Sound from a Virtual Planet

OK, it’s a month later and people are still asking me about the coolest stuff I saw at the Winter NAMM 2008. So I guess I’ll have to come clean with my top 5. For those of us looking for big music technology news, trade shows are more or less sleepers. These days, fewer manufacturers time their release cycles to trade shows. Even Apple, who tries to set their trajectory in January with Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote, is more about getting products out the door as soon as they’re ready. So, for most music technology companies, major releases and announcements have already hit the street by January. There are some exceptions…

Although I got scooped on this one by my friend and fellow Berkleemusic blogger, Dave Franz, at the top of my list is Spectrasonics, who know a little something about drama. They skipped NAMM altogether last year while working on "something really big." The fruits of that labor saw the light of day at NAMM this year when patron saint of sound design Eric Persing rolled out Omnisphere.

Spectrasonics has been quite successful at creating powerful and evocative sampled instruments such as Atmosphere, Trilogy, and Stylus RMX. These were based on the UVI sound engine which essentially is a platform for sample playback. With the next generation of instruments, the company wanted to develop their own sound engine that would expand on sample playback and get much deeper into synthesis techniques such as granular, waveshaping, and FM. They came up with something they call the "Steam" engine. While the synthesis and modulation functions here are deep, Spectrasonics has made them immediately and easily accessible to any musician. The sound library itself is massive, comprised of the greatest hits of all their previous libraries along with a collection of new and unique samples. They showed one such sampling session for their demo where an upright piano was set on fire and carefully recorded as it went up in smoke. The sound quality was fabulous and the design was ingenious with things like a Farfisa organ graincloud sounding at once unique and familiar. The only downside of their demo was the September 15 release date. With such a build-up I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t want to leave the show with a copy tucked under their arm.

One of the biggest buzzes at the show this year was the Euphonix MC line of hardware DAW controllers. While primarily known for their high end digital consoles, Euphonix is coming out with a more modest line of products that uses their Ethernet-based EuCon DAW control protocol.

These new surfaces, the MC Mix and MC Control, are aimed at the project studio user with 999.00 and 1495.00 price tags, respectively. Currently, their main competition will be the Mackie Control units. However, a sleek, compact design, well-designed functionality, as well as the responsiveness of their high-speed control will make these units serious contenders.

Next on my list is Access. While it took a couple of years to perfect the technology behind the Access TI (totally integrated) line of Virus synthesizers, these instruments have become one the must-haves in current electronic arsenals. This year Access introduced an entry-level, stand-alone module version of the Virus TI called the Snow. To top things off, Richard Devine spent the weekend holding court at their booth, evangelizing the Virus and the newly released Atomizer companion software.

The software works alongside the Virus OS to beat slice audio input coming into the Virus, map the slices across the keyboard and provide addition processing controlled by the mod wheel and pitch bend. In the capable hands of Richard Devine this became a powerful, real-time performance tool. It looks like Access is pushing the envelope of what we can expect from a hardware synthesizer to include functions that we’d normally associate with custom laptop performance software. Atomizer will be free to all Virus TI users.

Korg had one of the coolest gadgets I saw at the show, and the closest thing to what one might call a glitch instrument. The new Kaossilator Dynamic Phrase Synthesizer takes a small Kaos pad controller and adds 100 different sounds and phrases.

An internal sequencer allows the user to assemble simple melodic/rhythmic fragments and manipulate them with the pad. The device itself is pocket sized, and while it offers little in the way of connectivity or pro features, it’s really fun to play, and downright addictive.

Somehow NAMM brings out the guitar player in everyone, and this year, Mackie’s new HotWire guitar amp was what did it for me. Legendary designer Greg Mackie reputedly spent years on this design, and the result is a remarkable combination of high and low tech in a great sounding amp. At the heart of this is analog tube circuitry. Not just one circuit, but a number of them, so that in fact, when switching between the various amp modes, the actual circuit routing changes, along with the selection of tubes used. Think of it like having a collection of tube amps at your disposal, where you can easily switch between them. In addition, the amp comes with a collection of creature comforts from a tuner and metronome, to on-board digital effects. The amp sells for 1500.00 and is expected to be available in March.

Winter NAMM 2008 Top Five Roundup.

1. Spectrasonics Atmosphere
2. Euphonix MC Controllers
3. Access Virus Snow and Atomizer software
3. Korg Kaossilator
5. Mackie HotWire Guitar amp

There’s always been a disconnect between musical instruments and technology. On one hand, we view instruments as things that take years of dedication and practice to master, while the unabashed goal of technology is to make the things we do, from basic communication to art creation, easier, and shall we say, more "democratic." With synthesizers, there has always been a steep learning curve involved with the art of sound design, however manufacturers have repeatedly found that most using these instruments, hardware or software, never stray far from the factory presets. Now let’s take a company like Native Instruments, who have developed an extraordinary line of unique, powerful instruments. How do they reconcile the two, staying on the cutting edge while serving the needs of the marketplace?

In the last couple of years, NI has been promoting its Kore system as a way to simplify working with massive software synthesizer patch libraries. Kore uses a database and browser to organize patches, formatted as Kore sounds, by sound categories. For those who have NI Komplete, this makes for a very powerful way to access sounds while in the production process. Typically, when looking for a bass sound, one would have to open each synth, browse for suitable patches, write them down, open another synth, and repeat the process, over and over again. This gets tiring fast; –not what attracted any of us to electronic music in the first place. With Kore, the patch browser lists all patches designated as bass patches, regardless of which instrument they’re from. They can be opened, auditioned and used in a project, all within Kore.

While on the surface it may seem like we’re opening a new synth each time we call up a patch, we’re actually running off the Kore Sound Engine. What NI has done is built the sound engines for REAKTOR, MASSIVE, ABSYNTH, FM8, KONTAKT and GUITAR RIG into Kore, so when any Kore sound is loaded the engine is ready to go. Pretty cool…

So what’s the next step? Give the software away…free. At NAMM NI announced that a free Kore Player would be available in March, and the company will be selling soundpacks for 59.00 each. The player will have all the sound engine capabilities of the full Kore 2 version with a starting collection of 30 patches. While this is a remarkable development in the electronic instrument industry, giving away the synth but selling the patches, this is a model that we see more and more with technology tools. You need to look no farther than the printer you probably got free when you bought a computer to understand that the cost is in the toner, not the machine. And so it goes for software synthesizers.

It will be interesting to see how this flies in the marketplace. While there seems to be some support for the business model, soundware never appeared to be much of a moneymaker in the music tech industry. But, when you take a look at how musicians actually use synthesizers, as opposed to how they say they use them, our friends in Berlin may be on to something.

The hardest part of getting through a NAMM show is wearing a badge that identifies me with Berklee. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to represent the institution, and while my affiliation opens many doors, there are scores of alums in all aspects of the music industry who love re-connecting with their alma mater. If you want to travel to NAMM incognito, get your badge from Harvard.

The best spokesperson for any product is an artist who uses the product, and uses it well. This year, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my former students, New York electronic artist Matt Moldover, talking about his work and performing at the Ableton Live booth. While sharing a common school experience with fellow alum Dan Lehrich, profiled in an earlier blog entry, Matt has taken a very different path, establishing a profile as performing artist.

Matt was one of the legion of guitar players that comes to Berklee each year. While most are looking to follow in the footsteps of one fretted deity or another, Matt always wanted to forge his own path, and after getting in the Music Synthesis major, that was combining interactive electronic performance with the guitar. At Berklee he discovered MAX, and soon was on to the idea of extending what he did as a player to sound from electronic sources. Matt didn’t want to play in a band, he wanted to play with sound.

Matt also got turned on to DJ and club culture. Moving to New York after graduation, he found a scene for like-minded electronic performers, and jettisoned his first name, becoming the artist known as Moldover. Being a player and a geek, he was in the right place at the right time when Native Instruments came out with Guitar Rig. The first time I saw him at NAMM, he was the Guitar Rig guy at NI. While he gave knowledgeable and convincing demos, I got the sense a different muse was calling. At a party in LA we had a chance to talk, and I got a glimpse of some of the projects he was working on, the first of which was the Interstellar ReMix Wagon for Burning Man, 2004.

The thing I didn’t quite realize about Moldover was that he was really pretty good at building stuff. His next project was the Octamasher, a performance system fueled by Ableton Live that gave eight “mashers” a tool to communally create a club mix. Social networking and interactive performance might sound like a research project at the MIT Media Lab, but this is a guy with a laptop, hacking a bunch of cheap keyboard controllers and hitting parties…. pretty cool.

Sometime last fall came a new website and the birth of “controllerism.” According the the site, Controllerism is “the art of manipulating sounds and creating music live using computer controllers and software.” Perhaps Matt will be the first to make both YouTube and dictionary.com. But, what I saw from him at the Ableton booth this year was a virtuoso performance that combined electronic music with the spontaneity and inventiveness of a jazz soloist, swapping clips of sound for notes and scales.

Dan Lehrich and Moldover may seem at opposite ends of a very wide playing field, but what really fascinates me is the real passion they both have for creating immersive performance experiences using computers and physical interfaces. While research in the field of interactive music systems continues at the highest levels of academia, it’s really cool to see real innovation happening on the street as well.

I’ve been going to the Winter NAMM show since 1997, and every year when I return I’m always asked “so, what did you see.” Granted, trade shows are all about products, but over the years I’ve come to realize that they’re really about people. I don’t really need to fly across the country to find out about new products; any of us can check a manufacturer’s website after the show closes on opening day and get the dope on their latest and greatest. What’s really cool is the people, and for me, some of the coolest people I meet are students I’ve had over the years. I’d like to highlight a couple of former students from Berklee’s Music Synthesis department, my day gig, who have gone down very different paths and are doing really cool things.

My first day in LA I had the opportunity to have lunch with game developer, Dan Lehrich. I count myself lucky because it seems like getting a mid-week lunch with anyone working in LA, is about as easy getting an audience with the Pope. Dan came to Berklee as a bass player and left as an interactive audio designer. He had a typical trajectory through the core courses in the Music Synthesis major until he found Max. Max is a graphical programming environment for music, and capability expands into audio with the MSP extensions and video with an additional toolkit call Jitter. I recall talking with Dan while he was in school, soon after he had this epiphany, and what really excited him was the possibility of programming the kind of interaction he experienced playing bass with other musicians. Once he got the bug, he got real tight with Max. He worked as a student employee in Synth department office, and became a fixture, tweaking his latest patch, showing his stuff and sharing ideas with anyone who walked past.

Then graduation, and reality set in. There’s really not a big market for interactive computer performance, and we all have to eat somehow. Fortunately, an internship opened up at game developer Electronic Arts in LA, and Dan was in. At lunch, he talked a bit about that first experience. As an audio intern, there’s a lot of grunt work to be done editing and managing files, not exactly glamorous. But, Dan really opened some eyes along the way with a solid knowledge of advanced synthesis techniques that they had never really seen in an intern before. His stock went up. After the internship had ended, he began working for independent developer Seven Studios. As things got busier, he eventually found himself in the enviable position of starting and managing an audio department for them, and was soon able to hire a fellow alum to help meet the mounting deadlines he faced.

Along the way, his passion for interactivity and programming skills continued to grow. One of the big game hits of the last few years has been Guitar Hero and the follow-up Rock Band. On the surface, the attraction of these games may be the engaging 3D animation, but the core of the game play experience comes through, you guessed it, interactive music systems. Dan refers to these as “tempo-driven” games. Seeing an opportunity in the marketplace, Dan put together a demo for a game using Max, pitched it to game producers, and after a series of starts and stops, it’s now in development.

While I’m always up for a good success story, as a teacher, I’m interested in what someone needs to know to be successful. When I posed this question to Dan over lunch, he stressed knowing the basics of digital audio –sample rate, resolution, compression and file formats. While a knowledge of granular synthesis techniques may have impressed his handlers at EA, being able to clearly communicate this basic information got him though the day.