Archive of the Music Gear Category

Check out the new video featuring DJ Jungleboy rocking Serato Scratch Live with the Stanton SCS.3d multi-touch USB controller below.

And Gamespot has also posted a video showing off Numark’s upcoming Scratch DJ videogame controller.

Stanton also alerted us to another cool demo video for both the Stanton SCS.3d (deck) and SCS.3m (mixer) controllers with Atlanta IDM, sound design and DJ impresario Richard Devine, shown below.

Number of tumbleweeds spotted blowing through the aisles of the 2009 NAMM Show: 0.

Number of dopedy-dope new products for DJs and producers of electronic and hip-hop music: at least the following 13.

While attendance at the annual Anaheim, CA trade show occurring Jan. 15-18 may have been down a bit, attitudes were upbeat, and booths were filled with new innovations for making 2009 another year sacrificed to the art of making music.

This quick snapshot of 13 hits only represents a slice of the newness on offer, and we’ll be following up this week with full, more detailed show reports on the new hardware and software from NAMM 2009.

ABLETON LIVE 8

You didn’t think this German freight train was derailed did you?

Like clockwork, Ableton cranks out a major update of Live per year, and there’s always reason to take notice. Live 8 ($449 download) includes a new groove engine that includes extracting grooves from audio or MIDI and real-time groove quantize; retooled warping abilities, such as warping audio events by adjusting the events on the timeline, a new Complex Warp Mode and slicing audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients; live looping; track grouping; a revamped MIDI editor; crossfades in the Arrangement view; and five new effects: Vocoder, Multiband Dynamics, Overdrive, Limiter and Frequency Shifter.

Live 8 is scheduled for availability this spring, along with Ableton Suite 8 ($699 download), which includes Live 8, a massive sound collection and many virtual instruments, including the new Latin Percussion acoustic drum collection and the Collision mallet instrument. Ableton’s first soft synth, Operator, has also been updated with new filter types, more modulation options and additive wavetable synthesis.

Prices for boxed version will be higher, and upgrade prices will vary.

AKAI APC40 ABLETON CONTROLLER

When Ableton first announced this at their press conference, they should have handed out Depends, because people were peeing themselves over this thing. Perhaps *the* hit of the show for the Remix crowd, the APC40 represents a collaboration between Akai and Ableton to create a dedicated controller for Live 7 and higher. Intended for real-time mixing, remixing and production, the APC40’s 109 buttons, 16 endless encoders with LED rings, nine 45 mm faders and a replaceable crossfader give you complete control of Live’s Session view, effect devices and virtual instruments with little need for a mouse.

The controller’s multi-colored backlit buttons let you know what’s loaded, what’s playing and what’s being recorded. For the $399 retail price, the APC40 comes with a specially designed version of Live Lite, so whether you use that version, Live 7 or the new Live 8, the APC40 automatically works over a USB connection, with no drivers or mapping required.

ARTURIA MINIMOOG V 2.0

Arturia did a great job modeling the Minimoog in its first version of Minimoog V, and Arturia was clear to us that it didn’t want to change the sound of the instrument. So what was there to improve upon? A fresh batch of presets is nice, and recording automation within each preset for up to four parameters opens a ton of possibilities. But that’s just the beginning.

Arturia added a Vocal Filter, which works almost as if to make the Minimoog talk. The new Vocal Filter, as well as Pan, can be used as destinations for an expanded modulation matrix.

Best of all, a new Sound Map lays out the hundreds of preset sounds in a sortable two-dimensional space as a new and effective way for zeroing in on the sound(s) you want. While that’s helpful, the Sound Map’s morphing might blow your mind. By clicking multiple sounds within the map, you can morph between them.

CELEMONY MELODYNE EDITOR

Back at the 2008 Musik Messe in Frankfurt, Germany, Celemony undoubtedly stole the show with it’s DNA feature–Direct Note Access–for Melodyne. DNA lets you access and edit individual chord tones in audio recordings. Those extrapolated chord notes can be edited like other notes within Melodyne, by altering the pitch, position and duration of the note detected, make it louder or quieter, copy/cut/paste and so on.

The first product using DNA was supposed to be Melodyne Plug-in 2 last fall, but since then, Celemony had rebuilt the product around DNA functions to the extent that a new name was in order. Melodyne Editor ($349) is set to come out this spring and will work as a stand-alone app, as well as a plug-in.

EASTWEST/QUANTUM LEAP SILK

It’s easy to get lost in specs, concepts and jargon at NAMM, but fantastic sounds still rise above all the rest. For Quantum Leap Silk - Masters of the Silk Road ($595), producer/composer Nick Phoenix recorded renowned musicians playing dozens of authentic instruments from China, India and Persia to create a brilliantly sounding and ambitious 25 GB collection of ethnic instruments.

Recorded at major studios using vintage Neumann microphones, Neve consoles and Meitner converters, Silk also takes advantage of EastWest’s new Play 64-bit sample engine, which includes scripting, micro-tuning and a convolution reverb.

EDIROL P-10 VISUAL SAMPLER

Edirol has transferred sister company Roland’s moxy for audio samplers into the video realm with this compact box. The P-10 allows you to capture video clips from DVDs, video cameras and other sources and then trigger them in tempo with effects and with the audio optionally intact if you want to play full music videos for example.

You can also capture still images from video clips and play sets of images as slideshows. The P-10 uses SD memory cards up to 16 GB, which would give you 4 hours of video storage in the Motion JPEG format it uses. With 12 pads and 72 pad banks, you have potentially hundreds of video clips at your disposal. A live input lets you capture videos of your surrounding and immediately play them back to the crowd.

KORG MICROKORG XL

Falling into the gap between the original MicroKorg and the Korg R3 synth, the MicroKorg XL ($750) features the acclaimed analog modeling from Korg’s Radias synth engine, a built-in 16-band vocoder (gooseneck mic included) and a simplified editing system using three large dials and a backlit LCD menu. With its 37-note velocity sensitive mini-keyboard and optional battery power, the MicroKorg XL is compact and ready to fit into a cramped studio or live setup.

While small, this full-featured keyboard includes USB and MIDI controller capability, audio inputs for the vocoder, an editable arpeggiator, 17 effects from the Korg Kaoss series, and it excels in a wide variety of sounds from filthy basses to sharp lead synths and lush, evolving pads.

MOTU BPM

Although frequently unsung, MOTU’s virtual instruments carry famously deep functionality to go along with impeccable sound. It’s latest effort, BPM, a beat production tool for urban and electronic music, continues that tradition.

With the intent of letting you make beats almost as fast as you can hear them in your head, and to stop you from relying on someone else’s loops, BPM gives you 15 GB of 24-bit/96 kHz of percussive material, but you can also sample your own sounds or drag-and-drop sound from your desktop to BPM’s pads, which are compatible with any MIDI pad controller on the market.

Just a few of BPM’s seemingly infinite features include drum layering, patterning sequencing, loop slicing, groove quantizing and unlimited effects processing with its included effects. You can create your entire rhythm track in BPM as a stand-alone app, but it’s not meant to be a one-stop-shop only. With universal plug-in compatibility, it features multiple outputs and many export options for you to use your beats in a DAW session or transfer them elsewhere.

MOTU VOLTA

One of the few “from out of nowhere” surprises at NAMM, MOTU introduced Volta, a virtual instrument plug-in that allows users to play and automate modular synthesizers–and other hardware equipped with control voltage (CV) inputs–right from their workstation software.

To pull off that task, which no other software has done before, Volta receives conventional virtual instrument MIDI note, automation and controller data and then converts it to a control voltage signal, which it sends through an audio interface as DC voltage that can drive a standard CV input. It’s important to point out that the audio interface must have DC-coupled outputs;

Volta also has a Calibration button that can automatically tune analog synths by sending voltages and measuring the pitch response. It can even tune self-oscillating filters.

Scheduled to ship in the first quarter of this year as an Audio Units plug-in, Volta does not have a price attached yet. Its capabilities are vast, but the bottom line is that Volta gives you the same or comparable access to sequence, control and automate your modular and other analog synths, Moogerfoogers and other CV gear that you have over your current soft synths.

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASCHINE

We’ve all heard a lot about the combining of software functionality with hardware control. However, until now, the combination has usually come from a fairly traditional piece of hardware having a software component to it, or software being controlled by a piece of general-use hardware. Native Instruments wants to change the game with Maschine ($669), an instrument in the tradition of the tried and true “groovebox,” but made from the ground up to combine the tactile control of hardware with the modern immense capabilities of software. And unlike many other music products before it, Maschine’s hardware is made to work with its software 100 percent, and vice versa.

If you’re used to the traditional groovebox and drum machine workflow, you should have no problem diving into Maschine. You get 16 pressure-sensitive drum pads that illuminate to reflect sequenced patterns, eight rotary encoders and plenty of buttons to keep your hand off the computer’s keyboard and mouse. The package comes with several gigabytes of sampled material for you to make your music, and the hardware doubles as a MIDI controller for your DAW and other instruments.

OPEN LABS MIKO LXD

Open Labs has been going as crazy as its hip-hop endorsers over the last year. At NAMM, it unveiled updated hardware specs and a much-improved software OS for it’s all-encompassing, computer-in-a-keyboard workstations. Among a full line of introductions, the Miko LXD stood out for the Remix crowd.

The 37-key workstation comes with a full software bundle including 60+ virtual instruments, including FXpansion Guru and the Livid Instruments Cell VJ software, all running over Windows XP Home. And you can load your own PC-compatible DAW, DJ and other software into the Miko. In addition Open Labs, has developed Riff, its new virtual instrument host software that makes switching between instruments seemless, and lets you create real-time virtual controls that can be mapped to effects or other parameters.

Miko LXD includes the touch-sensitive computer display and three built-in control modules, two of which are new. The new Bump MP module gives you Akai MPC-style controls such as note repeat, as well as transport controls, hold, pad tune and more. As an original innovation, Open Labs has included a 17th pad called Last Pad. This pad basically plays whatever the sound is of the last pad you hit, letting you perform fast rolls more comfortable on two pads instead of one.

Also new, the Mix/Edit controller gives you controller over as many as 128 channels of audio from within one set of 8 encoders, 8 lighted buttons and 8 faders. Miko LXD begins as $4,599 and is available to order now.

SONIVOX PLAYA

In a coup for cash-strapped cats who want to get into music now, Sonivox Playa supplies the basic tools for urban music production in one stand-alone app or plug-in for $149. That price includes 400 Sonivox instruments (for reference, Sonivox created the instrument sounds for Ableton Live 7), including basses, brums, synths, ethnic sounds, guitars, strings, brass and more. There are also effects, EQ and 50 construction kit-style layouts for the 16 programmable and assignable virtual pads. With MIDI learn, Playa is compatible with any MIDI controller.

WALLANDER BRASS

A lot of companies were trying to show off either their modeled brass or their sample-based brass collections at NAMM, but none that we heard were as impressive as Wallander Instruments Brass 1 ($599). Wallander’s acoustic behavioral modeling does a remarkable job of reproducing the nuances of notoriously difficult to replicate brass instruments. Brass 1 includes models of French Horns, Trumpets Trombones and Tubas and claims to be CPU friendly enough to produce full orchestra-worthy arrangements on a laptop. With modeling, you also don’t have to make room for gigabytes of audio material.

Ah, toys, gadgets, gear. Every week it’s something new that gets us excited about making music and questioning our commitment to financial responsibility.

This last week split my wig a few times with some cool announcements, so here are the best of the best, in a list as random and unorganized as my desk.

Stanton DaScratch

This touch-sensitive USB MIDI DJ controller, aka SCS.3d, promises fast response and easy customization. It can control an entire computer DJing system from one compact device or easily add to your existing system.

DaScratch introduces Stanton’s StanTouch technology, which is supposed to incorporate finger movements familiar to DJs, such as scratching, scrubbing and circular touch-pad navigating. The main surface works in three modes–Slider, Circle and Button–in which the surface responds to touches in different ways. In every mode, DaScratch responds to multiple simultaneous touches. If you buy more than one of the $249 units (available now), they can snap together to create a larger control surface.

Dave Smith Instruments Mopho

OK, one question: Did it really take this long for someone to think of calling a MOnoPHOnic synthesizer the Mopho, or is Dave Smith just the first one with the cajones to do it? Well, I for one say bravo to curse word innuendo.

But moving on, the Mopho actually looks like an extremely badass synth for a $439 list price (available now). The one-note/two-oscillator analog synth features a synth engine based on the DSI Prophet ‘08–one of the greatest 21st-century analog synths–with the added bonus of two sub-octave generators–one per oscillator–for additional girth and crushing basses. It’s got an audio input for passing sounds through the legendary Curtis lowpass filter; it includes 5-pin MIDI ports; and at only 7.5-by-5 inches, it’s very portable.

IPJ “iPhone Jockey” Software

Dude, these apps from Japanese company New Forestar are only in beta, but to my knowledge are the only apps for the iPhone/iPodTouch that attempt to turn them into mini CDJ-style audio players. Two iPhones and a mixer? That’s what up.

The features of these apps include a jog dial with virtual scratching and tap tempo, a pitch fader, play/pause button, cue button, forward and backward buttons, a seek bar and a time display. In addition, they’ll use the iPhone’s accelerometer to issue sound effects when you shake the device. No word yet on when the programs will become available.

D16 Decimort

What’s your favorite “mort?” Voldemort, Mort from Family Guy or maybe it’s the Decimort, the new bit-crusher plug-in from D16 Group. Decimort aims to recreate the highly sought after coloration of vintage samplers such as the E-Mu SP-12 and SP-1200 and the Akai MPC 60mkII that was the result of encoding techniques, lower sample and bit rates and conversion circuits.

Decimort’s main sections include a decimator with controls for bit rate and sample rate and a filter with four filter types and controls for cutoff and resonance. It’s available now for preorder at 29 euros. After the first week of October, the price will be set at 35 euros.

Universal Audio Moog Multimode Filter

On the heels of it’s recently announced UAD-2 DSP platform, Universal Audio has announced the released of the Moog Multimode Filter plug-in for UAD-1. UAD-2 users who buy the UAD-1 version now ($199) will receive the UAD-2 version for free when it’s available.

Here’s list of key features:

• Classic Moog ladder-type 24 dB/Oct (4-pole) & 12 dB/Oct (2-pole) LPF/HPF/BPF
  
  

• Extreme distortion via 0/+20 dB Input Gain, replicating MiniMoog external input
  
  

• Stunningly “analog”: self-oscillation, smooth saturation, zero artifacts/quantization
  
  

• Enveloper Follower, Six LFO wave shapes, and DAW tempo synchronization
  
  

• Mono & Stereo processing with Spacing/Offset features from Voyager
  
  

• Includes Free low-DSP Multimode Filter SE version for high instance counts

Other than music, there’s little that we love here at Remix more than the Adult Swim animated shows of the Cartoon Network. One of their shows that has flown under the radar, Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil, combines our favorite things — irreverent humor and DJ culture — like no other.

The main character, DJ Jesus (pronounced “hey seuss”) is an up-and-coming San Francisco DJ who pulls off miraculous publicity stunts to further his career and dates Lucy, the supposed anti-Christ who’s continually pursued by a bunch of bumbling clergy. Oh yeah, and the devil is in there too. Fans of Adult Swim shows will recognize the ubiquitous voice of H. Jon Benjamin (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Home Movies) vocalizing several lead characters.

In these few clips, you’ll see DJ Jesus playing with an MPC, human beat boxing and whipping up some miracles. Bounce over to AdultSwim.com for a ton more. (PS: this show is funny, but not made for kids.)

How many times have you fired up your DAW with the intention of writing a track and sat there overwhelmed by too many options, or doodled around with creating the perfect synth sound that never comes, effected the same beat over and over or done everything but actually write some music?

Hopefully, never. And hopefully, you’re the A#1 chief badass of all time. But the reality is, most of us on some occasions get bogged down with all the other aspects of audio production that take time away from the actual songwriting. That’s why a good old fashioned acoustic piano or guitar can be vital. There’s nothing else to do with them but play music.

However, today I received a demo of a new software program that actually does something that’s pretty rare: It identifies a unique problem of the music producer that no one else has addressed, and attempts to solve it.

The program, Tanager SongFrame, is in a sense a pre-DAW. It’s chief focus is to assist you with the process of songwriting, without all the bells and whistles that are necessary for production in a DAW but can be distracting to songwriting. When you’re finished with a song, you simply export from SongFrame, which creates WAV Audio Tracks and MIDI files that show track markers and are compatible for importing in literally every DAW, to be used as scratch tracks for your full production.

SongFrame’s notable features include an audible chord library, thousands of possible chords progressions taken from popular songs and musical compositions from every era and genre, hundreds of placeholder drum patterns, VST plug-in hotsting, audio and MIDI recording, a lyrics module and a SongBit Notebook for saving ideas.

Check out Tanager’s videos for a run-through.

Tanager has also produced a couple of other very helpful musician’s apps. Chorducopia is an audible chord library with more than 50 chords per key to help you in practicing an instrument or with songwriting.

But for traveling laptop musicians and producers, Chirp could be indispensable. Whenever you’re in a spot where you want to make music but don’t have the luxury of playing a MIDI keyboard or other type of controller, you can use Chirp. It’s basically an 18-key musical keyboard and 10-drum pad MIDI controller in software form. It maps its triggers to your QWERTY keyboard and send MIDI messages to your software, just like a hardware MIDI controller does.

Richie Hawtin is always so far ahead of the DJing technology curve, it just may be futile to try to catch up. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired by his innovation to do your own thing. In this video on ResidentAdvisor.net, Hawtin explains his current live setup using Native Instruments Traktor with four virtual decks and an Allen & Heath Xone mixer/MIDI controller (as well as an extra computer just for effects).

If you still think that it’s cheating for laptop DJs to use a software’s auto beat sync, allow Hawtin about 10 minutes of your time to justify himself for offloading that task to his computer helpers. As always, his endeavors are quite impressive.

Oh man, are you ready for the NIN tour that’s about to happen this summer? Do you want a sneak peak of all the audio awesomeness that is about to dropped on our eager ears? Yeah? Of course you do! Check out these exclusive NIN rehearsal videos from Pitchfork TV, where we see Trent and company performing three tracks from The Slip, “Echoplex” (sweet), “Letting You” (totally sweet) and “1,000,000″ (supersweet).

In “Echoplex,” we get to see drummer Josh Freese using the JazzMutant Lemur, which is totally badass.

Better, faster, stronger for sure. The iPhone update that the rest us have been waiting for is set to drop in the US and in many other countries July 11. It will go live in 70 countries by the end of the year.

Besides having 3G networking, which Apple claims is twice as fast as the original iPhone and lets you use the phone worldwide easier, the new iPhones will have built-in GPS and will tax you one bill less: they’ll go for $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB. Woot! In the US, the iPhone 3G will still only officially support the AT&T carrier, unless you unlock it at your own risk.

But what’s also exciting for musicians is that the iPhone 3G will rock the iPhone 2.0 software, which will be able to run applications created on the iPhone Software Development Kit that has already been downloaded 250,000+ times since its release in March. There’s not much hard data yet on what sort of music applications will be coming for iPhone 3G, but at Apple’s WWDC this week, there was a quick demo of an app called Band:

While Band is squarely aimed at casual or non-musicians, it nonetheless looks fun and hints at the kind of potential the iPhone 3G has for hosting drum machines, simple synths, sequencing, effects and other utilitarian music programs. Once the iPhone 3G launches, you’ll be able to scour Apple’s iPhone AppStore, which will also be accessible from the phone itself, for all the latest goodies.

Show me a person who disrespects Moog synthesizers, and I’ll show you a schmuck. But when the company announced the new Moog Guitar, I was a bit like, “Wh-whaaaa?”

Moog long ago entrenched itself in the hearts of creative guitarists with it’s stellar MoogerFooger series of stompbox-like effect processors. And at first glance, it looks as if the Moog Guitar is a regular guitar with some MoogerFooger synthisis and/or effects processing built in. But after watching Moog’s video on its homepage, and with the company’s insistance that this is not a MIDI guitar, not a guitar synthesizer and not an effects processor, I’m not exactly sure what the Moog Guitar is. It’s clear that you can control the sustian and muting of the strings like on no other guitar, but not being guitarist, the true implications of that may be lost on me.

Moog will be publicly debuting the Moog Guitar at this year’s Summer NAMM in Nashville June 20-22, so we should have more answers after that.

Invented and produced DIY-style using recycled materials in a garage in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Garrahand electro-acoustic hand/mallet percussion instrument stood out from my normal daily plague of useless emails today.

The Garrahand is meant to give you metallic percussion sound of the UFO-shaped Hang Drum, but in a smaller size that’s easier to re-tune. It uses a built-in, internal microphone, and the new Standard 2 model has an audio output with level knob, so it’s ready for use onstage or in the studio. The new model also has improved tuning, so you can tune it to any number of 6-note scales or get a pair to tune to a full 12-note chromatic scale. Prices range from $300US for the original model ($500 for two) or $400 for the Standard 2 ($700 for two). Check out their Website for audio and video clips.