Huge Announcement from Cakewalk Sonar

Cakewalk announced huge news today.

Cakewalk Sonar (one of my beloved DAW softwares that I have grown up using for years), has just announced that it will soon be releasing a version that will run on Mac OS !

Also it has announced a time-limited offer for lifetime upgrades, with a one-time payment. The offer to jump on to lifetime upgrades will end 31 Aug 2016. Go to the official website for details and more information. http://www.cakewalk.com/June-2016#SONAR4Life.

I am not a Mac user, have never owned an Apple computer. But I'm still excited. I am glad that musicians on Mac will get one more alternative when choosing their DAW platform, and that the excellent software that Sonar is, will get more exposure and appreciation in the DAW community.

Somehow with this decision to adopt a new OS, I feel Sonar has stepped up to a new status. More widely used, more "international / universal", is the best way I can describe how I see this move.

Fight Through It!

For all the struggling artists or people picking up a new skill, here's a video to inspire you to keep up the good work, and never give up!

Understanding Music Publishing

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/02/28/understandpublishing

Here's quite a comprehensive introduction and overview of music publishing, the pieces which makes the process function and what each element does.

This is really worth a read for musicians and composers who have be hesitant and afraid to step into the business side of things. I am definitely in that group.

Head2Head Mix Contest by Mixrevu - February 2015

I just got to know about this Head2Head Mix Contests by mixrevu.com. They give out free multi-track projects of actual released tracks by various bands with different genres.

For this round, the track is a country song, Motherload by Merrygold.

Head2Head Winners are featured on our Homepage, Social Media & our Newsletters. In addition, the Winning Engineers may also be Featured in their Promotional Ad Campaigns!

In return, professional and aspiring audio engineers can use them to practice and submit the finished mixes in a contest.

Visit the article here to download your session files, and begin mixing now!

The contest for this month ends 14 February 2015.

Find out how to submit your mixes here.

Creating and Posting Cover Songs on the Internet (YouTube, SoundCloud, etc)

So 3 posts ago, I posted about a cover version of My Grown Up Christmas List that I created and uploaded onto SoundCloud.

I was wondering if it would be infringing any copyright laws, especially if I am not intending to make money out of the track.

On the other hand, I see a huge number of YouTube artists performing cover versions of songs. Has anybody wondered if it was legal at all?

I searched and found an article in NewMediaRockstars,com that held some promise of answering my question.

From what I understand from the article, it is actually illegal to upload and produce our own cover versions of copyrighted songs without permission from the creator.

However, quoting from the article: "Back in 2012, YouTube made deals with major US publishers that allowed creators to keep up their covers while publishers took upwards of 50 percent of the revenue generated from them. Unfortunately, we’re still not sure which publishers officially signed on. This means that even though YouTube has made it legal to upload a great deal of cover songs, we have no clue what those cover songs actually are."

Therefore if we really want to steer clear of copyright infringement when posting cover recordings of copyrighted songs, we have to  check with YouTube's list of publishers and which songs fall under the coverage of that deal.

For those who have uploaded material that publishers have flagged up to be infringing their copyright, that video will have the following notification on his/her video.

Another consideration for content creators who upload cover songs on YouTube, is the "three strikes" policy. YouTube states that for any user who receives three strikes of having claimed to be infringing copyright, his/her account will be removed, along with all his/her videos. Thereafter, he/she will be barred from creating a YouTube account, and from accessing YouTube's community features.

So it looks like in order for us to be on the safe side, we need to find out the publisher of the songs we want to cover, and to see if those fall under the list of songs included in the YouTube deal struck in 2012.

That is how much I have found out at the time of this post. 

I will continue to read up and find out how other music hosting platforms deal with the issue, and what are the proper procedures to go about doing this, if it is legal at all.

Strings Articulations on Wikipedia and Youtube (Mostly Violins)

I was reading up on strings articulations (8Dio Adagio Violins has a "Loure" articulation which I wanted to read up on)

Wikipedia has a page Violin talking about playing techniques.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_technique

In one of the links there is a link to The Violin Site, that has a page that has detailed instructions on how to execute quite a few articulations.
http://www.theviolinsite.com/bowarm.html

Finally I went to YouTube and found some instruction videos for Violin playing techniques, where the very patient Fiddlerman shows how he achieves various playing techniques on the violin.



Its great reference to see people showing how they play various articulations.

Groove3 Releases Training Videos for Eventide UltraChannel

Eventide-UltraChannel-Explained

On 1 July 2014 I published a blog post about Eventide giving away their UltraChannel plugin for free, as a introductory time limited offer.

Now, Groove3 the training videos provider for audio and music software, has released a 2-hour long training video series just for Eventide's UltraChannel.

The tutorials and training are written and presented by Multi-Platinum Producer / Engineer Kenny Gioia. Here are the other training videos on Groove3 developed by Kenny.

Ten Minute Master – Sample Streaming

This article from MusicTech is such a great read. 

Samples have come a long way, and we owe it to the great guys who continually push the technological boundaries so we can come ever closer to realism with our music.

The article talks about how it was in the days of sampling which, with unimaginably low resources (RAM only) allocated for samples, managed to squeeze only couple of seconds of samples for use in audio/music production.

Then came the revolutionary technology that broke the resource limitations of RAM capacity - the innovation of hard drive streaming, where sample data is streamed from hard disks to RAM.

It then talks about which types of harddrives are available and what aspects of hard-disk performance matters most when it comes to making music and getting the most when working with samplers. It also suggests some nice tips on how to spec-out your workstation to get the best performance for sampling based applications.

We are also reminded of the trend of greater efficiency with data, and continual improvements in technology, that music and virtual instruments in the future will sound ever closer to the realism that we dream of.

How to Create Width, Height and Depth in a Mix

The Pro Audio Files

http://theproaudiofiles.com/width-height-depth-in-a-mix

This is a  great article about how to manipulate your audio content to create the perception of depth, width and height in a mix. This article is written by Matthew Weiss, a mixing and recording specialist based in New York and Philadelphia

I like the way Matthew breaks down width, depth and height and tells us how each of these are perceived. Once we know what governs our perception, he then tells us what we can do to accentuate or even exaggerate it in our mixes if we so choose to.

I enjoyed reading this and I hope you pick up a thing or two also.

Behind the Scenes of Disney's Frozen

Great to be able to witness part of the workflow, and amazing team of many people working in collaboration to make this movie happen.

The featurette begins with the voice actors recording their lines,
then at 7:00 we see some kind of dailies for the visuals.
At 8:15 we see 3D artists actually working with the poses and rigs in Maya.
At 10:13 we are shown the choir recording their parts.
At 11:58 we finally see the orchestra recording the cues.

This is really good stuff!

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Production Diary 14

Here's an excellent look behind the scenes of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Production Diary 14.

This installment of the production diary takes a look at the music and musicians behind the production of the larger-than-life soundtrack that sets the mood for the whole realm in the story.



I have just watched the film, it is awesome. Can't wait for the next one!

How Much Should We Charge for Our Music? by Emmett Cooke

Here's a great article that discusses how much we should charge for our work. It is written by Emmett Cooke.

It goes through the thought process of how much it costs us, and how much it costs the client.

After that it goes to discuss a few ways we can calculate our costs, and different ways we can charge the clients.

I believe it not only applies to just music composing, but can be really useful for any industry where you do a task-based project.

I got to know Emmett Cooke from this website he set up, its called VstBuzz.com. A music composer for media, games, TV and films, he is an active member in the music community. VstBuzz.com is his way of bringing great virtual instruments to the community at promotional/discounted prices. Do check it out!

After every purchase from VstBuzz, Emmett never fails to write in to see if everything is fine with the purchase and if the product is working well.

I applaud his passion for helping out the community, and I really love his music.

WHY HANS ZIMMER GOT THE JOB YOU WANTED (AND YOU DIDN’T)

Yesterday this article was pointed to me by mr Alvin Yap who crawls the internet forums in his free time :)

This article was on a website called Soundtracks and Trailer Music

It is entitled: Why Hans Zimmer Got the Job You Wanted (And You Didn't)

It is written by Michael A. Levine, providing an Interesting Insight into Hans Zimmer (his work attitude and personality). It is a combination of musical skills, sensitivty and understanding of dramatic storytelling, business sense, ability to deliver and meet deadlines, and finally, understanding who the real clients are and treating them right.

Most of all, Hans Zimmer works really hard, and takes his career seriously, investing lots of time and money.

Thanks, Soundtracks and Trailer Music. This site will surely be another good place to hang out and to enrich myself with.

Interview with Film Composer James Bernhard

New from the Cakewalk Blog.

Great interview with Film Composer James Bernhard, a Sonar user incidentally. He has a strong perception of what is right, and what isn't for him. Coupled with these nuggets of wisdom and experience, are also very handy tips for aspiring composers for Film and TV.

 I like the questions asked by the interviewer from Cakewalk :)

 I am wondering why composers are secretive about the sounds, libraries and gears they use?

I like it when James say that in today's world of music, a demo track is often required to be broadcast quality, available to be used at an instant's request.

I also like the fact that he prioritises quality over speed. He rather have it right, than to have it fast. However, I also appreciate a lot of people in a situation when they are cornered into just meeting deadlines or budgets. At this point in time I can only draw on my professional experience as a CG / VFX artist. I hope I get to experience a full swing project cycle of stress, deadline versus budget kind of struggle, as a composer one of these days.

Thanks for the great interview, Cakewalk!

John Williams Recording NBC Nightly News Beat

Amazing recorded footage of John William conducting his piece that gets played over NBC's nightly news.

It is so beautifully moving, the motif keeps evolving slowly, seamlessly moving from one form to the next. I can only describe this as wondrous. It lifted up my soul and left me with wet eyes as I listened and watched to the end.

The Making of Freljord Music

I happened to come across this great video, the making of the music behind Freljord. These guys really did a lot of work for the music score and were very serious about the recording process as well.

It is awesome that the music making folks were getting inspiration visually from the art and design department (and they even got that lady over to sing in their recordings). That should really be the way to go. Many productions tend to treat music either as a separate process from their visual workflow, or as an afterthought.

Also, I really like the fact that they were not rushing merely to meet a deadline, but they were actually allowing their creativity to soar while they explored different instruments that could further draw the player into the environment they create with the visuals, music and sound.

How Oblivion Made Earth Sound as Post-Apocalyptic as It Looks

I found this amazing article of the same name on Gizmodo.

It links to a video from Soundworks Collection, the official site that hosts the video. This video talks about how the people working on music and sound design makes the environment depicted in the narration come to life on the big screen.


Check out more exciting and inspiring videos on Soundworks Collection!

A New Generation of Instruments - WeAreRoli.com

Roli is an up-and-coming company with an innovative instrument on their table.

This is a familiar yet unique musical instrument which they have named it The Seaboard.

The Seaboard has the familiar layout of a keyboard instrument, but it has added controls that from the demo videos, seem to involve pressure as well as touch. There is a ribbon controller near the base of the player's palm that allows for smooth bending of pitch. The indication of pressure and touch capabilities seems to also hint at the possibility of being able to control expression, vibrato amount and vibrato speed as well. The official site says that the performance can affect the timbre of the instrument as well.

One of the team members helping to shape the product is Jordan Rudess (head of music experience), who is an established and outstanding keyboard player who is also a member of 2 outstanding bands in the music scene.

Here are 2 demos featured on their official page:

From the comments from YouTubers I see mixed reactions. Many commented on the style of music that was played, or the sounds that are used in the demo. I feel all these comments are besides the point.

If you are doing any composing, sequencing or music arrangement with a keyboard/computer set-up, you would know about the expressive limitations of your regular midi-keyboard. With just the playing keys as controllers, we can only control the note, the velocity and aftertouch (channel / note) in some cases. In an attempt to achieve deeper control and expression in our playing, the industry has come up with additional controllers like breath, expression pedals, joysticks, pitch and modulation wheels, touch-pads or even gestural and optical sensors. Virtual instruments implement key-switching to trigger a change in the timbre and performance in the sounds.

As you can see, The Seaboard does not have external wheels/joysticks. It only has a ribbon strip besides the 'keys'. Yet it looks like it can control pitch bending, expression, timbre, all from the keys without the aid of external input widgets. The Seaboard looks like it is able to empower a keyboard player to new dimensions of expression in his/her playing, breaking the current limitations of only velocity and after-touch. I am hoping this keyboard has midi utilities to remap whatever input it's getting into various different continuous controllers messages. This would make it an extremely versatile input device for performing artists on stage and composers working in the studio.

The Seaboard is now available for pre-orders.

Engadget did an article about the Seaboard, with a 7 minute video of the creator giving a hands-on demonstration explaining what the instrument is made up of and a little bit of demystifying of the technology behind it:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/12/roli-seaboard-piano/

Here is another article on The Seaboard from MusicTech:
http://www.musictech.net/2013/03/roli-seaboard-grand-unveiled/

I do hope it takes off, and I look forward to seeing more of such instruments that can help us create more expressive music, which should be what an instrument is about.

FL-Studio - Resetting "Init Song With This Position"

This is a problem that I was stuck with for a while. Today I finally took the time to search for the solution on the internet, and the solution was readily available on many forums including Image-Line's.

The Feature

Init Song With This Position is a feature of FL Studio to enable the user to set a particular knob/slider/control to a certain value at the beginning of a song.

Any control, knob, toggle, slider from FL Studio's main application interface can be assigned an initial value this way. These include mute/unmute, volume, pan, mixer sends, tempo (coarse/fine), master volume, master pitch, etc. 

Once you set an 'Init song with this position' on a control, that control will revert its value to the set value every time you hit play on your song (even when you are not at the beginning of your song). Even with initial values set for a control, it is still possible to record automation on it, since 'Init song with this position' is not automation data in itself.

To use it, right-click on the control (knob/slider/button), then select 'Init song with this position':

Right-click on the control you want to init

Click on 'Init song with this position'

I can think of many uses for this feature. The most helpful situation for me, would be when I am going to use a physical controller's slider (Korg NanoKontrol2 for me) to affect the values of a FL Studio knob for example. I may actually mess up the value if I accidentally bump on my physical sliders positions (or someone changed the slider positions while I am away from my computer for a while). 

If that control has recorded automation, there would be no problem with this since during playback automation will automatically get the control back to the correct values. However, if that control has no automation set, that value would be lost and I would not be able to know what it was originally set at. 

This is where the 'Init song with this position' comes in very handy. It behaves like an automation snapshot that remembers that value without writing automation data on that control.

The Problem
Having knobs initialised with a certain value, without knowing how to remove that initialisation, can be annoying. Say at the beginning of my mixing stage I have 16 tracks. I do a rough mix of the levels, and I set the 'init song with this position' for each fader on each track.

Later on I tweak the levels of track 6 while the song is playing, from -10db to -5db. I'm happy with it, and I stop the playback. I play back the song again wanting to hear another part of the song with the new level at track 6, and lo-and-behold, my track 6 level jumps back to -10db because the track is initialised to that value.

One of the solution could be to set track 6's levels to -5db, and re-initialise this value as initial position on track 6's volume, before playing again to hear this new level for another part of the song. This could work but imagine having to keep setting initial value like this.

This is just one example. Another crazy example would be if a track's mute state was set with 'Init song with this position'. Every time you play the song, that track jumps to be muted, or un-muted as dictated by your init value. I don't know about you, but in my workflow I need to keep changing the states of mute/un-mute/solo. So having them init-ed and keep jumping to a certain position at the start of the song is unthinkable. (You can also accidentally produce this phenomenon if you are in automation enabled record mode, and you solo/mute/un-mute tracks during your playback. its really painful to undo).

The Solution

From the discussion threads on a few forums, the solution involves 2 steps:

• In the browser panel (F8), go to 'current project' -> 'initialised controls'. There will be a list of controls that have initialised values. See the diagram below.
• select from the list of controls those that you want to remove the 'init song with this position' from.

Browser panel's Initialized controls folder shows a list of controls that have initialised values.
Delete these to remove the initialisation.

This should successfully remove the init state of the control, and now the value should not jump to any pre-init-ed values upon playback.

All this while I appreciate the usefulness of this but was afraid to use it because I did not know how to reset the initialising. Now I am confident to use it, knowing I can remove it any time I want to.

If you have a better workflow please feel free to drop a comment :)

Some helpful links on this topic:

• http://www.theflipsideforum.com/index.php?topic=16171.0
• http://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?t=51073

Bought NI Massive and Razor Video Tutorials from Groove3.com!

I bought 2 video tutorials from Groove3 today! They are: Massive Explained, and Razor Explained.

Massive Explained is going for USD10 this week instead of the regular USD29.99!

Razor Explained is going for USD19.99 instead of USD29.99.

The FM8 tutorial and the Reaktor tutorial look really attractive too! I realise I have been under-utilising my plugins from Native Instruments. I will try and find more opportunities to use them.