02 Virtual Instruments September-October 2005.pdf

Mungo giveaway! Win a Stylus RMX Groove Module with all 5 S.A.G.E. Expanders

www.VirtualInstrumentsMag.com

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 - VOL. 1 NO. 2

THE WORLD OF SOFTSYNTHS AND SAMPLERS

Alesis Photon X-25 – MIDI in 3-D

Can this much fun be legal?

VERY DEEP CLINIC:

Adventures with Ableton Live

Law of the LAN

(look Ma, no hardware)

Jordan Rudess of

Dream Theater

CUTTING-EDGE

REVIEWS:

Audio Ease Altiverb 5

• IK Multimedia

SonikSynth 2 • Korg

Legacy softsynths

• Scarbee Vintage Keys

• Submersible Music

DrumCore

Mungo giveaway! Win a Stylus RMX Groove Module with all 5 S.A.G.E. Expanders

THE WORLD OF SOFTSYNTHS AND SAMPLERS

Editor

W elcome to the second issue of Virtual

Instruments.

I’d like to start off with heartfelt thanks for all the

amazingly positive feedback you’ve given us. Of course

we wouldn’t have launched this magazine if there

hadn’t been a need for it, and we were confident that a

lot of people would like it (if for no other reason than

that we have such a great team of highly experienced

writers). But you never really know what the reaction’s

going to be until it’s out there, and your letters and

comments on the internet have gone way beyond our

most optimistic expectations.

Now, as a preface to the following I want to stress

that you can get a lot of music out of a single comput-

er; there’s no shame in only running one, in fact film

composer Klaus Badelt explained at great length why

he’s doing that in his interview last issue. However,

Virtual Instruments is all about creating music on the

cutting edge, and networking multiple computers is

right at the forefront of the cutting edge.

As we mentioned in our premiere issue, those of us

running large-scale compositions are constantly running

into, and more often exceeding, the limits of a single

computer. Why?

The first reason is that a lot of modern sample

libraries—meaning that they’re large and they stream

from hard disks—have way more programs than you

can load into a single computer’s memory, and you

want to have the programs you’d like to try for different

phrases or fragments loaded and ready to play. This is

especially true if you’re using large orchestral sample

libraries: East West Quantum Leap Symphony Orchestra

(especially the Platinum version, which gives you a

choice of three mic positions to mix and match for

every program), Vienna Symphonic Library, Sonic

Implants Complete Symphonic Collection, plus individ-

ual section libraries from SAM, Garritan, and others.

But for example the outstanding Larry Seger Acoutic

Drum library alone can easily use an entire GigaStudio 3

machine—and it’s putting that machine to good use,

it’s not being a pig. Another example: Prominy’s Electric

Distortion and Clean Guitar has 30GB each of clean and

distorted Les Paul electrics.

It’s also easy to exhaust a single computer’s horse-

power with a few complicated softsynths going—such

as Native Instruments Reaktor—and elaborate mixes

with a lot of plug-ins running can overwhelm a single

machine very quickly. Processing and memory resources

are a theme you’ll see recurring constantly in these

pages. And there are many other reasons for having

more than one computer, from needing to run Mac and

Windows to having a laptop and desktop machine that

you use for different purposes.

So while the idea might seem extravagant to some

musicians, multiple computers certainly aren’t only

found in the rigs of the precious elite. Even a five-year-

old computer can run a few softsynths or plug-ins, so

there’s no reason not to put it to work.

None of this is lost on developers, and we’re seeing

an increasing number of products that connect comput-

ers in the studio. Apple’s OS X Tiger has both MIDI and

audio networking built in, for example, and there are

other applications mentioned in the article all this is

leading up to: “Lay of the LAN,” on page 36.

Audio takes a lot of bandwidth if you’re running it

over a network, and it really wants to go over a gigabit

ethernet connection rather than a standard 100 Base T

one. But how do you keep the standard ethernet con-

nection to your cable or DSL modem from slowing

down the network? What if you have several machines?

Never mind that—how do you just get your machines

to start up with the same ID so they show up on the

network every time? Most of us don’t have one of those

proverbial “network administrators” referred to in a lot

of instruction manuals.

To answer those types of questions, I called upon one

of the sharpest people I know: Monte McGuire. Monte

is a recording, mixing, and mastering engineer with an

MIT technical background. It turns out that networking

isn’t very complicated—at least not the way he explains

it—but it really pays to have a thorough understanding

of it. I hope this article answers as many questions for

you as it did for me.

nificent Stylus RMX Groove Modules (reviewed last

issue), complete with all five S.A.G.E. expansion groove

libraries, for the Son of Mungo Giveaway in the center

of this issue. Its main purpose is to encourage you to

subscribe, which we consider to be a highly capital idea.

Congratulations to the winners of our previous pro-

motion. Chris Caouette of Colchester, CT; Tony

Hartmann of Dallas, TX; and Frank Karabotsos of

Vancouver, BC each receive a copy of the book “Visual

Music” by Christopher Brooks

(www.KIQproductions.com). They’ll learn a lot about

scoring for every medium. Kenneth Kuhlmann of Turner,

Australia wins Chicken System’s Translator Pro

(www.Chickensys.com) for the platform of his choice.

His sample libraries are now portable between many

supported formats. Finally, Henry Wieczynski of Gdansk,

Poland wins a Garritan Personal Orchestra library. Happy

composing, Henry.

And happy reading.—NB

2 VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS

From the

S pectrasonics has kindly donated one of their mag-

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: