My
"Secret Weapon"
The
time is way past due to salute the staff at Mark
of the Unicorn for their
"Insanely Great" tool for music and audio:
Digital
Performer. Pardon if I now
embarrass them a little on this single page. I've been a
user and soon after a beta tester since the time I first
heard of "Performer" (no "digital"), in the mid-80's. The
product's goal was rather modest at first: to provide a
convenient way to record, store, and edit MIDI performances,
using a Macintosh computer (had one of the first of those,
too.)
During the fifteen or so years
that have elapsed, this music tool has grown and expanded to
include just about any manipulation to audio or musical
theme you might conceive of, while forever trying to present
the musician with a smooth and elegant user interface, that
hides what you don't need, until you really NEED it! This is
a company that does listen to its beta testers and
user-base. Ideas and suggestions are seldom tossed into a
black hole. Given a bit of time, and repeats of similar
needs or modifications from a few others, you suddenly
discover the very annoying "feature" you most dreaded has
transmogrified (that's one "o", as in Moog -- NOT... ;-)
into a pretty fair representation of the very concept you
were trying to introduce. There are always several ways to
accomplish any task, leaving the exact method up to you. All
these are the marks not so much of unicorns but professional
human tools.
For digital HD audio, I find
I'm using DP more and more just for its audio side, MIDI and
notes and such don't always need be considered. It has
become my most common package for manipulating streams of
audio. Editing single elements I still find Sound
Designer II indispensable
(will DP's new pencil and destructive editing replace SD II?
-- stay tuned...!) That and the cornucopia of goodies inside
the Arboretum
family of plug-ins (Ionizer and Ray Gun -- wow) and snappy
stand-alone audio editing/manipulating software are not
leaving this studio anytime soon. Ditto the wonderful
Waves
audio refining and optimizing products. I'll comment on
these other neat packages more on another page at another
time, when I've had more time to work with them, and know
them in greater depth.
There are two reasons to
explain some of this to you. The first is the very simple
fact that some of you ASK me what I use, what I recommend,
for either beginning, or more experienced composers and
sound engineers and designers. Not much of a surprise to
those of you who have read any of the many interviews I've
given in the trades, like Keyboard magazine, Mix, EM, and
several others. Since I was cursed with having a chatterbox
"big mouth", and seldom try to hide my methods from anyone,
you'll get a frank answer from me about such stuff, with no
motive except that it's only right to spread the good word,
and if your art actually depends
on some bit of biz or another, it's a fairly thin thing to
start out with. It's what you do with and how you do with
that counts. We all ought at least have the chance to use
the best tool works available.
The other reason is just to
thank a great group of people, who only incidently make
somethnig I use all the time. For me, Digital Performer is
the one essential piece of software "equipment", as it has
been ever since my
first big Performer project,
the Peter
and the Wolf parody with
my Carnival
of the Animals, Part II.
done with Al Yankovic in 1988. That experience convinced me
this was the wave of the future, even when there was no
graphics note editing, no score views, no unified control
panels, a minimum of editing smart-tools, and certainly no
Midi Timepieces with lotsa polyphonic channels (I used a
JamBox), or digital audio to spoil you from ever going back
to those "good old days"...
Good
Old Days?! (Sorry, I already used the "not" joke above...)
In some ways it hurts to think of the 80's, editing on the
teensy screen of my old MacPlus, with the Levco accelerator
card that initially crashed Performer every two minutes or
less (yikes, it happened again, and all I did was
open a file...), which drove the MotU staff bonkers -- until
they solved it a couple of months later, and learned a lot
that benefited later versions in that process, a synergistic
(pardon me, Larry!)
process. I got to tackle the newer versions and sync with
the MotU Digital TimePiece just a year ago, on the
"Woundings" score. The program was rock solid then, showing
that those trials of using an early version to compose
"Clockwork Black" were behind me. A lotta RAM and a fast Mac
also help, as ought be no surprise.
Just so this doesn't seem all
one-sided, I do have reservations about the notation side of
DP, and will continue to use Coda's
massive Finale
for scores and initial composing for some time to come.
Several icons and the new cursors seem to have been designed
to confuse the mind on the former, and to hide from old eyes
using big monitors, for the latter. Somehow those items have
not yet gotten improvements. Must be with all the heavy code
that must go into such magic as Pure DSP, and the
interactive multi windowed environment. The audio graphics
window also is now too much a clone of ProTools, the very
things composers like me cringe about in that program are
now, alas, to be found in DP. But with the many alternative
ways you have to work, this is no real hardship.
If I mention the bad, let me
not forget the head programmer, Bennett, flying here into
the city at his own expense, just to spend an entire day
reworking DP 1.6 into something that was essential to
complete Clockwork Black, a few years back (all work had
ground to a halt and I was paralyzed, before he helped me.)
Jim and more recently Les have bailed me out of more absurd
binds than I dare recount, to you or to myself! Robert has
been a brick in supporting my often insouciant requests of
him and his company. I'm tickled to have slightly aided
Matthew (the Matthew mentioned at the bottom of all our
pages!) in becoming a part of MotU, and that's worked out so
damn well for both sides. (It also provides me with an
inside peek at tidbits of what goes on behind the scenes,
where a lot of interesting stuff is to be found.) How could
I not be a fan of this team? And now you certainly know this
is a prejudiced review, for many excellent
reasons.
Thank you, good people, and
carry on what you're doing. I'd hate to work in this field
without you, and hope after reading this, some other
musicians will be curious enough to try it out for
themselves. Of course by now there will be much new to
learn, but it all (mostly) makes sense, it sure does work,
and is a lot easier than those clumsy ways we used to do
things in that hazy, crazy, distant memory of... 1968...
1975... 1981... pick your "favorite" year...
--Wendy
Carlos
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