TC-11 – a touch-controlled synth for ipad that really delivers…

since acquiring a tablet device some time ago, I’ve tried a lot of ipad synths, and I am not ashamed to say I have a very large collection of them, that is still growing steadily – and probably always will! 🙂

they tend to fall into three broad classes:

• category one – those that work to emulate normal synthesizers, and therefore, their main method of producing notes and chords is a “virtual” keyboard;
• category two – those that use an alternate method to produce notes and chords – in a serious number of radical configurations, some more successful than others;
• category three – other less easily defined interfaces – oddball devices / devices that use truly unusual methods of triggering notes and chords;

so – in our first category (by far the most populated, from what I can tell) you have keyboard-based synths ranging from animoog to xenon, including classic emulations of moogs and korgs (such as the iMS-20 or the iPolysix), other standalones  such as addictive synth, alchemy, mini-synth pro or magellan, and second and third generation devices such as the amazing thor and the equally capable nave.

the second category is a mixed bag, with some good entrants, such as the strangely satisfying sound prism pro; then you have your cantors, your mugicians, and the like…they don’t have keys, but they have a single, straightforward way of producing notes and chords.  but that is also their drawback – they only have one screen pattern, regardless how innovative.

and then finally, the somewhat unclassifiable, such as the good dr. om, noisemusick, the 76 synth, or the moog filtatron – any number of oddballs “fit”, more or less, into this third category.

in category one, some stunning advances have been made, and in the case of a keyboard-based synth like the mighty thor – well, this synth is almost a textbook case for how to build a perfect synth in ios – it’s just a dream to play, it sounds great, it looks great, and the developers deserve a huge pat on the back for what they’ve done with thor – it’s really incredible.  if I want the best in a keyboard-based ios synth, I almost always turn to thor or nave, nave or thor, or let’s not forget the redoubtable iMini.

while I might go for one of those first, depending on the requirement, for another session, on another night – I might go for animoog (which has become quite the synth now that you can get the richard devine and other nice sound libraries for it, the metallic library is also fabulous) – so that’s a synth that has improved with the addition of new libraries, although of course, you do have to pay for them – or I might choose one of the korgs, or addictive synth, or cassini, or xenon or sunrizer.  or let us not forget the mighty n log pro – a fantastic first generation synth.

I’ve been less impressed with the progress of category two and three synths, that is, until I decided to take advantage of a rare price reduction on the TC-11 synth a few days ago – and suddenly, all these attempts to use the massive screen of the ipad in a unique and unusual, yet totally functional and musical way – well, it all starts to make sense now!  the designers / developers of TC-11 has done what the sound prisms and mugicians and the cantors could not quite do – they’ve created a synth with no keyboard, that is actually playable; that challenges the very need for a standard keyboard, and I found today, in making some test recordings, that it is entirely possible to play music with the TC-11 – despite the lack of a keyboard.

so the claim on the itunes store that the TC-11 synth is “the only fully programmable multi-touch synthesizer for the iPad” – would actually seem to be true! – I’ve certainly never encountered any other ios synth with the level of “under the hood” control that the TC-11 gives you.

the key is that there is no one solution, there isn’t one static screen (as there is with sound prism pro, mugician, cantor, and so on) instead, there is a different screen for each preset!  and each patch is totally configurable, from the oscillators to the filters to sequencers to the effects to determining how the movement of your fingers affects auto-panning, total behind-the-scenes control.

I actually bought this synth thinking “OK, I am a guitarist, and I have a lot to learn about synthesis still, despite playing and working with them for more than a few decades; I will buy this, and I will sit down at some far future point, many months from now, and try to teach myself how to program it…”  I expected it to be beyond me – and am pleasantly surprised to find that really, it’s not.

within seconds, I was playing, within minutes, music was emerging, even before I really understood what is going on with this remarkable synthesis engine, which is utterly and so beautifully configurable, you have access to everything under the hood, and I do mean everything – and this synth has just about everything you could ever, ever want – you are in control!

like any good ios synth, of course, it comes stocked with a healthy dose of presets; and from examining the way those are designed, I can begin to make my own connections and alterations and create fantastic patches of my own.  I actually didn’t expect presets, I thought I would have to build all of my own, but the developer has spent some serious time and effort to give us some absolutely great sounding presets right out of the box – which also work as building blocks for sounds of our own that we will design later…did I mention that the synth comes with a fantastic set of presets?

when you play through some of the presets, you will see that not one, but several different screen configurations are used, based on various different geometrical shapes – commonly, a circular interface; fret like interfaces; and various alternate versions of several basic screens, none of them featuring a key of any size or shape! nary a white key or black note in sight – and that, in the case of the TC-11, is a good thing.

despite the lack of a keyboard, there is a somehow-obvious logic (that I can’t describe in words) and when you play each patch, well, sometimes, it just hits you how you should use your fingers, you might make a fist to create a really pure chord, or stretch two notes far apart to increase that amazing thick flanger – but the design of even these presets is incredibly complex, and you can get amazing and very musical results by variously:

• making a swirling circle with one or two or three fingers
• putting all five or all ten fingers down in a semicircle
• making a fist in the centre of the screen, and spinning it slowly around
• trailing a single finger from one corner of the screen to another corner
• tapping out individual notes just as if you had a keyboard, but – you don’t
• moving the entire ipad in various directions to effect the sound as you hold fingers on the screen
• playing the screen like a typewriter
• any combination of the above
• using your imagination – just try it…and hear what it does to the sound !!!

…in other words, almost any gesture that you can imagine, made with finger, fingers, the fingers of two hands, the backs or sides of your hands…will produce a distinct result within the parameters of that patch, and some of the effects are extreme and wonderful – especially in the world of auto-panning, a lot of work has gone into the panner, not to mention some beautiful delays and flangers, too.

I imagine that you could put your forehead down on the screen, and something beautiful would come out of the TC-11. 🙂

so now – what I suddenly have here, is a superlative touch control interface synth that I can already play.  with some rehearsal, and some knowledge of how to get the best out of some of the best presets, and I should be able to play it live, anywhere, without issues.  so when I want to move from playing thor, and the world of the black and white, the tradition, playing those 88s in which ever mode I find them on whichever category one synth I am playing…

…to the world of total freedom, where one patch is all about circles and chords, another, about fretless dub bass with sonic qualities you will not believe, the next, an abstract plane of rectangles that fades into the top of the screen in an endless, fading curve, which defines your “playing field” for the next patch – it’s fantastic, a fantastical world of sound that is one of the most exciting I’ve heard, touched and seen, in a long time – the TC-11 is the real deal.

playing it is very, very liberating, the only experience I can compare it to, was when I first got my korg kaossilator, and I realised that after forty some years of making music with either frets, or keys – that I could make GOOD MUSIC without the benefit of keys or frets – well, it’s a similar feeling – and a wonderful, freeing one I can tell you.

I can make that comparison easily, because when I started out with the koass pad, I had no idea what would happen, and to my everlasting astonishment, with one day of practice – I could make music – without those pesky keys or frets or strings!

same thing with the TC-11 – within minutes, I could make music, even though the interface was completely alien to me, after a few minutes, I could begin to pull tunes out of it – which surprised the heck out of me, because with other category two and three synths, like sound prism – OK, you can get some nice chords and melodies out of sound prism – but you don’t get what you get with the TC-11 – beautiful, rich, synth music – with a really, truly unique playing surface, which is really, really fun to play – with a beautiful synthesis engine powering it, giving you the power to configure each patch to suit the way you want to move your fingers, to create the sounds you want to hear when you use that patch – total control, including the playing surface.

and, with the total configurability of the TC-11, even the most demanding, experienced synthesist should find the kind of control they crave for their patches – total control,  and playing without keys, finally got truly do-able.

so if you enjoy the challenge of playing the synthesizer without a keyboard, using a variety of approaches for note and chord generation, and you want a totally configurable synth with a powerful engine that you can tweak to your heart’s delight – then the TC-11 is the category two synth for you!  give it a try – I am finding it to be very, very addictive – it’s just a LOT of fun to play, and trying out different gestures to see what sound will result is a real hoot, and sometimes a new gesture will bring out an amazing sound out of a patch you thought you knew everything about – it’s full of surprises.

I took a bit of a risk in purchasing this, thinking it was far beyond me, but that risk has been rewarded a thousandfold, and what I have with the TC-11 is a fantastic tool for both live performance and recording – and a tool I know I will make a lot of use of in the years to come.  the TC-11 is a winner with me – a real winner.

you may want to give it a try – I am so, so glad that I decided to give it a go – because boy does it ever go! 🙂

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a short session with the “shredder synth”…

I recently mixed a really interesting session from june 16, 2012, where I did my first ever testing of and recording with an app I had just recently acquired, which is called “shredder synth” – a bit of a misleading name, because it neither shreds (well, it probably can, if you work at it) nor is it a synth – at least, not a normal synth – but nonetheless, it’s a truly remarkable app, and I wanted to share my experience with it with you…

first of all, I cannot for the life of me imagine how the developers of this app even got it to work, because, somehow, from a normal analogue guitar input, they have made a fairly flawless translation to a full on guitar synthesizer – an amazing acheivement for a tablet-based device!

so all you need is an input for guitar (any will work, I happen to use the “apogee jam”, which has worked flawlessly with every app I’ve ever tried it with – and that is several now) and that is all: ”shredder synth”does the rest – it detects the input, and somehow translates audio into MIDI to drive the synth.  god, and the developers, know – I do not 🙂  and I don’t actually care, all I care about is how it sounds – and that is wonderful.

the sounds – are beautiful.  that’s why I say the name of the app is misleading, OK, sure, you can get some heavy/metallic sounds with it, but it’s mostly capable of very, very beautiful sounds, very subtle, or very strange sounds.  the only negative comment I might make is that there are not very many “presets” – but, that’s not really a negative – I just happen to like apps that give me many presets, because that gives me that many more “starting  points” to modify from…but either way, presets or no, this is an excellent application with enormous creative potential.

I find the interface to be really easy to use and understand, it’s very, very simple to edit a voice, and on my very first day with it, I took a standard voice, modified it to my liking, gave it a name, and saved it for future use – a beautiful, beautiful sound, which I then, two days later, recorded two really lovely improvs with. one of those improvs, entitled “a string of islands“, can be found on soundcloud – I am so pleased with this simple but effective piece of guitar – but guitar played through a tablet guitar synth – remarkable!

some of the stock voices are really, really beautiful – one in particular caught my ear, “appalachian” – which is a very pure sine wave sound, with a serious hint of slow attack that gives it a quasi-reverse sound – so it’s sort of halfway between a forwards and backwards guitar sound, but a very, very pure tone indeed, and really works beautifully in any improv or piece that I’ve used it in – a definite “go-to” tone.

I really, really hope that this app does well, because I already like it in it’s current state, but I could imagine, with more features, more presets, and more functions, that over time, it might become one of the most amazing and capable guitar apps anywhere.  I hope the developers will really put some thought into improving this app, and making it truly world class – it’s well on it’s way already

I only have a handful of guitar apps (compared to a ridiculously large number of keyboard based apps I own) and”shredder synth”is utterly unique among them – three of the main guitar apps I use,  are guitar amp/cabinet emulation / effects multi-purpose apps (“stompbox”, “ampkit +”, and “jam up pro xt”), basically, different versions of the more familiar “guitar rig” that appeared some time back: devices to run your guitar through.  and I’ve been astonished at how good some of them sound, right out of the box – replacing thousands of dollars worth of gear with a 20.00 dollar application – that’s astonishing.

I have a couple of other guitar rig type of apps that I don’t really use, like “amplitube” and so on, because the main three I have are so, so capable – really powerful guitar processing devices, particularly peavey’s “ampkit +”, which I absolutely love.  I have high hopes for the newly acquired “jam up pro xt” but it’s a bit underpowered right now – ampkit plus is miles beyond it in terms of devices available and presets available – miles ahead – so I hope “jam up” will catch up 🙂

but, so far, ”shredder synth”is the only guitar synthesizer in the bunch, and it’s a beauty.  what I realised during this session was, that along with all the processing I can do to a guitar signal, using ”shredder synth”means that now…I can drive those processors with two unique guitar synths – the roland gr-55, and, “shredder synth“.

and actually, of course, since the roland is capable of two simultaneous synth voices (and, one modelled guitar voice) that actually means I can have three guitar synths (and one modelled guitar, too!) running simultaneously. 

so I can imagine producing some very, very complex waveforms, with one stereo pair of guitar running from the roland gr-55, and another stereo pair running through ”shredder synth” – and then of course, taking those strange “triple guitar synth” constructions, and then running them through the many processing options…my guitar continues to mutate further and further away from sounding like a guitar – which to me, is usually a good thing!

some of the pieces I recorded in this session from june 16^th, 2012, demonstrate this beautifully, and even when there are just two synths running – say, poly sitar from the roland, and digi-lead from the shredder –  it’s uncanny to hear a melody played by two completely different synth voices – especially since in some cases, the differences in adsr, particularly, differences in the attack, mean that the melodies seem to interweave, since one synth voice might “start” it’s phrase many milliseconds before or after the other – a great effect, because even though there is only one note playing, one melody, the aural illusion is of multiple melodies – because the voicings are so very different in their sonic characteristics.

I was astonished to realise that suddenly, I now have an extra guitar synth added to my main guitar sounds – so going from the already very lush combination of two synths and one modelled guitar, to now three synths and one modelled guitar – which while it may not sound like much on paper, in terms of my guitar sound – it’s huge.

given my now-very-flexible routings situation, it will also be possible to route one synth through one set of processors, and the other, through another, and, sending separate stereo pairs to the recorder, as well – allowing me to record the output of the roland on one pair, via one set of processing devices, and the output of the shredder on another, via another set of processors – giving me maximum mixdown flexibility, plus the ability to level match precisely between the two after recording.

one of the test pieces utilised a second app, so as well as”shredder synth”and the roland, I was running a tabla/tanpura drone as a backing track, using my favourite “itabla” application, and that piece, even though just a rough run through, really gave me the flavour of just how good this “two guitar synths” set up is going to be going forward when combined with other applications like “itabla”.

other “shredder synth” presets that merit special mention are “hidden talons” which is almost impossible to describe in words, running a “glass cello” on the roland into the “hidden talons” patch on the shredder, created a complex and beautiful stereo output, with oddly-moving-from-major-to-minor organ chords – plus, strange bubbling sounds, a beautiful drone-like sine wave output – and the constant, gorgeous glass cello driving the whole thing – a really lovely sound (if a bit out of control at times!).

I also am quite partial to the preset “keep your ears” – a sort of oddly-arpeggiated sine wave synth – again, when coupled with a more constant roland voice – the glass cello again – it works really well because the two voices are so very, very different – great sonic contrast.

glitchiness? – well, I’d say, all in all, that the “shredder synth” is about the same as the roland. let’s face it – all guitar synths suffer from this – if you do not hit that note precisely, perfectly, carefully – you get little glitchy sounds sometimes, depending on which voice, and which fingering, and how much care you take in the accuracy of your fingering.  this can be controlled via the application of very precise technique.  sloppy, random playing generally results in a rapid increase in “glitchiness”.

this applies equally to the roland gr-55 and to “shredder synth” – it’s part of the slightly glitchy technology of input tracking – whether that be the roland’s special GK pickup, or. the way the shredder synth’s developers have captured the guitar’s input to use to drive the synth – sometimes, I love those glitchy, weird extra “sounds”, their randomness and sudden appearance can add character and excitement to a piece.  other times, they can and do sometimes annoy me, because sometimes, I really want the pure sound of the patch.  but the “shredder synth” is truly no better and no worse then the gr-55 – it tends toward glitchiness on some voices more than others – as does the roland.

this is something that can probably be improved over time by the developers, but, to be honest – a big part of it is the player’s style – when you start out playing guitar synth, you quickly learn that it’s not “just like playing guitar” – in fact, you actually have to spend time and make a deliberate effort to develop a specific picking style for each synth voice, that works with that particular sound – and every voice has it’s idiosyncrasies, that you have to allow for – and great care must be taken to perform each note so that the device doesn’t glitch.  but – with practice – you learn , and it sounds better and better as you learn more precise fingering which translates directly into better tracking and fewer glitches – usually 🙂  it’s not an exact science, but to me, it’s miraculous that guitar synthesizers, of any description, exist at all…they are an astonishing thing.

hearing this session now, there are maybe only a few viable takes from the session, because the whole idea of playing with two guitar synths at once was new to me, and I just didn’t do that well – I was still adjusting to the double-synth concept – but when I hear the tracks, including imperfections and my own learning curve – I can hear great potential here.  particularly the track I recorded using itabla pro, could easily lead to a whole new kind of guitar-synth-based “synthraga orchestra” piece – using not a keyboard synth, but perhaps the roland gr-55 driving “shredder synth” atop itabla – the potential that these test recordings reveals is really encouraging – and I love the sounds that this unique and interesting application makes.

but the jewel in the crown from this session, are the last two tracks, which were both recorded using the first custom guitar synth voice that I created – so I had tailored an already-beautiful sound to my own ear – it sounded just like I wanted it to – and I was good and warmed up, so, I sat down and did two very, very satisfying and quite beautiful pieces using this custom sound.

that is possibly the most attractive feature of the “shredder synth” though, the ability to create your own synth voices, either from scratch, or by modifying existing presets – and there you have an almost unlimited palette to work from – and I am looking forward to getting creative in this area, creating a number of patches of my own to use in ambient and active pieces of music…particularly ambient, and the custom sound I created is in that category – which is why the last two ambient pieces in the session are so, so successful.

“shredder synth” is another real winner in my book, and one of my very favourite guitar apps to date – highly recommended if you want something a bit “different” – and, if you have no guitar synthesizer at all in your set-up – well, if you have an ipad, you can now have a guitar synth for an extremely reasonable price.  it’s not perfect, it’s not as capable as  the roland gr-55, but for the money, it does do an awful lot, and it does give you a lot of really interesting and unusual and also, frankly strange! new sounds for your guitar – you can’t really go wrong!! 🙂

the return of adobe audition / guitar synth sessions

over the past few days, I’ve been involved in mixing tracks from a live improv guitar synth session recorded way back on february 26, 2012, and it’s been a challenging and interesting session indeed.

first of all, I am using a different tool for the final mixes, a tool I’ve used before, but now, I am sure that I will eventually invest in, instead of trialling it, and that is adobe audition 5.5.

when cool edit pro disappeared way back when, i’d heard vaguely that it had been taken over by adobe, and that’s welcome news, but I didn’t really mean to wait ten years to check out what adobe had done with the cool edit pro code…but basically, that’s what happened.  I’ve been “making do” with other audio tools in the interim, sonar, sony sound forge, t-racks 3, and so on – so imagine my astonishment then, at seeing just how very far the original excellent ideas that cool edit pro espoused, have been carried through, brought up to date, and even into the future, by adobe with audition.

for audio – this is just heaven.  for the first time since the cool edit pro days, I can do noise reduction properly – fft style! – by taking a sample of the noise I want rid of, and then applying that to the track or section I want to clean.  there were some strange residual artefacts in some silences in take 9, the take I’m currently working on – and audition’s fft-style noise reduction cleaned them perfectly.

then there is the amazingly efficient pop removal tool, the “auto healing” brush.  I’ve tried a lot of different methods of removing pops and clicks over the years – and this one actually works.  it takes a bit of practice, but if you are careful, you can totally remove every pop and click without any damage to the actual music.  it’s a visual system, and it works really, really well.

for just those two practical, sensible tools, I am already sold, but then last night, I was trialling many, many echoes, delays and reverbs in the tool – and for built in effects, they are just outstanding.  I’d also already had a really positive experience using audition during the final mastering of “gone native” – using it to measure the effective levels, using the really sophisticated and most excellent analysis tools, so I could gauge the best levels for the tracks on the record – that was an invaluable help at the time.

not to mention, multiple levels of selectable undo – listed right there for you to choose from.  brilliant!

I still have a couple of sessions that have disastrous pops in them, which I never had time to cleanse when I had the trial of audition earlier this year, so for me, just for the effective pop removal tool, it’s a no-brainer.  but it’s also a great, great tool for editing audio, making mp3s, etc. – it pretty much does it all.

this is the first time in a long time that I’ve mixed something outside of sonar, and I wasn’t really missing anything, sonar does have some nice plug ins, but from what I understand, audition supports vst as well, so I am going to be trying out breeze and my mellotron and so on to see how audition does with them – watch this space.

I could also switch to a hybrid scenario, where I record in sonar, apply any plug-ins or reverbs I need, deal with any midi tracks, and once I have a decent sub-mix, send it to audition (which I can actually, probably, just call from sonar – so no need to export!) for final touches.

I got excellent results, and in fact, I ended up doing two additional mixes of take 9, to test out the effect of different delays and levels of reverb on the track, and in listening to the mixes today, it’s done a great job – I am particularly pleased with how well the fft style noise reduction cleaned up those strange noises in the silences, that is fabulous, that was something I loved about cool edit pro, and in fact, back in the day, most of what I was doing was converting master reel to reel tapes of either dave stafford solo albums, or bindlestiff/band albums, to digital, the very first thing I would have to do would be take noise samples (I ended up with a big library of fft files by the time I was done!) and noise reduce the entire master just to get rid of all the hiss and noise from the tape…and it worked beautifully.

so to finally have that tool back, configured the way I prefer (even better, now) is invaluable to me, and, with all the unfortunate popping that I’ve  been cursed with this year in particular, on sessions that are very important to me, I am equally enamoured of the most excellent pop removal tool – I love it – I am absolutely loving adobe audition.

this will probably also mean that I don’t need to use sound forge any more, because from what I can tell, audition is superior in almost every department – including specialised, extensive analysis tools, another huge plus in my book.  I also love the little “instant level” adjuster, a tiny digital potentiometer that hovers in every track, and you can instantly raise or lower the level in db for any section or the whole piece on the fly – a little too quiet?  tweak the pot, and it ups the level, and saves the file – all without bothering you.  that’s a brilliant idea, leaving me free to get on with the work – no dialogue necessary for this most basic of functions!  excellent.

anyway, the track I’m working with had quite a few challenges, I feel it’s an interesting track, it’s certainly imperfect, as improvs often are, so I used the tools in audition to try and improve the parts of the song that I felt were not 100% up to scratch, and mostly, what I’ve  done has really, really helped the track a lot.

I had originally intended only to release one improv from this session, take 10, which is now retitled “extreme gradient” but I went back and listened to the entire session, and the somewhat raw take 9 – which has now been retitled “provide the spark” – leapt out at me as being a strong contender – because of a unique and bizarre accidental “introduction”.

a fragment of a loop got caught in the looper, so this was a short sound, with a gap in between it, a short duration event in a short loop.  it was playing along, so I just let it play, and instead of clearing the loop and starting the take, for some strange reason (none of the other 17 takes have this intro) I decided to just overdub this running loop, and then launch into the song proper.

so as this short sound was repeating, I started inserting short bursts of guitar synth, two notes, one note, on top of it, in successive iterations, and very quickly built up a strange, strange “mini-loop”, with a gap in between, that continued to repeat right up until the point, about a minute and a half or so into the piece, where I then started to play the main improv I was working on that day.

at first I thought, this is just too strange, I am not sure I can actually use this for a video, but as time went by, I “got used” to this strange introduction, so I decided to work up the track in a mix and see what I could do with it.  one aspect of the loop was that it went on a few bars longer than I would have wanted, so to try and add some variety, I used audition to add in a nice delay about half way through the iterations, and then a more extreme delay towards the end – I took a preset delay called “delicate whispering” and altered it to fit the time signature of the piece, eventually (after many attempts) getting the right delay sound – not too overbearing, but enough to differentiate the final iterations of the loop from the first ones – and I think I have succeeded.

as often happens with loops, they can sometimes grow too loud too quickly, so again, I was able to “grab” sets of iterations, and selectively lower their levels (by grabbing in the gaps around them) so that the whole level of the looped section became more even.

the final tweak came at the end of the song, where I originally meant to have a sort of xtc/”great fire” gradual move from dry to reverbed, but in the end, while I did do a variation of that, I actually reverbed different sections of the final guitar solo with different levels of reverb, which had the desired effect – again, trying to instill some variance in this section of the song, and sometimes a bit of reverb is just the thing.

so there is very dry guitar, very dry guitar synth, and then very wet guitar, and very wet guitar synth – lots of variations – which you kind of need on a track where basically, I am playing a lead solo throughout the track – without variations, without a bit of delay and reverb to break things up, it would have sounded like a four minute fifteen second guitar solo – prefaced by a long, strange loop. (of course, that is what it really is, but hey!) – I think I have altered it just enough to make it interesting, and improved it’s user-friendliness a hundredfold in the process…and that’s all thanks to audition, and a bit of creative thinking – and, the tool is so intuitive, so easy to use – of course, probably since it’s the descendent of cool edit pro, I still recognise it’s functions, but it’s so completely different from cool edit pro that actually, it’s almost unrecognisable as ever having anything to do with cool edit pro – stripped down, rebuilt from the ground up – as with many adobe products – this one oozes pure class.

having said all this, I still have a third option with this strange loop – to release the untreated version.  my main motivation for working on the alternate mixes of “provide the spark” was more about learning more about audition and what it can do, and I had a great time trialling various excellent echoes, delays, and reverbs – I had a blast, and it even boasts successive equalisation of repeats in some of the more complex echoes, delays and reverbs, not to mention – of course – 5.1 reverbs, which can be customised for the 5.1 environment! I’ve  never seen a 5.1 reverb until last night – wow!

so in listening this morning, I am comparing my original “dry” mix, which uses only the effects present in the live/looped performance (which were considerable, by the way), to two different alternate versions that had been noise reduced, levels adjusted, delays and reverbs added, and trying to decide what makes the most sense for the video.

after listening to all three mixes a few times this morning, my view so far is this:  it’s between the original untouched mix, and the second delay/reverb mix – the first delay/reverb mix has too heavy a delay on the last section of the loop.

I think in the end, I may start again with the untouched loop, and do just the noise reductions, and the level adjustments on the loop – and some very careful reverbs at the end – and see where that gets me.  if still not satisfied, I will then approach some kind of delay on the last parts of the loop, similar to the on in “version 3” that I am favouring at the moment.

I believe what this means is that, after two nights of work, that I am still not happy, and I want to take more time and see if I can get a “best of all worlds” mix – addressing the needs of the loop, and of the main track, effectively.  I am getting close, and these rough mixes are certainly helping me gauge what else I might need to try…

luckily, I now have a great tool on hand to mix with, well, I actually have several great tools, and that’s the beauty of having daw, you have lots of options – within sonar itself, I have so many mix options, so many plug ins, it’s not funny, and then on top of that, I have several external tools, of which audition is just one, to aid in getting the best sound possible…so I feel totally spoiled for choice.  I also have the t-racks system, which I have yet to explore…

audition is a definite new year purchase, meanwhile, I plan to use my current trial version for another few weeks to clean up some sessions that have been patiently waiting for me to do just that – in particular, a really good session with the ipad from april 7, 2012, demonstrating the amazing power of some of the synthesizer apps, ended up with a lot of pops due to a usb conflict, so I had to shelve several really promising tracks that should have been made into videos for the applicationhd channel – well, hopefully, if I can clean them up, they now eventually, better late than never, will be.  I really want to get those tracks out there as they are really remarkable, albeit currently spoiled by many, many pops. (note: in the interim, all of these tracks have been cleaned up and are now pop-less, and are ready to be released!).

this and another session (at least – probably more sessions that I don’t know about yet, as my backlog is still quite extensive at this point in time) are plagued by pops and clicks, and I am sure that here and there there will also be other clicks and pops, and if I end up buying audition, then I need never worry about that again – I have the perfect tool to sort those out (not to mention, I can use it on the audio from old tapes of every description, even vinyl noise – I can clean up anything with this suite of tools).

once I get back into digitizing tapes (a room full of cassettes and tapes awaits me, as always) that fft style noise reduction will also give me great value, so I can reduce noise and remove clicks and pops…

the current version of audition is pricey, yes, but to my mind, it’s worth it for the time and trouble it will save in cleaning up “difficult audio”.

and I seem to have rather a lot of that about the place.

 

while I certainly have no lack of music to work on, I will say, it’s remarkable to have such a capable and diverse tool set with which to restore and improve audio.  I am loving audition – in any of it’s versions, right back to it’s genesis as cool edit pro 🙂