A: When it’s ajar…. fnaar fnaar.
But seriously folks, the guys at Propellerhead Music have just announced a new product called “Record“, anyone that has worked with or around their flagship product Reason, will know that a complaint from many users, and non-users alike is the inability to input audio or record to the tool as you can with just about any other DAW, however Reason have always claimed that they’re not a DAW. So now “Record” appears and promises to be a recording tool for musicians… from their website….
Welcome to Record, Propellerhead Software’s brand new recording software. Record gives you unlimited audio tracks, world class effects and mixing gear, and a whole new take on music recording. With an intuitive, straightforward interface and a hands-on approach to capturing performances, Record was designed for musicians – not audio engineers. This is recording done right.
So many people out there are now saying OK, so that makes Reason a DAW when combined with Record, right? As with all the Props products, they seem to have made a great job of it and thought things through well, but for me, I’m not sure that it’s so compelling, firstly for existing Reason users it costs around $100 to upgrade, I’m already a good way along the path of learning how to be an audio engineer (not pro by any means, but not a novice either) so they won’t save me that hassle. The mastering and mixing tools they provide seem really good (wait, I thought it was for musicians not engineers??), but are they likely to be worlds ahead of the tools provided by Logic or Cubase, probably not, and what about when you want to upgrade them?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the product, I’ve not used it and have only read the marketing so far, I’m just saying I’m not 100% convinced that many of the existing users will spring for the extra cash. As someone else pointed out, if this was a Reason upgrade to version 5 and not an entirely separate product, they might consider it (with the tight integration some might argue it is an upgrade) but time will tell. I’ll be agnostic for the moment, but with Cubase 5 just out, not to mention that it’ll now be going head to head with the likes of “Live”, etc. and Apple slated to upgrade Logic at WWDC in a few weeks, I think Props are in for stiff competition. Time will tell.
For those that are a fan of Propellerheads Reason software, you might be interested that I recently read a post on Computer Music blog. They say that
something is coming and that it really will be a major launch (ie, not just another posh ReFill)
I always look forwards to releases from these guys, they’re very innovative and more than many other companies I’ve owned softare from, they write stable, and very solid code. They say May 9th is a likely candidate for the release date, because it coincides with the Producers Conference. Full blog post can be found here
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/page/computermusic?entry=something_big_on_the_way
I finally got around to installing the sound interface I’ve had kicking around for so long, this was mostly driven by my need to DI my Telecaster, combined with a recent update to Guitar Rig. First impressions of the Presonus Firestudio are great, but there’s enough articles and reviews out there, so there’s no need to regurgitate them all here. So this evening I’ll be trying out the DI functionality, and sometime next week (due mostly to XLR lead fail issues) I’ll be trying out the mic pre’s on the interface to see if they’re all they’ve been hyped up to be.
Presonus Firestudio Project
I’ve just finished reading this book, and I have to say, it’s not full of groundbreaking industry secrets which is very refreshing, but perhaps the best thing about the book is it’s use of visual imagary to help the reader understand the sound-stage that you’re mixing within. The text itself is full of really useful day-to-day information, full of mixing common-sense. Things like why certain parts are placed in the mix in a particular way, how to keep an ear on your audience, and still take into account the client and their mix wishes for the end product.
Much of what makes this so great is the fact that it’s almost a complete source useful studio mixing & production information, that would be really useful on any studio bookshelf as a reference, it has a clear methodological approach to the subject, and presents all of the informational clearly and concisely, it’s clear that David has a great deal of experience in the music production and engineering field.
I’d give this book 4.5 stars out of 5 losing only half a star because some parts get a little repetitive; especially the section about homework for listening to the relative volume levels for each part in the future, but that’s a subjective thing I guess, in some cases I feel a chart or two more might have been able to cut down on some of this.
Top book, for both beginners, home producers, and intermediate non-professional sound engineers. I doubt that any practicing pro’s would get a huge amount from this as a lot of it would be picked up from working daily in a studio with other professionals. For me, this book was worth every penny!!
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So there I was sitting with a tune stuck inside my head that I wanted to get down onto paper. Normally this isn’t an issue as I have several instruments laying around normally where I can articulate my ideas before committing them to paper, but on this particular occasion all I had was my laptop. That’s no problem because on my Mac is a copy of Logic Pro Studio 8 which has a great score editor, so I figured I’d get the music out of my head that way.
For quite sometime I struggled with trying to open up a blank score and start to draw my notes in, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to make it happen as I needed, I looked in the manual and the most helpful information that gave me was that before I could score any notes, “a staff must exist” well… obviously!!!
So if you’ve hit or are hitting the same problem the answer is to create a new empty part in the arrange window, then you can edit the new piece from the score editor as needed. Although it seems really straight forward, at the time I couldn’t figure out why simply creating a new stave and writing to it wouldn’t automatically create a new part to be allocated to the part of your choice. If anyone from Apple happens to read this, maybe in Logic Pro 9 eh??