I seem to have struck a bit of a nerve with my recent First Take column, in which I postulated that people who make music primarily by putting together loops rather than playing traditional instruments should still be considered “musicians.” The responses I’ve gotten so far have been spilt between the positive and the negative. I will say, that the people who have emailed me to disagree have been quite passionate in their feelings about it.

For instance, a reader named Richard said:

“Ordering, and re-arranging of digital synthesis does not a musician make! While I, like your musical associate mentioned in your First Take article, respect the abilities of said persons, this, “Borrowed or Licensed programming” is insufficient Data to constitute comparison to lets say”’ Beethoven, I know the Magazine is Electronic Musician, but Mike, please!!!”

On the other side of the argument, Alan had this to say:

“Just wanted to write you and say thanks for your piece on whether or not mixers/producers can be considered musicians. I have to agree with you. In my opinion a believe that the tools used in creating music doesn’t determine whether or not you can be considered a musician.”

More support for my position came in from Tim:

“I am a high school music teacher of a course titled Digital Music Composition. We use GarageBand, M-Audio USB keyboards, a Korg M50, and four Kaossilators. While most people can come up with creative ways of using the technology devices, one will always have to have some knowledge of music theory–how the elements of music go together (melody, harmony, and rhythm.) Just come to day two of my course where, after I’ve taught the features of GarageBand, I simply tell the kids, ‘Take five minutes to develop a one-minute song.’ The loops are splashed all over the screen in a cacophony of fits, starts, and musicl zigs and zags. Inspiration is one thing, know-how is another and more important thing. So while GarageBand, Kaossilators, and Apple Apps for iPhone/Touch bring powerul expression tools to the masses, one still needs to know how to put the ideas together in a musically cohesive manner. That’s why we will always need music teachers: to take that inspiration, hone it, sculpt it, enable it, and let it go.”

And then, there was Drew…

“In my opinion, this kind of editorial is first and foremost cynical and disingenuous and second, divisive and wrong-headed. Mike unwittingly (I’m guessing) is driving a wedge even further between musicians and “sound knob twisters” by equating the two and suggesting that what untrained dilettantes do is music.”

If you want to read their complete responses, go to the article link. Keep those emails coming. You can respond there or here on the blog, if you’d like.

About a month ago, editors at music publications began receiving packages from Mackie containing Mackie Onyx-i mixers, a boxed version of Pro Tools M-Powered software, and not a lot of explanation. It was a teaser campaign to get the press’s attention, and get us talking about the fact that Mackie had managed to reverse engineer a mixer/interface to make it work with Pro Tools. Why is that a big deal? Up until now, Pro Tools could only run on hardware made by Digidesign or, in the case of Pro Tools M-Powered, by its sister company M-Audio. Both Digidesign and M-Audio are owned by Avid.

At that time, I contacted Avid to get that company’s reaction, and, not surprisingly, it wasn’t particularly positive. Here’s Avid’s official statement, as of August 10th:

“Avid (Digidesign) has not approved or tested Mackie equipment to be interoperable with any of its solutions. Pro Tools M-Powered is only licensed for use with our M-Audio peripheral products.”

Why is Avid not happy? Because, its business is based on selling hardware. Up until now, Pro Tools or Pro Tools M-Powered could only run on a Digidesign or M-Audio interface (respectively). Pro Tools software, is, for the most part, the carrot that attracts people to the company’s hardware. Avid’s control of its market hinges on the fact that nobody, at least up until now, can run Pro Tools without buying its hardware. Suddenly, here comes Mackie, a company with a distinguished reputation for building mixers, with a challenge to Avid’s entire paradigm. Today’s Mackie press release about the Onyx-i mixers, which are due to ship this month, had this to say in a subtly placed footnote:

“The Onyx-i Series Mixers are qualified by Mackie for use with Pro Tools® M-Powered™ 8. Mackie will release a driver (via www.mackie.com) together with full details of how to use the Onyx-i Series with Pro Tools® M-Powered™ 8 in the coming weeks.”

I don’t know enough about intellectual property law to predict whether Avid will launch a legal challenge to this, but it certainly bears watching. Without question, this is a story that could have a big impact on the personal-studio market, and I will offer updates as they become available.

In other Avid news, the company has announced a new entry-level version of Pro Tools, called Pro Tools Essentials. It will offer very low priced, track-limited Pro Tools bundles, replete with M-Audio hardware, and a price of $129. More details on this soon.

Legendary guitarist and music-technology innovator Les Paul has died today at the age of 94 of complications from pneumonia. Although very well respected as a guitar player (he worked for years in a duo with Mary Ford), Paul’s biggest contributions to the music world were his technological innovations in the areas of multitrack recording, delay, and the design of the solid-body electric guitar. The Gibson guitar model that bears his name is perhaps the most iconic guitar in the world.

Those of us on the EM edit staff wish to express our sadness at his loss, and extend our sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

For more about his life and work, read this obit from our sister magazine, Mix.

Watch some videos of Paul in this blog from Newsweek.com:

I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty about the new Apple iPhone 3Gs models that are scheduled to be available this Friday. They promise to be faster and even more fully featured than the current 3G models (which will be dropped in price to $99). For a good summary of the features and pricing, check out this story from PC World.

Current iPhone owners who don’t want to shell out the bucks for an iPhone 3Gs can still get some cool improvements with the free 3.0 operating system ($10 for iPod touch users), which will also be available on June 19th. That promises a lot of improvements including cut, copy, and paste; a landscape keyboard in the Mail app (a boon for typing emails, and a big improvement over the portrait-oriented keyboard in the current OS), turn-by-turn directions for the GPS (you’ll have to purchase a third-party app to access this feature), and, built-in voice-memo recording.

What the new iPhone models and operating system will mean for music apps on the platform remains to be seen. But in the meantime, new ones keep popping up. Here are a couple I’ve tried lately. (Read more about iPhone music apps in the EM feature story, “iPhoning it In“.)

Scale Wizard 1.01 ($1.99): Planet WavesGuitarists looking for fingerings for virtually any scale at any fret will love this app. You can see the fingering for, and listen to (either ascending, descending, or by individual note) virtually any scale, mode, or arpeggio in any key. It’s simple to use and a boon for any guitarist.

FiRe 1.0.0 ($5.99, Audiofile Engineering). Designed as a field recorder for your iPhone/iPod Touch, this app is well-designed and very useful. Large Play and Record buttons greet you when you open the app. It defaults to mono, but if you plug in a stereo mic (I tried it with the Blue Mikey, which it only supports on the iPhone 3G not the iPod touch 2G), and restart the app, it supports stereo recording. You can easily drop in markers, add Broadcast WAVE metadata, and record in a variety of quality levels topping out at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz. Like BIAS’s iPro Recorder app (reviewed in “iPhoning it In“) the display will rotate when you turn your iPhone or iPod touch around, which is handy because mics plug into the dock port which is on the bottom of the unit. The rotating display lets you view the app right side up when recording with an external mic. One feature that’s a bit puzzling is Overdub. You’re able to record on top of a previous recording, but you can’t hear your original while doing so. I’m not sure of the utility of this, but perhaps I’m missing something. You also get a bunch of different export options including FTP. I was able to easily download files through the browser based transfer method. I’d love to see an editing feature added, and monitoring while overdubbing, but overall, this is a very slick app.

Many tech prognosticators predict that “cloud computing”—where applications reside on a central server that you access through the Web—is the wave of the future. Instead of having your own software locally on your computer, you’ll get all your apps online. There are some examples of that already, such as the many online apps that Google offers. However, Indaba Music, an online collaboration Web site, is taking cloud computing to the recording space with the announcement today of a browser-based DAW, tentatively called Session Console 2.0, which is built on the Sun Microsystems Java/FX platform.

According to Indaba, this application, which is scheduled to be released in July, will allow you to record high quality audio, and will give you editing, looping, and mixing capabilities. An Indaba spokesperson told me that any audio hardware that works with your computer’s audio system will work with the software. This version will not have MIDI-sequencing capabilities, however.

In addition to working with the DAW through your browser, you’ll be able to drag a copy of the DAW to your desktop for working offline. The software will work with both Macs and PCs.

Indaba has been beta testing the software with a number of musical artists, including Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. The company previewed a video for the press with Cuomo talking about how much he likes working with the software. The gist of his presentation was that he doesn’t like complicated DAW software, and that the Indaba Console was really simple to use.

I’ll keep you apprised as more details about this application become available.

Avid has just announced Sibelius 6, the latest version of its notation software. The big highlight of version 6 is a feature called Magnetic Layout. When activated, it automatically positions score objects like dynamic and rehearsal marks and lyrics, the kinds of things that in the past (and in other notation programs) you’ve had to constantly re-adjust. I saw this feature demoed and I was very impressed. It promises to take a lot of the time and tedium out of putting a score together.

The Live Tempo feature is designed to let you control the tempo of playback the score from a MIDI controller or footpedal, or even from your computer’s keyboard. This allows you to “conduct” the playback, a capability that will be really helpful when performing with live musicians.

Also new to this release is the Sibelius Player, a sample playback engine which replaces the Kontakt Player that was used in earlier versions. It’s loaded with sounds from Garritan, AIR, and Tapspace, as well as a General MIDI instrument it comes effects like convolution reverb, chorus, EQ, and distortion that can be applied to individual parts.

ReWire support is also new to Sibelius 6, allowing Pro Tools or any other DAW to slave to Sibelius. So if you wanted to play back a score that was mostly MIDI tracks, but with a few actual audio files (a vocal, or maybe some real strings), too, slaving your DAW to Sibelius using ReWire would make that process easy.

Also new and cool is the Versions feature, which tracks changes by others to the score, so that, say you sent your score to an orchestrator, you could easily see the changes he or she put in. Versions will be useful in the classroom, as well.

The other big additions are keyboard and fretboard windows that allow you to see the notes in real time as Sibelius plays them, and also let you enter notes from them.

Sibelius 6 is available now, for an MSRP of $599 ($329 educational price). Upgrade pricing is $169 USD $129 (educational price). Check out the Sibelius Web site for more info.

On Saturday, Propellerhead Software introduced Record, a very impressive standalone audio recording program for Mac and Windows that can seamlessly integrate with Reason to become a fully featured and very powerful recording/MIDI sequencing environment. Rumors had been percolating about it on the Web for a while, but the company announced it officially at a series of Propellerhead Producers Conferences in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York, all of which took place on Saturday. Watch the video (part 1 and part 2) that I shot at the New York event.

My biggest headline about Record would be the incredibly impressive timestretching capabilities of the program. Propellerhead CEO Ernst Nathorst-Böös, who demoed Record, opened a song originally recorded at 140 BMP, and then sped it up to 160 and slowed it down to 113 as it played, with no audible artifacts. The crowded room—the event took place at Clinton Studios, a large commercial recording facility—broke into applause after Nathorst-Böös had navigated the song through its tempo changes. He then demonstrated how you can automate tempo changes, as well.

“The concept of recording stuff on a computer, from our perspective, which we like to think is the musician’s perspective,” said Nathorst-Böös. “It’s a little bit different from what’s out there today, a lot of which we think is designed from an engineer’s perspective.”

The mixer section of Record is an emulation of an SSL 9000K console, and includes the EQ, dynamics, and even the master bus compressor. There was an audible gasp and then applause from the gathered Reason users when the mixer screen was first shown.

Record’s editing features are designed for ease of use. It has a comping feature that appears really user-friendly and is similar in basic concept to those now included in Logic 8, Pro Tools 8, and Digital Performer 6.

As mentioned, when you run Record alongside Reason, the two programs integrate into a single production environment. You get the full MIDI recording functionality of Reason and its sequencer together with Record’s audio prowess. Reason’s sequencer tracks appear alongside Record’s audio tracks.

You also get Line 6 guitar- and bass-amp models and effects, and if you use a Line 6 hardware device (like a POD or audio interface), connected via USB to Record, you can access all of the models from that device in the software.

One area that may give pause to some users is Propellerhead’s decision to make Record a closed environment, that is, it will not support outside plug-in formats like Audio Units or VST. As a result, your plug-ins will be limited to those in Record, or Record and Reason if you’re working with both together.

Nathorst-Böös explained the decision by saying that by not having to support the outside formats, Propellerhead was able to make the system much more efficient for using its included effects (and instruments when you’re running in tandem with Reason). “It’s not that we don’t acknowledge that there’s all this cool stuff that you can use,” he told the crowd, “we figured we’d rather give you 30 or 40 channels of true, really good, mixer processing, and being able to use it on a computer you already have.”

And he demonstrated that capability by playing back a song from his MacBook Pro, and showing the huge amount of effects that were included on it (there were at least 50 different instances of effects on that song, and probably more). For situations where one wants to export a project out to another DAW, Record has an incredibly easy setup that lets you select the tracks you want to export, hit a button, and boom, it’s done—and all the tracks are automatically set to start at the beginning of the song, making syncing them in another host a breeze.

Record will ship on September 9th of this year (that’s 9/9/09 for you numerologists out there), and there is an almost fully functional public beta that is available now.

Oh, and one more thing, the street price for Record is $249 (there was another audible gasp from the crowd when that was revealed). Registered Reason users will be able to upgrade for $149. A bundle of Reason and Record will street for $499.

Okay, here goes a bit of a rant: I was doing a video edit recently, and I got so into what I was doing that I forgot to hit save for awhile and, wouldn’t you know it, my video editor crashed and I lost about 30 minutes of work. Not a catastrophe, but maddening nonetheless. Why do I bring this up? Because if my video-editor software had an auto-save feature, I would have lost no more than a few minutes of work instead of a half hour.

It got me to wondering, why don’t more DAWs, video editors, and other creative applications have auto-save options? It seems like such a no-brainer to me, and should be a basic feature common to all programs.

Kudos to Digidesign, because Pro Tools has a very useful auto-save feature, called Auto Backup, with which the user can setup how often an automatic copy of your file is made (or turn it off completely). Steinberg’s Cubase and Nuendo have such features, as does Cakewalk Sonar.

I know that some people don’t like auto-save. The complaint is that it can make the program slow down briefly when it’s saving. My response to that is: fine, if you want to work without a net, that’s your prerogative. Turning it on should be an option. Also, the feature should be designed so that it won’t save during a recording or playback (because that could cause a glitch).

Yes, we should all get in the habit of hitting Command + S (or Control +S on a PC) every time we do almost anything in a DAW, at least anything of significance. But no matter how diligent you are about saving, I’m willing to bet that there will be times when you get so into producing or playing or whatever you’re doing in the session that you forget to hit save and then…

I’m curious for your opinions: do you like auto-save features? Have you lost data due to the lack of an auto-save feature? Let me know what you think.

I caught John Scofield’s show at B.B. King’s in New York last night, in which the vaunted jazz guitarist played in support of his latest CD, Piety Street, which combines New Orleans music, blues, gospel and jazz. Scofield appeared with the band from the CD, which includes multitalented keyboardist/vocalist/guitarist John Cleary, legendary bassist George Porter Jr. (of Meters fame), and drummer Ricky Fataar (Bonnie Raitt, The Beach Boys).

In front of a packed house, Scofield and band came on with little fanfare and no opening act, and played a scintillating hour-and-a-half-plus set. Sco, playing his Ibanez semi-hollowbody into a Vox AC30 (and a ton of pedals) was fluid and skillful throughout, mixing bluesy inflections with his usual jazzy sense of melody and rhythm. He masterly blended in effects such as wah, tremolo, and even a looping pedal to many of his solos and fills.

The band stuck mostly to the material from the new CD, which is mainly reworkings of old gospel standards like “Something’s Got a Hold On Me” (which was a big song for the Reverend James Cleveland) and “Walk with Me.” Lead vocals were provided by the ultra-talented Cleary, whose New Orleans-influenced piano style and organ parts (he used a Nord Electro 73 through a Leslie, which sounded very B3-like) and vocals were stellar throughout.

Porter Jr., and Fataar provided a super-solid foundation as well as background vocals (Porter sang a couple of lead vocals, as well). I wished the drums were a little more prominent in the mix, but the playing was great.

Other highlights included a remake of the Ray Charles number, “I Don’t Need No Doctor” on which Clearly picked up a guitar and showed off his formidable abilities as a lead guitarist; and an old Hank Williams song “Angel of Death,” which Scofield opened with a haunting solo part and later did an amazing solo where he masterly injected counter rhythms. The whole set, which included two encores, was superb, and Scofield and the band appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Scofield has shown no hesitancy to experiment with other musical styles, and he’s done so again here with great success. The band will be touring into May. If you get a chance to go hear them, I highly recommend it. Great songs, great playing, great fun.

I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Béla Fleck and the Flecktones perform the second set on Friday night at the Blue Note in New York. Despite some iffy weather in New York, the club was completely sold out and totally packed.

The musicianship of the band was quite impressive, with Fleck on banjo (both acoustic and electric), Victor Wooten on bass, Future Man on Drumitar and drum set, and Jeff Coffin on sax and flute. The group mostly played material from their new CD, Jingle All the Way, which contains a selection of holiday songs arranged as only the Flecktones can. (For an interview with Fleck about the recording of this CD, check out this month’s EM Cast. To hear a a couple of audio clips from the CD, click here.)

The band’s virtuosic instrumental abilities were in full display in their Friday show. Although all four musicians were amazing, the most jaw-dropping musical moments of the evening belonged to Wooten. His facility on the bass was something to behold, whether he was playing tapped melodies while simultaneously holding down the bass line or rattling off rapid-fire funk and jazz licks. (For an interview with Wooten, check out the EM June 08 cover story, which also contains a video of Wooten playing bass in his studio.)

The band played a lengthy set, finishing off with its imaginative and incredibly complex arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” in which each day is in a different time signature and key.