Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 121 i AudioTechnology

I knew this day would come. I’ve dreaded it, mulled over it, but long accepted the reality of rental life; that one day I’d have to move. I currently rent a house on a sizeable piece of land that’s very attractive to development. As it happens, roughly the same size parcel as the 852sqm Sing Sing Studios occupied at Gordon Street in Cremorne. That’s going to developers too. High-rise apartments is the best guess. One thing’s for sure, it’s never going to be a studio again. My studio will be going, too. Four or five years ago now, my friends and I scrounged together enough material, squirted tubes of Green Glue, and built a room within the two-and-a-half car garage that keeps noise down and lets us play into the…

MVi Expect to pay $215 The MVi’s dense Shure construction would do serious damage if thrown at a window. That’s not to say it’s big — it’ll easily fit in your back pocket. Its weight and indestructible feel means it probably wouldn’t suffer if put through strenuous conditions in the ‘field’. All three Motiv devices serve slightly different purposes but accomplish the same basic goal — a portable, simple interface for use with a computer or iOS device. Each is capable of transporting 24-bit/48k over USB 2.0. They’re plug ’n’ play, and the hardware controls changed my Mac’s system volume — a neat touch. For on-the-run recording, the ShurePlus MOTIV iOS app offers recording and editing functionality on your iPad or iPhone. The MVi is the only Motiv that doesn’t…

I want them to exist so badly. When Korg first released Gadget as a mobile app environment, its graphic design department breathed flesh ’n’ blood life into the gadgets themselves, looking all the world like real-life tabletop microsynths in the promos. Stroke of genius really. The fact these little gadgets are small – and by necessity a tad limited – ceased to be an issue. They were adorable and I wanted them to be alive. They’re not… alive, that is. Their corporeal chassis are imagined; and must live in our imaginations… but just imagine having 20-plus Gadgets on your desk, all sync’ed… Anyway. Enough of the daydreaming. They sound real enough; and now they’re on your other desktop… your Mac computer’s desktop. Korg has released Gadget for Mac, matching a…

SUBSCRIBERS: 750,000* VIDEO VIEWS: 87 MILLION* *All figures from mid-April, 2017 Andrew Huang strictly adheres to a schedule of releasing a video through his YouTube channel every Monday and Thursday. His output is a mixture of vlogs — often about music production and music theory — and videos with musical content that could range from original songs, to feats like rapping 300 words in 60 seconds, and his breakthrough novelty children’s song Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing On Rainbows. His ‘Song Challenges’ are also wildly popular, where Huang reconstructs 99 Luftballons entirely from samples made using red balloons, or limits himself to using the notes in CABBAGE to write a metal song… about cabbage, or makes a beat using samples harvested from beets. Hailing from Ottawa, Ontario in Canada, where he…

“I actually use a MIDI guitar to do all the keyboards and even the drums. I’m lucky that Abel is a big fan of guitars, so many of the ideas we came up with started on guitar” ABOUT DOC Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney was born in Canada, but grew up in Minneapolis, where he started his music career playing guitar in punk-rock bands. It was during his first tour at age “13, 14” that he squatted in Manhattan. Growing up as a black kid playing guitar elicited sneering responses, but “what people don’t understand about me is that I don’t give a f**k,” said McKinney. “I grew up punk rock as hell.” In 1994, in his early twenties, McKinney decided that there wasn’t much space for him to grow as a…

Midway through their popular tune What About Me, Snarky Puppy frontman Michael League calls out, “Hey, it turns out half the band tonight is from Dallas, so we’re gonna let the Texans jam while the rest of us take a water break.” With that, he and half the band walked off the Melbourne Recital Centre stage, leaving the remaining four to improv their hearts out for the next six minutes. From what I understand, a ‘typical’ Snarky Puppy gig is anything but typical. Each live performance is refreshingly unpredictable; one of a kind. Adding to the intrigue, you’ll never know which of the roughly 40 member-strong jazz/funk collective will form the lineup each night — or how long they’ll stay there apparently. It matters not, because only players at the…

I’m always on the lookout for the studio of the future. What image that conjures up in my mind is forever changing, but it always centres around one goal; achieving more complex tasks, easier, and with more musicality. MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) fits squarely into that mould. Or should that be ‘fits cubely’? What is MPE? Think of it like breaking down the barriers between notes. You can slide between any pitch, or modulate a sound by pressure or movement, all without lifting a finger to grab a mod or pitch wheel, knob or joystick. We’ve already covered ROLI’s Seaboards, which look like keyboards but feel like a gel shoe insole. Awkward to play on at first — like learning how to walk again — but with four extra dimensions…

CRYSTAL MASTERING Crystal has mastered releases for Davey Lane (You Am I), Branch Arterial, Drakezilla, Anna O, Romeo Knights and James Hale. King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard also brought in their second album, Murder of the Universe; one of five to be released this year. WILLIAM BOWDEN MASTERING Will has been stacked up with jobs for producers Shane O’Mara, Brendan Gallagher and Matt Fell as well as releases from Fiona Kernaghan, The Basics, and many more at his Launceston suite in Tasmania. APHEK 1 Aphek is celebrating 25 years in business this year by giving the control room a complete makeover. Aphek has replaced the flooring, put in fresh acoustic treatment, and most importantly, installed the first Heritage Edition Audient ASP8024 console in Australia. It took way longer to…

Tertiary audio education is enjoying some hefty financial investment lately. SAE Institute recently opened the doors to its new $12m, seven-story Sydney facility located at 39 Regent St in the inner-city creative hub of Chippendale, next to Central Station. General Manager of SAE Australia, Lee Aitken, said the new campus was built to accommodate a growing demand for a range of creative media programs in disciplines like film, animation, games, design and web/mobile. “The new campus has been fitted out with the best facilities and industry-standard equipment to support hands-on learning in small class environments,” said Aitken. “Our focus is on giving students access to the types of technology and equipment they’ll be using in the workplace, and equipping them with both the technical and soft skills needed to kickstart…

SUBSCRIBERS: 161,000 VIDEO VIEWS: 13 MILLION Kawehi is not primarily a YouTube musician, but calls herself a “one woman band” who uses many different web sites, including YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Kawehi.com to release her videos and music. Her YouTube stats are less stratospheric than those of the real high-flyers, but she’s nonetheless enjoying an impressive independent internet-fuelled music career. Kawehi made a name for herself by performing all the musical parts of her videos live through looping. It’s an impressive feat, but what helped her stand out and flagged as Vimeo Staff Picks were the moving images she and husband Paul Wight created. For example, in the video of her song Anthem she sings and beatboxes each musical part with different versions of her head in cardboard boxes.…

This ‘PC Audio’ column is getting a bit meta. See, typically I write about how to get the most out of your PC for recording, but lately I’ve actually been recording my PC! Let me explain. Electromagnetic fields can be found all around us, yet they all remain inaudible and invisible to us until converted into waveforms using a suitable pickup. Some fields — like the earth’s own magnetic field, and that around a bar magnet — are static, but the alternating currents (AC) produced by most mains electricity supplies produce time-varying electromagnetic fields. It’s those fields we can pick up from suitable electrical appliances — table lamps, radios, TVs, mobile phones, microwave ovens, even personal computers — and turn them into sound. My own journey started last year, after…

DUAL 15-INCH TOUCHSCREENS — With a one-to-one ratio of onscreen channels to faders, and two sets of channel processing encoders, the SD12 workflow is lightning quick and functional. Bottom line, says Barnard: “It’s inherently more simple to have a channel strip in front of you with a fader at the bottom of it.” LIGHTBAR — No need to go scavenging for console lamps, the integrated lighter is just one way the SD12 keeps things compact and neat. HIDDEN TIL LIT — A feature gleaned from Digico’s flagship consoles, HLT aligns the onscreen colours with the LEDs rimming the rows of encoders. If they light up pink, you know you’re dialling in your aux send levels. The two banks of encoders also let you toggle between a locked preference and the…

Sennheiser’s original XS entry-level wireless microphone system was a hit on par with Shure’s PGX line. Notwithstanding, user demands change quickly at the bottom end: more channels, better builds, cooler looks — all areas Sennheiser has addressed with its latest update to the range. There are two broad flavours of XS wireless systems; XSW1 and XSW2. The main differences between the two are; preset vs manually selectable frequencies, 10 vs 12 channels per band, integrated vs external antennas, pushbuttons instead of dials, and plastic vs metal receiver housings. Other than that, the audio specs are the same, and they both operate within a bandwidth of 24MHz. The XSW2 range wasn’t available [in stores now - Ed], so Sennheiser loaned us a couple of XSW1 systems for review; the XSW1-825 with…

It’s dirty and underhand: an intro video that has four or five keyboard masters — musical directors and virtuoso players — jamming on the Kronos LS? It’s not fair. Not as though I needed too much convincing. I always considered the Kronos to be the ultimate musical director’s workstation; the one-stop keyboard that virtually guarantees you’ll never be caught short, packing a gargantuan range of sounds from a bunch of killer engines — sampling, recording/sequencing, split/ layering, Karma… it’s effectively the full Korg toyshop in one package. Most of us don’t/won’t need the Kronos but if you draw a wage from making/composing/arranging/teaching music then Kronos is a nobrainer tax deduction. It’s the muso’s version of the tricked up tradies ute… why skimp? And back to that video. The LS version…

NEVE 2254E TURNED MULTI-BAND US$199 | www.plugin-alliance.com It seems the Neve 2254E compressor/limiter is in vogue. Check out our review of AML’s take on the hardware later this issue, but if software is your bag, you can download Plugin Alliance’s Lindell Audio version, the 345E plug-in. It chains three 2254E models together to create a multi-band version. It keeps the 1.5:1 to 6:1 compression ratios, but adds features like a Nuke button for dramatic over-compression, a side chain function, and a Niveau filter for tilting the side chain and high-pass filter response towards preserving more of the bass energy and lending itself to the API ‘thrust’ compression effect. The attack and release controls differ slightly from the original, allowing you to select an insanely fast two microsecond attack. There’s also…

The Internet was once the brave new hope of the leftfield, the trendy, and the creative. Those of you who were around in the early days will recall the idealism and optimism of everything being free; free to participate, freedom of expression, democracy for all, and a world without boundaries. That same equality also meant anyone could track mud all over the utopian carpet. Fast forward 20 years and the Internet is blamed for most everything that has gone wrong in the 21st century: trolls, cyberwars, government’s spying on its own people, fake news, the demise of the fourth estate, even the erosion of society because we’re all suckling on social media feedlots. Phew, talk about a bad rap. The Internet also decimated the music industry as we knew it.…

SUBSCRIBERS: 1.5 MILLION VIDEO VIEWS: 277 MILLION Leo Morachiolli’s path to YouTube fame was shorter and more straightforward than that of Huang and Kawehi. It’s taken him only three years to amass his impressive audience, once again, largely under the radar of the mainstream press. Before YouTube fame hit, Morachiolla was very much like millions of other aspiring musicians around the world. Born in Norway in 1978 to an Italian father and a Norwegian mother, he started playing guitar and singing at age 15, played in bands, one of which had a record contract with a small Norwegian label. However, Morachiolla concedes, “unless you’re really big, you can’t make money from music in Norway, so I ended up having to do nine to five jobs. For years I worked mostly…

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the 2017 NAB conference in Las Vegas. The show is massive, with around 1700 exhibitors and approximately 105,000 attendees throughout the four days open to the public. It’s a good few kilometres from one end to the other according to my pedometer, which tallied up over 7km/day for my stay. While the conference primarily encompasses the broadcast industry, there was plenty on show of interest to the audio world. Possibly largest press with 1300 attendees was Avid’s Connect 2017 event. Avid was pretty excited about the recent additions to Pro Tools, the most heralded addition being the integration of Dolby Atmos with Pro Tools HD. This has been a long time in the making; Avid announced the partnership with Dolby around two years…

Like Mama always said, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Solid advice when choosing friends or baking a pie, but it turns out it’s a good philosophy for designing audio interfaces, too. When it comes to pro audio, Apogee knows a thing or two about making products with high-quality insides. Continually delivering impressive spec sheets has required paying keen attention to every component in the signal path, every time. Apogee does a good job on exteriors too — the Duet and Quartet set standards for interface design. However, if we had to pick, we’d probably all agree that an interface’s sound is more important than its looks, or even its physical controls. So would you forfeit the latter for the sake of affordability? In a bid to make top-notch…

Phil McKellar is a multi-ARIA winning engineer and producer. He’s worked all throughout the ABC and recorded a bunch of Aussie hit records, including Grinspoon’s Guide To Better Living, which has been re-released on its 20th anniversary. I came to arts school in Melbourne, then dropped out and went back to work in the Shepparton canneries to get some dough together. In ’79 a mate who worked at the local TV station told me the ABC was employing technical trainees. We had a crack at it, but neither of us got a return letter. I kept ringing them, annoying them and sending them letters. Eventually around Christmas 1980 they suggested I come do some staging work. My girlfriend’s mum told me, ‘you want to get your foot in the door…