Innholdsfortegnelse for AudioTechnology Issue 117 i AudioTechnology

Perfectionism is not an excuse for failing to finish. Which sucks, because it’s a useful crutch. Even beyond that most unimpeachable of reasons to procrastinate, there are countless other excuses that can detach your song or mix from any sense of timeliness. This issue, I came across two vastly different approaches to reaching the end of the creative timeline. On one hand there was Stu Mckenzie, lead singer/engineer/producer/sonic mangler of Melbourne psych rock band, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. If he doesn’t release an album a year, I’m sure he would literally explode trying to contain an avalanche of ideas. Next year, his aim is to put out four! Then there are The Avalanches, the snails of the Australian music industry, who threatened to turn from legendary artists to…

Architects must hate it when client’s change their mind. Say the brief was to build a retirement home for a sexagenarian couple — a well-considered, modernist abode with all the mod cons a long service leave payout can buy. The architect goes ahead and designs a smaller, easily maintainable home with only a couple of rooms and plenty of wall space for their pre-war art collection. No one mentioned room for the extended family rocking up on the weekend, or the raucous grandkid sleepovers on Friday nights, until the design was already done. Fernando Menis, principal of Spanish-based firm Fernando Menis Architects, seems to handle those kind of last minute requests well. Menis won a 2008 international ideas competition for the new CKK Jordanki concert hall in Torun, Poland under…

Townsville-based guitarist Mick Lockhart has spent much of the last 20 years on the road as a guitar player for a who’s who of Australian country. However, now with a young family and a whole bunch of space on his property 15 minutes North of Townsville, he decided to build a high quality, well-proportioned studio in his backyard. 18 months ago, Parkway Studios became a reality. The studio consists of a good-sized live room, with a nice neutral tone and ambience, a great sounding, spacious control room, with two well-isolated booths attached – one for vocals and the other for acoustic instruments and amps. There’s lots of ceiling height and the rooms are really well lit and laid out. The studio is built around an Amek Recall RN56 console. Lockhart…

A few issues back we looked at crafting your own OS X-capable machine using off the shelf computer parts — a Hackintosh, as it’s become known. Of course, this is frowned upon by the higher beings at Apple, but until the Apple stormtroopers come bursting through your front door there’s little to stop one from doing so. That said, if you’re planning to embark on building a bespoke machine to compete or better a Mac Pro, the costs can end up being quite similar. However, the advantages can outweigh the pitfalls: the main advantage being incremental hardware upgrades, and the weaknesses being issues with Thunderbolt compatibility and the time you have to spend getting a system up and running. In short, avoid Thunderbolt audio interfaces if you’re going the DIY…

Arturia has worked hard to ensure KeyStep isn’t just another MIDI controller. Its built-in arpeggiator and sequencer gives it a useful creative edge when making music, jamming with mates, and performing live. Second, it speaks more than just MIDI. KeyStep has CV I/O for connection to your analogue synths — a useful feature if you’ve wanted to control your VIs and modular gear from the same unit. KEY COMPONENTS Build quality is second to none. The keys feel pleasantly squishy but can take a decent thrashing. I’m not a fan of mini-keys but for whatever reason the KeyStep didn’t really bug me — probably because it’s unashamedly a synth controller and not trying to be a hammer-action set of ivories worthy of Beethoven’s Fifth. Besides that, the starting note of…

STUDIOS 301 Recently Owen Butcher was in the studio with Matt Damon recording ADR for his latest creature-feature, The Great Wall, while the album he engineered for New Zealand band Horses For Sale, Nothing To Be Done, has finally been released. In Studio 1, producer/engineer Antonia Gauci recorded a session with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Antonia also managed to lead the Engineering Basics masterclass for Music NSW’s Women In Electronic Music Masterclass. Vocal producer Simon Cohen has been in the studio with Nicole Millar, ASTA, Horrorshow, Coda Conduct, and his recent release highlights include E^ST’s Get Money! (feat. Mallrat), Thundamentals’ Late Nights, and Illy’s Papercuts. In the mastering suites, Leon Zervos has been tweaking tracks for Bernard Fanning, Delta Goodrem, Gang Of Youths, Tigerlily, Jess Mauboy, Nicole Millar, Human Nature…

BREAKOUT CONTROL FOR DLIVE www.allen-heath.com Networkable mini-controllers for dLive? Allen & Heath is onto something good here. The IP6 and IP8 remote controllers interface with the dLive mixing system through TCP/IP connections, plus you can network them with other controllers and computers via Ethernet. The IP6 gives you six push ’n’ turn rotary encoders and colour LCD displays, 19 programmable soft-keys, and a mic stand mount. The IP8 has eight motorised faders, colour LCD displays, and 23 programmable soft-keys. Both can be configured with up to six layers. With PoE capability, the controllers could be a perfect fit as personal, single-cable monitor-mixing solutions for musos. Also new to dLive is the Waves V3 audio networking card which provides a 128 x 128 channel interface to the SoundGrid platform, and the…

Much attention has been paid to the preamp side of Universal Audio’s Unison technology. But what of that humble DI jack on the front panel? It’s equally Unison-equipped, and UA’s latest Fender ’55 Deluxe Tweed plug-in goes as far as the company’s gone to show it can squeeze as much bleeding-edge-meets-vintage mojo out of a DI as it has previously achieved with a mic preamp. Two years in the making, UA has emulated every bit of valve goodness and circuitry in one of the all time classic amps. While the original Fender Deluxe was the epitome of simplicity with its single tone and volume controls, UA’s version offers loads of possibilities for those who love to tinker. First up, the gain structure can be adjusted via the Apollo Hi-Z channel…

Artist: Beyoncé Album: Lemonade Beyoncé’s latest album, Lemonade epitomes the adage ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. The album addresses infidelity, with Beyoncé on the receiving end. Wounded and angry, the album pulls no emotional punches. Rolling Stone labelled it “an entire album of emotional discord and marital meltdown.” With her hackles well and truly raised by the betrayal, Beyoncé didn’t stop at her own distress, instead she cast the album’s net over broader themes of women’s power and racism on songs like Freedom (with Kendrick Lamar) and Formation, which are the singer’s most politically explicit to date. Beyoncé has responded to life’s basket-case-full of lemons by serving up some pretty tart Lemonade. Just like Beyoncé’s previous self-titled album, Lemonade was released with complementary full-length visuals. While…

One of the many hats I wear is owner of a small cottage microphone business. Part of the business’ value proposition is that I have a personal conversation with all of my customers. One common line of questioning surfaces half a dozen times a week centred around ‘Which preamp do you recommend?’ On one hand, there are completely subjective answers to that question; pulling together preferences for sound, quality, tone, etc. With thousands of microphone preamps ranging in price from under $100 to over $10k a channel, there’s no common price-to-performance formula you can follow to help make that decision. However, you can compare technical specifications of preamps and microphones to find out whether they match well. This ‘no maths required’ primer is your Babel fish for translating the seemingly…

The Reason 8 update was a little underwhelming — of that, I think we can all agree. In fact, as a Reason user, you may have even approached the release of V9 with a certain level of resignation. You may have not bothered to upgrade at all! Be encouraged, the Propellerhead team has delivered something special. Reason 9 has plenty of juicy goodness to chew on. We’ve had it running for a couple of months now and have yet to explore it fully… but it’s been an enjoyable journey. SOUNDS AHOY Reason 9’s motto could well be: ‘come for the new sounds, stay for the Players’. Allow us to explain: The most obvious V9 drawcard are the 1000+ new sounds. They’re excellent, and… they couldn’t have arrived soon enough. The…

AUDIENT iD4 $299 | www.audient.com Console manufacturer, Audient, is digging baby-sized interfaces of late. Its iD14, released mid last year, has gotten a younger sibling in the iD4 — very similar form factor but less I/O. The iD4 caters to singer/songwriter recordists keen to lay down a track or two with minimal hassle and technical speed bumps. It’s a 2-in/2-out interface with a single Class-A mic pre, DI input, TRS speaker outputs, and dual headphone outputs on the front (with both 6.5mm and 3.5mm connections). iD4 supports audio resolutions up to 24-bit/96k, and is bus powered via USB 2.0. A monitor control knob lets you mix between your DAW outputs and inputs for low latency monitoring, and it’s housed in a rugged, all-metal chassis. The main volume knob doubles as…

I’m usually not a big fan of non-motorised control surfaces. The constant dance of picking up last used settings drives me nuts. As a result, I’ve never really fallen into the orbit of these devices. Recently, I was given Korg’s new NanoKontrol Studio to review. Intrigued by the miniature box, I downed some humble pie and set out to discover if the little, non-motorised controller could soften my defiant stance. NanoKontrol Studio is a mini control surface with eight channel strips, each featuring a (non-motorised) fader, pan pot, and backlit solo/mute/select/record buttons. To the left you get your usual transport controls, plus a jog wheel and marker setting buttons. Nothing about the unit jumps out as ‘special’, except perhaps its super-slim form factor. PORT-ABILITY Korg’s Nano family — NanoKey, NanoKontrol…

Most PC musicians could not imagine a world without VST real-time plug-ins. I was already writing about music technology in the years BP (Before Plug-ins). While there were various off-line effects available in WAV file editors for effects such as reverb, filtering and echo, alongside more standard treatments such as normalisation, fade-ins and fade-outs, their audio quality was rarely on a par with the most budget hardware effects units available at the time. Furthermore, you had to wait at least several seconds before all their calculations had finished before you could hear the sonic results. This all changed in late 1996, when after the first audio plug-ins were released utilising Microsoft’s ActiveMovie technology (subsequently renamed DMSS, or DirectX Media Steaming Services), followed by Steinberg’s very own VST (Virtual Studio Technology)…

Marcus Ryle is a co-founder of Line 6, the original amp simulation innovators. As it turns out, Ryle has a long history of audio innovation, including helping develop the ADAT standard with Alesis. Ryle was in Australia as Line 6 moved distribution across to Yamaha Music Australia. It’s Line 6’s 20th anniversary this year. The company that is now Line 6 was founded in 1985 as Fast Forward Designs. I worked as a design engineer at Oberheim Electronics from ’80-’85, along with Michel Doidic — The French Guy, as he’s referred to. Oberheim was pretty focused on synthesisers and drum machines, whereas we wanted to build a wider range of solutions. Michel and I along with my wife Susan Wolfe decided to start a consulting company. The notion being we’d…