by G.W. Childs IV

Every music application has some way of color coding regions, clips, tracks, etc. However, isn’t it interesting how you don’t see anyone using them, with exception of people, like myself, who create demos for music software?

Let me be the first to say that colors are not a silly thing to add to your tracks. It’s not childish, and it’s not meant to make things prettier. Color coding a clip, region, etc, can really help you quickly identify parts, which makes editing and arranging much easier.

For example: I can decide that any part colored red is a rhythm part. As I go back through my song, I can clearly see all of my rhythm parts and differentiate those parts from the green guitar parts.

Second example: I can color code all of the clips or regions green that are apart of my song intro, the chorus could be blue, the verse could be yellow. When I go back to edit my song, I can clearly see all of the parts that make up my song and can jump around accordingly.

Finally, one of my favorite things about the color feature is one of the most simple: Colors can mean whatever you want them to. You can set up a color coding system for the way that your brain works.

However, I wouldn’t get too complicated, occasionally, you may want to pass a song along to a friend to do some work on and if you can easily explain what the color coding means, he can follow your system and this helps the collaboration go even more smoothly. When he returns the song to you with his revisions, you’ll be able to clearly hear and ’see’ what he’s done.

Zplane.development released version 1.5 of vielklang. vielklang is an audio harmonization instrument for easy generation of vocal or instrumental harmonies with up to four voices. The utilization of voice leading and harmony progression models allows vielklang to create harmony parts in a more musical way than traditional harmony processors and makes it a versatile and creative tool for musicians, songwriters and producers.

The new version adds the following main features:

• live MIDI input: play chords or voicings directly on the keyboard to control vielklang’s harmonization
• new harmonization styles: 3-voice intelligent, Block Chords, Fauxbourdon, Organum
• new export options: Audio/MIDI File Export for individual voices, MIDI export of harmony tracks
• improved input melody analysis: new note detection algorithm improves accuracy and robustness
• Ready for Pro Tools 8 and Cubase 5

About vielklang
vielklang allows quick and easy creation of natural sounding backing vocals, brass sections, and other harmony parts with up to four voices. It offers a new musical approach for the generation of the voicings: rather than synthesizing plain parallel voicings, vielklang takes into account the melodic context to create a chord-based arrangement and is thus able to produce musical harmonizations instantly.

Automatic recognition engines take care of initialization of obvious parameters like root note and key to let the user to focus on musical issues rather than tedious plugin configuration.

While vielklang will provide instant and meaningful results, experienced users have the option to edit the result with parameters like range (ambitus) or the distribution of the voices, to modify root note and scale, to edit single harmonies and to change each single pitch of each individual voice. Alternatively, the harmonization can be controlled by direct MIDI keyboard input.

vielklang’s main features are:

• musical harmonization using voice-leading and harmony progression models
• adjustable pitch correction, delay, timing humanization, timbre, volume, and pan for each voice
• Audio-to-MIDI
• MIDI-controlled snapshot system allows several harmonizations per audio input
• one-click modification of tempo, pitch, scale and harmonies
• plug and play: don’t waste time with tedious configuration

vielklang 1.1 is available for RTAS (Mac OS X, Windows), VST (Mac OS X, Windows) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a MSRP of $299.00/€249.00

More at: vielkang.zplane.de

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A first look at Pro Tools 8 from our friend at Digidesign Scott Church of Digidesign.

Q: I have a song where we recorded an acoustic guitar first then did the drum tracks later and so on. Before I recorded the drum tracks, I should have fixed the tempo problem first. Can I still fix this problem? (Even after using elastic audio to move some drum hits around?) I don’t work in grid mode or tick base settings for the most part. I know that this needs to change some day. Do you use beat detective?

A: OK, There’s 2 ways I can see going with this.

Way 1) Use Beat Detective to correct specific sections of the song, Say a bad fill for example Beat Detective is good with small sections. and is good for fixing a specific timing problem, but may still not work great if the tempo is all over the place or not defined for the entire song.

Way 2) Go the long way and create a tempo map of the entire song. Allowing you to use Elastic audio on any recorded tracks with more control over changing the actual tempo of the song. This is what I have been doing to fix parts because ultimately everything is much easier to edit in a grid mode once the tempo work is there. Also, Overdubbing new parts might be easier since you’ll be able to use a click track that will correspond to the tempo.

• Perform a SAVE AS at this point, so you can experiment without losing your current place. Creating the Tempo Map involves identifying bars and beats. Start by identifying bar 1. This could be tricky if you have any tracks set to Ticks. You may need to set them back to Samples before Identifying bar 1.
• Next identify Bar 2. This will set the Start tempo of the song. Now create a click track. This will help you by indicating when the tempo is changing and then go through the whole song identifying bars as you go whenever the click track gets off time. Each time you identify a bar, it will adjust the tempo map. Pic 1 shows where the Identify beat command is and also shows you my session, where I’ve gone through and done exactly that. Notice how the Tempo is identified, it’s all over the place. Kicks and snares are good places to identify beat. (Beat Detective can do this too, but I find it very tedious for an entire song)

• 
• Next, Change any Sample based tracks to tick based. Then pick the elastic type for ALL TRACKS - be sure your drum tracks are all grouped. Don’t leave any tracks out because they won’t be adjusted when you change tempo. Then I’ll mess around with the Tempo Operations window.
• In pic 2, I’m selecting 2 bars to apply a tempo change to.

This should go a long way to fixing any tempo issues. I don’t normally quantize things after all this, but often manually adjust or move warp markers using Grid mode. — Hope this helps.

Part 2 of a 4 Part Tutorial covering the Zoom functions in Pro Tools. This Tutorial shows us some Key Commands and covers use of the Zoom Tool.

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Q: Some friends of mine recorded at a Pro Tools HD studio recently. The studio selected a lower sample rate along w/ using a lot of compression. Why the lower sample rate? Is this common to do?

A: The Short answer is,  to save space and to allow for more DSP processing. The higher sampling rates require twice as much hard drive space, and twice as much CPU processing power.

The Long answer is, it depends.  I’ve run sessions at recording studios  before and I’ve set the Sample Rate to 48k so that when it comes to mixing, I’ll have the ability to apply more plug-in processing. Larger Sample rates may technically sound better, but even with some of today’s best computers, its easy to run out of DSP at the higher sample rates.  Most of the work I do is at 48k.  Deliverables for Television and Motion Picture broadcast are all at 48k. CD’s are all at 44.1k 16 bit.  Mp3s further reduce the amount of info in the audio that is retained.

So the advantages of the higher sample rate for most of today’s work are really limited to the environment its recorded in.  It’s also unclear at this time who can really tell a difference.   There is a much greater jump in quality and dynamics going from 16 bit to 24 bit. That is easy to hear and was a major improvement in digital recording.  But the Jump from 48k to 96k, or even 192k seems to yielded much less of a qualitative improvement.   So to get back to the question, my guess is they felt that 48k or 44.1k would provide them with more DSP for mixing in Pro Tools.  Without talking to the engineer its only a guess.

Another reason is that it takes up half the space on a hard drive. But I do think that for modern rock or electronic music, the lower sampling rate is fine. Just because the rate is lower does not mean quality will suffer. Many many recordings are all done at the lower rates, and the end listener would never know the difference. Good engineering can easily transcend any sample rate.

Part 1 of a 4 Part Tutorial covering everything you need to know about the zooming functions in Pro Tools. This Tutorial covers the Zoom Control Buttons for Horizontal and vertical zoom of Audio and Midi Tracks.

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Fred Here - From OBEDIA!

This is my very first blog post. I just wanted to say hello.

I’ll be posting comments and tips here as well as thoughts that occur to me while my endless

desire to break, fix and figure out better ways to work with Digital Audio Workstations continues.

I work with lots of progames including Cubase, Nuendo, Reason, FL Studio, ProTools, etc.

Although I don’t get asked about it too much - I am also a surround expert so, you may hear thoughts

about that too.

Finally, I’m heading up to the AES show in the first week of October and I hope to bring back some pictures and video of cool new gear.

Later. -Fred

Organize your plugins within Pro Tools for easy identification.

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