Enabling Technologies Part II

As promised in my pre­vi­ous entry, the rea­son I haven’t been post­ing much here recently is that I have been play­ing quite a bit of music. I’ve also been learn­ing how to use new toys (hence the “Enabling Technologies” title) that will enable me to record eas­ier and with a much broader sonic palette than I ever could before.

You see, as a gui­tar player, one of my most frus­trat­ing quests was to find the ulti­mate gui­tar sound or tone, espe­cially on the elec­tric side. Most gui­tar play­ers spend a lot of money on equip­ment and count­less hours tweak­ing it to find that elu­sive tone. During the last cou­ple of years that I played in my band, I was using a com­bi­na­tion of two sep­a­rate ampli­fiers and I must say that I had found a sound or sounds I really liked. My sonic palette was still lim­ited to about 3 or 4 dis­tinct “tones” but, in a band con­text that is quite alright. Well known gui­tar play­ers like U2’s “The Edge” for exam­ple have a sig­na­ture tone that they use most of the time and it becomes part of the band’s sound. I can hear 3 notes from a new U2 song and I know instantly who’s play­ing them.…

On the ohter hand, now that I am play­ing on my own and will be look­ing at ways to “sell” my forth­com­ing musi­cal cre­ations I need to cover a much wider array of sonic styles that my ulti­mate equip­ment setup just could not have pro­vided… Come in gui­tar ampli­fier “mod­el­ers” like the Line 6 PODxt. This lit­tle red, bean shaped mar­vel emu­lates the sounds of not 3 or 4 but up to 72 clas­sic and mod­ern gui­tar ampli­fiers. Buying all this equip­ment would be far beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of all but the rich­est musi­cians. Furthermore, I can plug my trusty Fender Stratocaster into it and play through head­phones as loud as I want with­out dis­turb­ing any­one and with a sound I would need to crank a real ampli­fier very loud to get. It is made for direct record­ing with­out the need of using expen­sive micro­phones on real ampli­fiers and mas­ter­ing the stu­dio record­ing tech­n­ques required to get a good sound­ing gui­tar on tape/​disk.

I have been learn­ing to use the POxt for a few months now and I am get­ting great results out of it. It needs get­ting used to and spend­ing a good amount of time “tweak­ing” all the para­me­ters to get the tones you need but it sounds very con­vinc­ing and is great to record gui­tar tracks directly into the computer…

Speaking of record­ing, com­puter based home or pro­fes­sional stu­dio needs soft­ware to record and edit songs and sounds. The record­ing soft­ware indus­try is a very com­pet­i­tive one where prod­ucts of all price ranges com­pete for mar­ket share. These appli­ca­tions often called DAWs (for Digital Audio Workstation) range from the very sim­ple to the very sophis­ti­cated and every­thing in between. I have recently upgraded my copy of one of those appli­ca­tions to the lat­est ver­sion: Sony Acid Pro 6.0. I’ve ben spend­ing a lot of time in the last cou­ple weeks famil­iar­iz­ing myself with this new ver­sion as I had not used the pre­vi­ous one exten­sively. I am very impressed with the sophis­ti­ca­tion and ease of use of this piece of soft­ware. Acid’s graph­i­cal inter­face is of a rare ele­gance and Adobe could learn a few lessons by look­ing at some of the more pop­u­lar offer­ings in the audio record­ing mar­ket for cues. In Acid, every­thing is easy to get at, reacts as you would expect and just works great out of the box. Sony has really lis­tened to its cus­tomers and deliv­ered what they wanted. Now I just need to get all those ideas and bits I’ve recorded on tape in the last few months and build real music with them…

With these two rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive new tools, I’ll be able to do just that and have more fun than ever in the process. I’ll post up clips when I have stuff ready. Enabling tech­nolo­gies that’s for sure!