PC and Music News

In this interview, Carl Beatty, a veteran engineer and Professor of Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music, discusses how the era of digital recording, with its presets, wizards and unlimited tracks, encourages novice engineers and producers to get lazy about capturing performances that are musical and tight enough for the final mix. He also describes how people who are serious about their recording careers can re-visit the studio techniques of the analog age to learn some recording best practices that work equally well in an analog studio as on a home ProTools setup.

Watch this video...

We at 440Network are very proud to announce the launch of 440TV, our new video broadcast site exclusively geared to musicians, and pro audio enthusiasts.

We hope you will enjoy finding hundreds of useful gear reviews, tutorials, e-lessons, interviews of renown professionals as well as hot tips & tricks and much more. The community site spirit remains in the way that you guys can rate, comment, share and upload your own videos for an always richer site content...

Facing such huge content, we worked hard to provide an intuitive interface where all you have to do is sort videos by "Category", "Date", "Popularity", or simply by "Manufacturers". A special attention has been brought to the search engine providing an easy to use while very powerful search tool.

It should here be reminded that any of you registered at MacMusic, PcMusic or 440Forums can automatically be logged-in to all other sites of the network including 440TV, which is pretty cool isn't it?

440TV is now live from the following URL : http://www.440tv.com

Just have fun and post a comment if you feel anything could be optimized on 440TV or just to say hi ;-)

ManyTone Music has just released Manytone Fretless Bass, a comprehensive sample library of a 4-string fretless precision bass available now in multiple formats.

The extensive soundsets cover a variety of articulations which take advantage of the fretless nature of the instrument. Manytone has sampled the distinctive sound of vibrato as well as various increments and speeds of bends. The staccato samples allow the sample library to encompass faster, more upbeat styles of music as well. Also these staccato samples, as well as the sustained tones, were sampled with both index and middle fingers, so the machine-gun effect of repeating notes may be easily avoided.

The Manytone Fretless Bass was sampled completely dry, giving you the flexibility to shape the tone to your taste from a neutral DI tone (Direct Injected).

This library is available in various formats including ManyTone Instruments, Wusik, Kontakt, Cakewalk Dimension (sfz), and Soundfont. The Fretless Bass library is presently available for an introductory price of $49.95 for single format (single choice of one of the formats listed above) or $59.95 for multi format (Any, or all, of the formats).

Future Audio Workshop (FAW) has released a new bank of 30 sounds for Circle, their fabulous semi-modular software synthesizer. Designed by Dajan Izzo, this first Circle Sound bank is available now on the Circle downloads page, here.

Note that you will also find on this page a comprehensive template for using Circle with the Lemur multi touch control surface. This template can be used in its entireity or as base for making your own custom templates.

Virsyn is happy to announce the release of Prism, The Pitch Designer. The multi-band pitch shifter Prism takes a fresh approach to solve the problem of shifting the pitch of complex sound sources in realtime.

Prism splits the spectrum in 27 bands and applies a different amount of frequency shifting to each band emulating a harmonic pitch shifting. This gives you perfect pitch shifting for all kind of drum sounds over a vast shifting range of +/- five octaves without disturbing the transients or introducing metallic distortions. With harmonic sounds you will get inharmonicities but it's much better behaved than pure frequency shifting. The extreme range of shifting gives you access to a vast field of unknown sonic territory.

Features :

- 27 band realtime frequency shifter.
- 27 band equalizer
- Linear phase precision filters for maximal transparency
- +/- 5 octaves frequency shift per band
- Envelope follower controlled pitch modulation.
- LFO controlled pitch modulation.
- Surround operation *
- Minimized latency ( 12 ms )

Prism is available now for Mac OS X and Windows in VST3, VST2.4, AU and RTAS formats at an introductory price of €129 till August, 31st.

*only available for AU / RTAS / VST3 version.

Sample Logic is proud to present its latest virtual instrument, Synergy. Weighing in at over 18 Gigabytes, this epic collection of 1200+ instruments, tempo-synced loops, and multis delivers the next generation of diverse sounds in an intuitive user interface.  

Powered by Native Instruments Kontakt Player engine, Synergy utilizes extended sample synthesis and effectual techniques to provide you interactive, ready-to-play instruments. With Synergy's flexible sound sculpting interface, control is in your hands. Simply put, all instruments can be modified, redesigned, and customized to your preference. This makes Synergy perfect for any performance and production environment.

Ambience (295 patches)
Bass (54 patches)
Drums (55 patches)
Impacts (269 patches)
Melody (173 patches)
Pads (57 patches)
Rhythms (270 patches)
Multis (40 patches)

Synergie is available now for Mac OS X and Windows in VST, AU, DXi, RTAS and Standalone versions for a fee of $299.