This is a short introduction to DB33, Digidesign’s new B3 organ instrument in Pro Tools LE. I go through the basic functions of each section and show you how each alters the organ’s sound.

A great resource: Virtual Instruments Magazine

Examples are Garageband instruments, Spectrasonic Triology Bass instrument, NI-Kontakt (sampler), or Play (from East West Soundsonline). Yours truly has too many of these to count. If you are in the market, ask a question and I’ll be glad to help.

Damon
The Studio Files

Update: It has been reported on the Apple Support forums (thread here) that the July 2008 Airport update does indeed fix this problem.  The update (for OSX Tiger only) can be found here. 

PJ

If you’ve ever found yourself humming the overworld theme from The Legend of Zelda or have the title track from Battletoads on your iPod, then you should definitely check out the “Magical 8-bit Plug” for GarageBand (or any app that supports AU plugins).

Magical 8bit Plug is a plug-in style software-synthesizer for producing primitive electronic sounds like the old 8bit game consoles. In Macintosh environment, it runs with AU (Audio Units)-supporting applications: ex. Logic, Digital Performer, GarageBand. In Windows environment it runs with VSTi supporting applications: ex. Cubase. Most of the software/hardware synthesizers include the most primitive waveform: square wave and pulse wave. But almost none of them include the pseudo-triangle or the low-resolution noise that will most characterize the 8bit sound’s unique taste. Magical 8bit Plug will help you producing the old 8bit sounds by providing those unique waveforms.

You can download the plugin here. For install information check out this article.

PJ

This video will show you how to create, setup, and use instrument tracks in Logic Pro. First, I show you how to pick instruments from the library browser. Then, I show you two different ways to create instruments in the Mixer window (first with manually inserting instruments, and then by using the channel strip settings).

Transcript:

In this video from the studio files .com, I am going to show you how to make and use instrument tracks in Logic Pro. This is very close to the article I posted earlier and the Pro Tools video, except that we are in Logic Pro, and I thought a video would be better than an article. Let’s create a new track in the Arrange window, Track>new. We will create one new software instrument. Let’s resize the track. Notice Logic automatically opened up the Library browser for me. With this, you can search through and click on any instrument that you want, and Logic will automatically load up those sounds on the track. I’ll pick a keyboard, a clavinet, and a “Direct Clav”. Now switch to a European Celtic harp. This is a fast way to get sounds going. You can always tweak the individual settings later to make it sound how you want, but to get a great base, this is awesome. Here’s another way. Let’s make another new instrument track. This time, rather than using the library browser, let’s go into the mixer window with Apple+2. If you go to the input for that instrument track, you can see all the different instruments that Logic makes available. Let’s pick the electric piano EVP88. As we discussed in the Aux sends video, use presets if you aren’t familiar with the programs. Let’s pick a “Suitcase” Rhodes. Here’s a final way to make instruments, its very similar to the library browser. Go up to the channel strip setting and click on that. It looks just like the library browser (with slight differences). Let’s load up an acoustic guitar. This is just a quick intro to instruments in Logic Pro, but they are very quick to access and sound great.

C

The Studio Files

Logic comes with a TON of instruments and sounds. Plus, it is very easy to get started making music with the media/loop browsers. Whether you are new to virtual instruments altogether and need a tutorial, or are switching to Logic from another DAW (like Pro Tools), this article should help you become fluent in setting up and making great sounds with Logic’s virtual instruments.

The easiest way to create an instrument track in Logic is to choose Track>New in the arrange window.

Then just choose “software instrument”. When the track is created, Logic will automatically open the browser on the right side of the screen. Here you will see TONS of different instrument groups. Click through to find a sound you like. (In this case, I am choosing Bosendorfer Piano Studio. Notice that with my instrument track selected, if I make a selection in the browser, my track automatically changes to that sound. Also, Logic will automatically insert EQ and effects into that track’s channel strip. In the picture below, I selected Bosendorfer Piano Studio; Logic changed my instrument to the piano sound, and added channel EQ (which you can see in the channel strip in the bottom LEFT corner of the picture).

Try loading up some other sounds, being sure to watch the channel strip to see what effects Logic loads up.

Another way to load up instruments is to make a new instrument track, but rather loading up sounds with the browser, you pick the instruments and effects yourself. Create a new instrument track, just as we did before. This time, go into the Mixer window. If you click on the “input” of the new instrument track, you will see all the possible instruments to choose from. Lets pick the EFM1 (stereo). Probably the easiest way to get great sounds (at least at first) is to use a preset. Access the presets in the menu (shown in the picture below). Cycle through them, pick one you like, and then start tweaking!

Now, what if you have an instrument that can utilize multiple outputs? (If you are familiar with Strike, Structure, or many EastWest instruments, this is for you). You don’t have to create aux tracks and assign the correct inputs, Logic will do that for you. Try selecting an instrument that can send multiple outputs. In this case, I am going to choose the EXS24 sampler, and I will choose the multiple output version.

Now just click the “+” under the solo button, and an Aux track with the next output the software as its input will be created. So, the first time I click the”+”, an aux track with an input of “EXS24 3-4″ will be created (the next time, “EXS24 5-6″, etc…) Using instruments with multiple outputs is a little more complicated that we are going to get in this article, but expect more soon on that topic.

With instruments and loops in Logic, you can make great sounding music really quickly. (If you need a refresher on how to use loops in Logic, see our article HERE). If you have questions about Logic instruments, or need more information on a specific topic, post in the comments here or send me an email.

C

The Studio Files

Apple – Support – Downloads – GarageBand 4.1.2
About GarageBand 4.1.2
This update improves overall stability and addresses issues with the automation of software instrument parameters, FireWire and USB based audio devices and Magic GarageBand.

The real question behind these polite, superficial questions is, “Will I, as a performer, find it rewarding to spend the time necessary to learn and perform your new piece?”

This is a really good question. If your art form is painting or sculpture, then you can produce new works on your own, fully formed, without ever really relying on the assistance of anyone else during the creative process. When you are finished, you have produced the thing: it exists exactly as you imagined and created it. If you are a composer who writes a piece for orchestra, you have a written score and maybe a set of parts. You still don’t have the thing: your work has not yet been performed. You are totally reliant on getting a group of talented performers to play your new piece and make this musical idea that you have so carefully sculpted into a reality.

A student of mine (Chad Latta, 19) was recently part of a packed house audience at the world premiere of his orchestra piece, Contentions, performed by the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Neal Gittleman. The piece, which is influenced by Lutoslawski and Corigliano, is substantial and more than a little bit difficult in places. The DPO offered an outstanding performance, and Chad was obviously thrilled with the event.

Contentions was programmed for this concert over a year ago. Lead times like that are typical (sometimes much longer) for professional orchestra performances. Chad submitted the score to Maestro Gittleman along with a “mockup” that he and I did together using East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra (I have the “Platinum ProXP” version, but Gold would have worked just as well for this application).

When the piece was complete, we exported a MIDI file which was written with Human Playback enabled. Then we opened that file in Digital Performer to do some MIDI editing and add in performances of the aleatoric (random) parts. These were notated as pitch groups in boxes (like in Corigliano’s Of Rage And Remembrance) so Finale wasn’t able to “perform” them as Chad wanted. He went through and sequenced these parts individually, which took most of an afternoon. We also had to do some patch changes and keyswitches to get correct articulations and techniques like ponticello and tremolo. It was also necessary to do some editing and reassigning of MIDI controller data, but the end result was pretty good. Not a version that would have been good enough for an application where a real orchestra would be expected, but the conductor was actually quite impressed. Gittleman is a long time Finale user, and he told Chad that his demo recording sounded much better than most of the MIDI files that he listens to. I, for one, am completely convinced that the quality of the sample library (East West) had a lot to do with getting the conductor’s attention and demonstrating Chad’s unrealized vision for Contentions. The result was the supreme accomplishment of winning a premiere by a major, professional orchestra–something that a composer never forgets.

If you have questions about how we did the mockup, or about studying composition, post a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

DS
The Studio Files

Anyone who uses Pro Tools with Digidesign (AIR) instruments in Leopard has probably seen the “yellow interface” problem before. For some reason, Strike, Velvet, Hybrid, and even XPand had an odd, bright yellow interface window in Leopard. This made working with the synths literally impossible. (Structure has been running without this yellow interface for most people.) There is an update available from Digidesign for each of the four programs mentioned above that will supposedly fix the interface problems.

You can go to THIS page from Digidesign, and download the latest update for these virtual instruments. Click on the “Digidesign/Bomb Factory/Trillium Lanes” tab and choose the proper download link.

Please note that Digidesign still can’t guarantee that everything will work perfectly (as Pro Tools itself, let alone the instruments, are not technically compatible with Leopard yet. I need to download this update myself. I will do it later tonight and let everyone know if it worked (or, if you download it first and get things working, let us know.

EDIT: I just updated all four programs, and they seem to all be fixed.  ::cheers!::  Picture below.

C

The Studio Files

For many years this sort of functionality was the province of external hardware synthesizers or the synthesizers built in to a MIDI keyboard. You would record or notate the MIDI notes into the computer and then send that MIDI information back out to a synthesizer which would then play back the sound on that channel. The switch to virtual instruments just means that your computer is now the synthesizer; so instead of investing in external hardware, now we can buy instruments and install them on our workstations and integrate them with notation or sequencing software. Virtual instruments can be programmed to emulate the sound of real instruments, or they can be virtual synthesizers that generate electronic sounds. Check the blogroll for a link to a great post listing some great and inexpensive software synths.

In another post, I wrote about using the Kontakt 2 sampler as a virtual instrument inside of Finale. The “patches” (a term that is a holdover from the days when you used to program synths by making connections with patch cables) were software instruments from the Vienna Horizon Series Solo Strings. Each instrument is sampled (recorded) playing the notes of the whole range of the instruments using different techniques (pizzicato, tremolo, arco) and different dynamics and sustains. In this example, think of Kontakt 2 as the virtual equivalent of a hardware synth module and the string patches as the sounds that are loaded into it. Now I can use Finale as a way to create the right sequence of MIDI messages to play back those samples in real time and hear my composition in a fairly realistic form. Carefully programmed MIDI files intended to co-create the sound of a live ensemble are often called “mockups.” Composers use these mockups to demonstrate the music that they are composing for a film (for example) to a director or music supervisor. It is increasingly necessary for film and tv composers to be able to do realistic sounding mockups of their work. Lots of music (for television especially) is produced entirely with virtual instruments these days.

The second way to compile a list of MIDI messages which will play back sounds through a virtual instrument is with a program like Garage Band, Cubase, Digital Performer, or Sonar, called a sequencer. In this environment you play the performance in via a MIDI controller (usually a keyboard) which the computer records as MIDI data (note on, volume, etc.). It is possible to create very detailed performances in this way without ever using notation, and many composers work primarily in this realm, especially if they are responsible for accomplishing the finished music themselves and aren’t going to be recording the music with a live orchestra or ensemble.

Because I am a classically trained composer, I tend to gravitate to the realm of notation first. I like the functionality of seeing the score and hearing it played back to me by convincing sounding instruments. I have been thrilled to embrace this technology, which was only in the fledgling stages when I started out. If you want to learn to compose music, be sure to pursue training in music theory and notation as well as investment in technology. There is no substitute for the powerful combination of your musical intuition and imagination PLUS the knowledge of melody, harmony and counterpoint that comes through the study of music theory. I will be developing some theory teaching materials on this site over the next few months that use some popular video game music cues as starting points for understanding music theory. Look for those and post comments about specific music that you would like to know more about. Your feedback and questions are always welcome.

Damon
The Studio Files

For all of the LE users out there (including myself), Pro Tools incompatibility with Leopard has been a big headache. This is obviously not all on Digidesign, as Leopard CoreAudio is buggy and 3rd party plug-in/VI companies are also having a hard time getting compatibility.

However, most of us have the “audio part” of Pro Tools working just fine. I get the occasional weird buffer error or CPU spike, but for the most part, recording audio into Pro Tools with Leopard 10.5.1 has been no problem. But using virtual instruments?? Big Problems. Even Digidesign’s own VI Box Set is shaky.  With a little patience and creativity, you can still be very productive in your studio.
I have the box set on my new 2008 Mac Pro (10.5.1). So that’s Structure, Strike, Velvet, Hybrid, and Xpand. One of them works… Structure will load up samples and trigger from MIDI, although it is rather slow and buggy. All the other VIs have big problems. All four of them have this neon yellow color scheme, and the windows seem to stay on top of each other, creating a big neon mess when you turn knobs or change pages within the VI. For what its worth, most of them (have had the least luck with Velvet) will generate sounds if you can actually figure out what you are looking at. I have a few Pro Tools sessions from a Tiger machine that I transferred into Leopard, and as long as I don’t mess with the VIs (aka even open the window), they work fine.

I am having a hard time getting 3rd party VIs to work (EastWest mostly, I don’t have many others).

So, what are the solutions? Well, the first is wait it out… but who knows how long that will be. For the time being, I would suggest doing your best to work around it. For example, I spent some time figuring out how to load up some basic beats in Strike through the neon interface (its harder than it sounds!). Now when I am writing songs, I can at least call up some basic rhythm without a lot of fuss. Structure works, so I try to use instruments from that (like basic rhodes pianos etc) rather than calling up an instance of Velvet. If you only have XPand, that’s ok too. Yes, the interface is messed up, but just get used to loading up a few instruments that you use a lot, and don’t get picky about tweaking things. Also, if you have other “real” instruments (keys, bass, guitars, synths), now is a great time to bust them out and record some audio, rather than using a VI for those sounds. You may find that you prefer to play the real instrument (at least I do when I can).

If you get really stuck, sequence your MIDI, export the files, and send them to a friend with a working DAW setup. Then he/she can run it through an instrument and send you back the audio in no time. I would suggest using yousendit.com to send large files rather than through email.
All I can suggest for now is be patient and try to make the best of it with any other resources you have. If you are a Pro Tools user who switched to Logic in all this compatibility fuss (and are having a hard time adjusting), check to The Studio Files soon, as there will be articles on that. You can either email me with questions, or just post them in the comments of any article on the site. We will answer them ASAP.

C

The Studio Files

Well, not exactly. But I am getting started writing a piece for piano quintet that I am going to talk about here. Maybe even post snippets. The main thing is to go through the process of using a notation program to create a piece for live musicians to play. For me, this is where music technology started… way back in 1993 when I got my first computer. It was a Centris 650 (Macintosh) with 8 Meg of RAM and a 25 MHz clock, and it cost me about $1700. I was working on several pieces that would be performed on my Master’s recital and I knew I needed to learn this program called Finale. It was only available for the Mac back then (v. 2.6.9). So with the help of my dad and a student loan, I got the computer, a black & white monitor ($399) a Roland JV-90 keyboard ($1500) and a 300 dpi laser printer ($899). I had already learned a lot about Finale by investing in some lessons from a fellow student (Thanks Mark, wherever you are!), and I dove in.

Finale has come a long way since then. Competition from other software like Sibelius has enriched the feature set and made it a much easier program to learn and use than when I first started. In the last couple of years, Finale has also implemented Native Instruments VI (virtual instrument) hosting within the application which allows you to load up a custom template of instruments from your own library. The Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO) version that also now comes with Finale is a great start for anyone who wants to start composing with sample libraries.

My usual compositional work flow for large orchestra pieces or smaller chamber works is to start with paper and pencil and begin sketching ideas at the piano. Pretty soon I start to develop ideas that are specific to a particular instrument and that takes me to Finale, where I start working things out in more detail. Finale lets me work on several ideas independently that will later be molded into the form of the piece as a whole; there is nothing greater than the flexibility that computer notation gives you to extend a section within the middle of a work, delete measures to tighten up pacing, etc. It also means that I work on a piece differently, and in some senses in a less disciplined way, than pencil and paper composers did. I can dive in without planning and fix it all later, which was a luxury that my teachers and their teachers didn’t really have without the necessity of recopying large swaths of a score.

Personally, I like it better this way!

So, as I said I am just getting started. I am setting up my instrument template (two violins, viola, violoncello, and piano) with the Native Instruments (NI) plug in within Finale. I have used NI (Kontakt especially) with Finale in the past, but it has been with the notation program communicating through Interapplication MIDI. For large scores I have orchestral sounds (East West Quantum Leap Platinum Pro XP) installed on two external Windows PCs that handle the large numbers of notes happening at once (polyphony). But for this piece, I can load all of the articulations that I want inside of Finale–I think.

Here is a picture of the articulations that I have loaded for the viola. You will see that some of the patches are marked TKT. These I have edited using a special technique that alternates different samples when the same note is triggered in succession. Kontakt allows a lot of flexibility and scripting possibilities that let you detail the performance of your sample patches in useful ways. I learned to modify patches in this way by following a tutorial found at kevintweedy.net (Thanks Kevin! and Theodore Krueger who codified this)

I will use patch change messages in Finale to change articulations as the score plays back. Some sounds have keyswitch patch changes (triggered by MIDI notes outside the range of the instrument). If I use these, I put the keyswitches in a lower layer in Finale and then tell Finale to hide that layer. It works pretty well, but I think I am moving towards instrument banks and patch changes more permanently. More on that in an upcoming post.

So once I have the instrument banks loaded, I’ll be ready to start sketching. I’ll keep you posted.

In the mean time, you might like to listen to a couple of orchestral sketches that started life in Finale and then got detailed programming in Digital Performer:

http://damonsink.com/mp3/Arches_sketch2.mp3

http://damonsink.com/mp3/Arches_sketch3.mp3

These are almost all East West Platinum ProXP sounds

Damon
The Studio Files Team