SOUND ON SOUND
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There are loads of handy gadgets out there to make a musician's life more fun, and every one of them is more desirable than socks or aftershave. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser present you with a few ideas...
Technology has threatened to put drummers and guitarists out of work, but until now, singers have been safe. Is Yamaha's Vocaloid going to change all that?
These days, few hi-tech musicians would consider their studio complete without some kind of sampler. Paul White goes through the basics of these invaluable studio tools, for the benefit of anyone who has yet to sample one...
50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work.
Roland's latest synth module boasts an impressive spec, including a 32-bit RISC processor, 64-voice polyphony and the ability to hoast up to four expansion cards simultaneously. Could it be the only synth you'll need? Dave Crombie finds out.
The TX16W was about to go down in the annals of electronic instrument history as a brilliant-sounding sampler handicapped by a pig of an operating system — until a group of Swedish users took matters into their own hands. Duncan Werner investtigates the ultimate in third-party development.
Modern synths are undeniably powerful, but for many users that power remains locked in by non-intuitive digital parameter access editing. Paul White and Paul Nagle check out a pair of knob-equipped hardware programmers that could reveal hidden depths for Microwave and Matrix 1000 owners.
Style-generation software Band-in-a-box is one of the many still-thriving music programs that started life on the Atari. These days, it's very much a home in the latest Mac- and PC-based studios, as Vic Lennard and Martin Walker discovers.
The M3X is the first product from Macbeth Systems, the Scottish company founded by former DIY analogue synth enthusiast Ken McBeth. Will all turn out well, or is the M3X destined for a tragic end?
Many people love the idea of laptop recording, but few have put it into practice like 1 Giant Leap. Their acclaimed album and DVD project was recorded on an Apple Powerbook during a six-month journey round the world — with a little help from some friends...
We pass on the hard-won wisdom of 50 top producers in the essential Sound On Sound guide to recording kick and snare drums, the backbone of modern music.
Use of a full symphony orchestra remains a luxury afforded only to the world's top-selling artists or film composers. But with a little help from technology, the sound of convincing strings and blaring brass is achievable on a budget. John Rowcroft reports, and offers advice to anyone seeking to follow his example...
Sampletank was a hit: a sample-based virtual instrument with great sounds and, at the time, not much competition. Two years on, there are plenty of fully-featured software samplers and non-sampling virtual instruments too. Can Sampletank 2 keep up?
Producer Steve Levine has taken advantage of the tumbling price of quality recording equipment to assemble a complete digital studio in a tiny room at his home. Paul Tingen enters the digital domain...
Acclaimed producer Mike Hedges has filled his studio with equipment that is almost as antique as the ancient French chateau that houses it. Paul Tingen catches up with a man who's far from manic but quite ready to preach the virtues of analogue.
Paul Wiffen continues his homage to the first 'musical' sampling keyboard, which brought sampling out of the dark ages of simple trigger playback and into the realm of filters, envelopes and performance controls which we take for granted on all modern samplers. The Emulator II was, as he explains, also responsible for other major innovations like on-board hard drives and CD-ROM libraries...
The arrival of audio processing software plug-ins for the PC means that the platform can now compete as a viable digital audio workstation, and the latest update to PC audio editor Sound Forge supports the use of several software-based processors. Martin Walker checks them out.
Having decided to construct a studio for their own use, Damon Albarn of Blur and his collaborators Tom Girling and Jason Cox chose to create an environment as unlike a typical commercial studio as possible. And then they fitted it with perhaps the most bizarre assortment of equipment ever collected together...
David Mellor takes the mystery out of hard disk recording and CD pre-mastering, with an explanation of how to get up and running with a Mac and three popular software packages.
Part 2: Gordon Reid concludes his review of Korg's new family of workstations.