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The Sonic Delights of Hypersampled Steinway Grands
The Combinator in Propellerheads Reason has become an extremely successful device. It seems to have taken a life of its own and third-party companies now successfully market Combinator presets. Basically the Combinator allows you to bundle other devices in Reason — synths, samplers and FX — into a single device, much like you can with Ableton Live’s Instrument & FX Rack. Propellerheads has also come up with some very inventive uses for the Combinator. I think one of most interesting is the Reason Pianos. To create this product, several pianos were sampled, not only with the usual multisamples for pitch and velocity, but also for a number of different microphone placements. (more…)
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Cubase and GarageBand Are Doing It. Why Aren’t You?
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One of the main objectives in mixing is to bring out the best sound for each track. Much of our Mixing & Mastering course is dedicated to that subject. However, some people really aren’t into the intricacies of mixing. You just want your tracks to sound good. Experienced mixers tend to start with a formula approach towards mixing. For example, for vocals they will add compression, some predetermined EQ settings, and a room ambience reverb. So rather than re-invent the wheel each time, why not bake the settings of the pros into presets? Individual FX plug-ins have included instrument and music genre oriented presets for a long time. Now some DAW’s, notably Cubase and GarageBand, are promoting the concept of track presets. (more…)
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Rube Goldberg Design, Bungled Execution
AudioSnap, a feature that was released with Cakewalk Sonar 6, has received quite a bit of attention. While AudioSnap does indeed fill a gap in Sonar’s feature set relative to other products, I think the way in which it was implemented marks an unhealthy direction for Sonar. My main concern is that it was simply tacked on to the existing product and not enough attention was given to really integrating the functions. (more…)
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