Cakewalk has announced that the SONAR V-Studio 100 is shipping.
This is another interesting piece of kit that’s following the trend of marrying software DAWs and hardware for recording away from your computer. While not as low in price as the new Zoom (at $399) this one is still not bad for $699.
Here’s a quick video demo from Musikmesse:
Some key features:
High Speed USB 2.0 Audio Interface
Universal DAW Controller
Personal Digital Mixer
SD WAV Recorder
VS Production Pack suite of virtual instruments and effects (Mac/Win)
SONAR VS digital audio workstation (Win)
8 in + mix/6 out
24-bit/96 kHz quality
Two XLR Mic Preamps with phantom power and input sensitivity
Two ¼” TRS inputs
Hi-Z ¼” Guitar Input
USB 2.0
MAC/PC compatible with ASIO, WDM, WASAPI and Core Audio support
Works with SONAR, Ableton Live, Cubase, and more
SONAR V-Studio 100 is shipping now for around $700 US.
Okay, so technically the Loudness War began a looooong time ago.
I was recently interviewed for a featured article on this because of my connection with TurnMeUp.org. More on that in a moment.
If this whole “Loudness War” thing is unfamiliar to you, here’s the quick and dirty from Wikipedia:
The trend of increasing loudness as shown by waveform images of Something by The Beatles mastered on CD four times since 1983.
“The loudness war (or loudness race) is the music industry’s tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to attempt to create a sound that stands out from others.
“This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the music industry, particularly broadcasting and albums released on CD and DVD. In the case of CDs, the war stems from artists’ and producers’ desires to create CDs that sound as loud as possible, or louder than CDs from competing artists or recording labels.
“However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, once that level has been reached, the overall loudness can only be increased by a combination of dynamic range compression and make-up gain. This is done by applying an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of the recording and then increasing the gain of the recording until the peaks have reached maximum. Certain extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce distortion or clipping to the waveform of the recording.”
Here’s a video that also explains the Loudness War in a very quick and easy manner:
Now we come to the self-serving part of this post.
A while back, Charles Dye, John Ralston and I founded http://TurnMeUp.org as way for an artist to fight back against the loudness trend and release a dynamic record if they so choose.
I was recently interviewed on the subject by David Sason of Bohemian.com and the it’s now out. Here’s the beginning of the interview with a link to the rest of it. Thanks for the great story David!
It’s called “soundcheck” on the iPod. On some television sets, its name is “steady sound.” Today, virtually every electronic entertainment device has some sort of built-in volume control, seeking to level the increasingly jarring fluctuation in the loudness of audio or video content in the 21st century. “What’s probably most noticeable to people is how loud a commercial is on television when it comes on,” says Allen “Big Al” Wagner, recording industry veteran and proprietor of Big Toe Studio in Vancouver, Wash. “That’s the same technology being used to make music louder.”
As the cofounder of Turn Me Up!, Wagner, along with engineer-producer Charles Dye and rock musician John Ralston, is trying to counter a trend that’s quickly entering the cultural lexicon via a dramatic term: the “loudness wars,” a moniker that aptly describes the aggressiveness with which the loudness race has progressed and the destructive effect it’s had on the audio arts. Whether rock, hip-hop or jazz, music is roaring like never before. Turn Me Up!–the name tells listeners what to do with quieter, more dynamic albums–aims to hush the blast.
“It’s the equivalent of someone screaming everything they say,” says Wagner. “Imagine taking a painting and saying, ‘It’s not bright enough, so let’s take the Mona Lisa and go over it with all day-glo colors so that all the colors scream, all the time.”
First, I’d like to thank DeFacto Sound for reminding me of this fine piece of industry history!
One sound effect that has found a following with many sound editors and observant movie fans is a distinctive scream named Wilhelm.
The Genesis Of The Wilhelm Scream
In 1951, the Warner Bros. film “Distant Drums” directed by Raoul Walsh starred Gary Cooper as Captain Quincy Wyatt, who leads a group of soldiers to stop some Seminole Indians from threatening settlers in early 19th Century Florida. During a scene in which the soldiers are wading through a swamp in the everglades, one of them is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator.
As is usually the case with the making of a movie, the scream for that character was recorded later. Six short pained screams were recorded in a single take, which was slated “man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams.” The fifth scream was used for the soldier – but the 4th, 5th, and 6th screams recorded in the session were also used earlier in the film when three Indians are shot, one after another, during a raid on a fort.
After “Distant Drums,” the recording was archived into the studio’s sound effects library, and was re-used in many Warner Bros. productions.
Up until the mid-70’s, the scream recording was used exclusively in Warner Bros. productions, including “Them!” (1954), “Land of the Pharaohs” (1955), “The Sea Chase” (1955), “Sergeant Rutledge” (1960), “PT-109″ (1963) and “The Green Berets (1968).
One person who noticed the same distinctive scream reoccurring in so many movies was sound effects fan Ben Burtt. Ben and his friends in the cinema department at USC, Rick Mitchell and Richard Anderson, noticed that a scream was popping up in a lot of movies. One of the films they made together, a swashbuckler parody “The Scarlet Blade” (1974) included the scream – which they borrowed off another film’s audio track.
Ben adopted the scream as a kind of personal sound signature, and included it in all the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films, and many of the other films he has worked on including “More American Graffiti” (1979) and “Willow” (1988).
Ben’s friend Richard Anderson also continued the tradition. Both Anderson and Burtt worked on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), and Richard used the screams in the film’s truck chase – one of the sequences he cut sounds for himself.
Richard also used it in many of the films he supervised sound editing for, including “Poltergeist” (1982), “Batman Returns” (1992), “Planet of the Apes” (2001), “Agent Cody Banks” (2003), and “Madagascar” (2005).
Wilhelm occasionally pops up on television shows. Besides its use in a number of shows produced at Warner Bros. in the ’50s and ’60s, including “Maverick,” it was in episodes of “The X-Files,” “Angel,” and “Family Guy.” It has found its way into a few commercials as well – for Dell Computers and Comcast.
Many fans of the Wilhelm Scream have long wondered who originally performed the scream. No specific documentation has been found attributing the scream to any one person, but Ben Burtt has been researching the matter.
Between his work on the last “Star Wars” films, he has visited Warner Bros. to gather more information. He discovered a file for “Distant Drums,” which contained paperwork that was left over from the picture editor when the film was completed. One of the papers was a short list of names of actors who were scheduled to come in to perform various lines of dialogue for miscellaneous roles in the movie. After reviewing the names and even listening to their voices, one person seemed to be the most likely suspect.
Sheb Wooley - The Screamer
Sheb Wooley was a musician and character actor who appeared in many Westerns – but is probably most famous for the song “Purple People Eater,” which in 1958 spent six weeks at Number One and sold 3 million copies.
He played one of the four gunslingers that stalked Gary Cooper in the classic “High Noon” (1953), and starred on the hit TV series “Rawhide” as scout Pete Nolan. He also appeared in “Giant” (1956), “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), “Silverado” (1985) and even the film adaptation of his song “Purple People Eater” (1988).
Sheb played the uncredited role of Private Jessup in “Distant Drums,” and was one of the few actors assembled for the recording of additional vocal elements for the film. It is very likely he was asked on the spot to perform other things for the film, including the screams for a man being bitten by an alligator.
Here’s where I get to touch a little of this history! I once had the honor of backing up Sheb for a concert performance. He was a kind man and a smokin’ live performer. I get to say that I played with the “Purple People Eater” dude and the creator of the Wilhelm scream. How cool is that?
This is a very cool video from inside the control room of a pro studio. It also shows some interesting mic placements for recording a singer and an acoustic guitar at the same time, capturing a complete performance.
In the video singer/songwriter Gavin DeGraw tracks an acoustic version of “In Love with a Girl” at Sweetwater Productions Studios in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The track is for a charity CD project, “MAJIC Miracle Music,” through Sweetwater and Fort Wayne radio station MAJIC 95.1.
There has long been a recognized connection between listening to music and your mental state, which can obviously reflect on how you feel physically. But, this is taking it to a new level. Talk about getting your groove on!
Could this mean that we can write off gear purchases as a medical expense?
Here are the details from a report by PhysOrg.com:
Music May Have A Future Role In Heart And Stroke Patient Rehab
Blood flowand respiratory rates can synch with music, indicating that music could one day be a therapeutic tool for blood pressure control and rehabilitation, according to a study by Italian researchers published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
The researchers found in an earlier study (Heart. 2006 Apr;92(4):445-52) that music with faster tempos resulted in increased breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. When the music was paused, breathing, heart rate and blood pressure decreased, sometimes below the beginning rate. Slower music caused declines in heart rates.
In an extension of those findings, researchers recently discovered swelling crescendos appear to induce moderate arousal while decrescendos induce relaxation. In music, a crescendo is a gradual volume increase, and a decrescendo is a gradual volume decrease.
Previous studies have shown that music reduces stress, boosts athletic performance and enhances motor skills of people with neurological impairments. Bernardi noted that music more frequently is being used as a therapeutic tool for different diseases. In addition, the distracting effect of music can also prolong exercise by increasing the threshold for pain or labored breathing.
Music can induce physiologic changes that may precede the psychological appreciation. Such autonomic modulations could be of practical use to induce body sensation which might reach the level of consciousness, or at least create a continuous stimulus to the upper brain; moreover, the inter-individual synchronization of body physiology mediated by music could aid in strengthening the sense of sharing within the human relationship.
Blood flow and respiratory rates can synch with music, indicating that music could one day be a therapeutic tool for blood pressure control and rehabilitation, according to a study by Italian researchers published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
