Joel Braverman
Author: Joel Braverman Created: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:56 PM
Articles by Joel Braverman
Winter NAMM 2001 - an Odd-Essey
By Joel Braverman on Sunday, December 31, 2000 6:00 PM


Welcome to Hell (a.k.a. Los Angeles)

Every time I go to Los Angeles, I worry about my soul. It might just be a fear that I might actually start liking LA, and then I might want to live there. Or perhaps the danger is real... Are those really music industry executives with their combed back hair, dark glasses, Mercedes Benz and briefcase, or are they really minions of the evil one? Why do they all dress the same? What do they carry in the briefcases, and why do they hide their eyes behind dark glasses when they are indoors?

Anyway, this time around, the NAMM show was not in Los Angeles proper, but Anaheim. If you are from another part of the country or the state, the distinctions don't really matter and in fact it is hard to tell one part of the LA area from another. The part of the LA area know as Anaheim i ...
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Samplitude 2496 v5.31
By Joel Braverman on Tuesday, November 30, 1999 6:00 PM
In May of last year ProRec brought you a comprehensive and exhaustive report on Samplitude 2496. Since then, several major improvements have been made to the software package. This report outlines some of the most recent changes to the program. If you're looking for a complete review of Samplitude 2496 in general, please read Jim Roseberry's review.

The most notable improvement to Samplitude 2496 is the new 5.1 surround mixing engine with Dolby Digital encoding and vectorized automatic mixing. The second is MIDI - you can now play and record MIDI from within Samplitude, partially eliminating the need to run a separate sequencer synced up with Samplitude during mixdowns.

Other major improvements include the ability to import and export 24 bit files from other systems. This was extremely useful to me when I needed to de-noise a 24 bit file from a ProTools/Logic audio system. It wasn't exactly easy to import the file ...
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Winter NAMM 1999
By Joel Braverman on Sunday, February 28, 1999 6:00 PM
The forces of life were against my trip to the Namm show this time. Everything conspired against me, but I did make it down for one day, and I took a bunch of pictures with a borrowed Sony DV Camcorder. (Techie corner - they were digitally transferred to an AVID and the stills were extracted from there). I've provided a little information on the stuff I saw that I liked, and some links to the respective companies if the products sound interesting to you.

Down in the Basement

If anyone was hoping for as spectacular a NAMM show as last year, they were somewhat disappointed.

There were some interesting new things, but for the most part it was the same old stuff with a few little changes. The only place that truly had some major innovations was to be found in a corner of a basement of the convention center. Down there, clustered within a few booths of each other, were the softsynth manufacturers. Native Instruments, Bitheadz, and Sounds Logical were all promoting some hot new sof ...
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Autoscore
By Joel Braverman on Monday, November 30, 1998 6:00 PM
Many people have expressed a desire for a transcription tool that would let them take the melodies they hear in their minds, and convert them to music notation, or to transcribe an instrumental solo in order to more easily learn it.

Autoscore is a program from "Wildcat Canyon Software" (WCS) that attempts to fill this need. Although it isn't perfect, Autoscore does seem to do the job to some degree, but there may be some MIDI cleanup left to do afterwards. A skilled singer who can sing on key most of the time will get much more use out of this product than the average person.

The product was sent to me in two flavors - Deluxe and Pro. Deluxe appears to allow step entry only. It comes with MidiSoft Studio for Windows, but will work with other sequencers, like Cakewalk.

The Pro version ships with Cakewalk Home Studio, which is pretty much the old standard Cakewalk 3.01 sequencer, sans a few nice features. It appears to install Home Studio by default. Fortunately, it doe ...
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Gettin' Back To the Music
By Joel Braverman on Monday, August 31, 1998 6:00 PM

Cosmic Message...

Many years ago, I had a job working at IBM, a good two hours away from where I live. Because of the distance, I stayed near the job site during the week, and drove home on weekends, which meant I was not playing an instrument anywhere near as often as I was used to. I felt I was losing touch with it. One week, I stopped into a book store, and thumbed through some sort of mythic adventure book, possibly by which was all about getting back some kind of lost spiritual art. Then I went to the magazine rack, picked up some music rag, and flipped to the back page where there was a large ad for a recording console entitled "Get Back The Art"

It's still a meaningful message to me now.

Time Travel

A friend of mine loaned me a CD of Electric Light Orchestra's Time the other day. Wham. Some people talk about roots music being the blues, and jazz. Well, to me the roots music is the music that turned me on, blew my mind, and moved my emotions. It's what ...
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Cool Tools For MIDI Processing
By Joel Braverman on Friday, July 31, 1998 6:00 PM
Since I was a teenager, I've been enamored of music by Kraftwerk, Jean-Michael Jarre, Ultravox, Vangelis, and others. Unfortunately, with the exception of the built in Arpeggiators on some keyboards, MIDI has never been quite up to the task of producing this kind of music, unless it is through-composed (in other words, you program and play every note and filter setting). That is why I'm thrilled with some of the new software products that emulate the old step sequencers and arpeggiators. Here are some of the coolest ones I've found:

Seq-303

Seq-303 from Techno-Toys is a really cool little piece of software. It is a sixteen step programmable sequencer with some really neat features. It is called Seq-303 presumably because it functions in a similar way to the old TB-303 and TR-606, and attempts to emulate the 303's style of portamento,or "glide". I downloaded it from http://www.technotoys.com a few months ago, and liked it so much that I registered it ...
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Hyperprism Direct-X Effects
By Joel Braverman on Tuesday, June 30, 1998 6:00 PM
After reading the marketing hype on Arboretum's web site for their plugin effects package, I was almost drooling at the idea of testing them out. Are they worth it? At $299, they are certainly less expensive than some competing effects packages.

One of the nice things about Hyperprism is the logical set of tools that it provides - almost 30 different plugins - if your software will allow you to chain direct-x plug-in effects, you can take, for instance, the noise gate plugin and gate a reverb, a classic effect made famous by Phil Collins and others. I was able to get quite a few chained up on a mono track in Cakewalk. Of course, the Vocoder is what I was dying to hear, but due to some technical difficulties, I got much less use out of it than I did their HyperVerb(TM), which is Arboretum's Flagship product.

All of the Hyperprism effects sport a similar user interface - a set of sliders and buttons at the top, ouput level controls on the left, and a real-time controller, the X and Y ax ...
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Walter Murch
By Joel Braverman on Sunday, May 31, 1998 6:00 PM
Walter Murch is known as the film editor and sound mixer for some of the best movies of our times - the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient are just a few. Recently a popular Pro Audio magazine interviewed Mr. Murch in a special audio-for-video section. However, the topics discussed did not really go into technique and technology, but focused more on aesthetics. I wanted to find out more about what technology he uses when mixing for picture.

Walter Murch

Walter told me that he is the only person who actually does the editing AND the sound mixing on feature films, an approach he developed at Zoetrope which he helped found with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. I dropped in on Walter at his farmhouse in Marin County, California where I asked him too many questions over a cup of tea. He had just returned from Cannes a couple of days bef ...
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The Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI
By Joel Braverman on Thursday, April 30, 1998 6:00 PM
I was tired of turning up the inputs on my mixer to record my hiss, um, I mean my Bass guitar and decided it was time to get a direct box. I didn't know what to get, so I asked the folks who made my bass - Warrior Instruments (http://www.warrior-w1.com) what to get - they recommended the Bass Driver DI. I on the other hand didn't want to spend the $250 dollars to buy a little box.

I went out and bought a Rolls Adb 2 for $40, which actually sounds great on my acoustic guitar with a Dean Markly Pro-Mag soundhole pickup, but not really what I wanted for bass guitar. After annoying my favorite salesguy at Banana's At Large, testing various doo-dads and processors, I decided to blow the bucks and get the Bass Driver. (My advice to the cheap and those on tight budgets - give it up, spend the money, do it right, you won't be sorry, and you can always sell it if it's worth anything in the first place)
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Behringer Composer
By Joel Braverman on Tuesday, March 31, 1998 6:00 PM
I've been using the Behringer Composer for a few weeks and so far I'm very happy with it. The cost is low ($250) yet the unit is very transparent, with fast gate response.

The Composer is a dual-channel compressor / expander, noise gate, and peak limiter. It has the basic control you would expect on a compressor (threshold, attack, decay, ratio, etc) as well as an Automatic setting. It also includes less-than typical 8-segment LED meters to indicate gain reduction and signal level.

The Composer features -10 / +4 inputs to match to any of your pro audio gear. It also includes a sidechain, which will allow you to compress only certain bands. This is a great feature on such an inexpensive compressor.

Behringer Composer

I'm running my synths through three mixers - a Yamaha DMP11 digital mixer, a Mackie 1202, and a Korg 168rc, each of which add their own brand o ...
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