Blogcritics Author: Ed Driscoll

From Electric To Electronica: Les Paul, the Minimoog, and The Studio as Compositional Tool

Ed Driscoll — Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:21:30 EDT

A new book, new MP3 collection, and new software synthesizer patch chart the development of pop music and its tools from the 1950s into the 21st century.
Three recent releases, one in book form, the other software, and the third an MP3 nicely sum up the past, present, and future of pop music. Let's review them by the chronology of their subject matter. The Early Years Of Les Paul's Legacy One of the benefits of AMC's Mad Men series is that it reminds viewers that however badly...

The Joy Of Virtual Sets

Ed Driscoll — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:50:01 EST

Chromakey dramatically changed how recent Hollywood films look. It can do the same for much lower budget productions as well.
In the 1970s, when chromakey technology debuted, it was mainly used in television newsrooms, to project images into a monitor behind the local weatherman, allowing him to interact with animated maps, graphics, and scenes of the local community. In that role, chromakey did its job reasonably well, but when first used by Hollywood for television...

The Well-Tempered Christmas Tree

Ed Driscoll — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:08:01 EST

Serious musician on your Christmas list? Unlike fruitcake or socks, these items will get loads of use throughout the year.
What to get the professional or serious amateur musician for Christmas? Consider some of these gems:Since November of 2000, Propellerhead's Reason has been one of the best-selling software synthesizers and its graphical user interface is a big reason why. There are two big selling points: the combination of a stylized equipment rack into which...

Product Review: The Roland VG-99, The Arsenal Of Guitarocracy

Ed Driscoll — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:02:43 EDT

The guitar of the future is here, if you want it.
It’s awfully minor in the scope of global conflicts, but there’s a sort of ongoing tension between electric guitar players and musical equipment manufacturers. As I’ve written before, the middle-aged men who make up the bulk of the electric guitar market are typically buying reissues of the guitars that the heroes of their youth...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Podcast: Interview with Cakewalk CEO Greg Hendershott

Ed Driscoll — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 07:48:17 EDT

As I've written before, the past 25 years have seen a quiet revolution in home music recording, that's right in line with the growth of other "Army of Davids" technologies that dramatically empower individuals. In 1982, the breakthrough product that made home recording possible was the cassette four-track recorder. These weren't one half of the eight-track deck that you had in your '77 Chevy Vega; they used an ordinary stereo audio cassette, but played that cassette in only one direction, so that there were now four individual, synchronized tracks to record on. You could put a drum machine (another newly designed product) on one track, a bass guitar on another, an electric guitar on the third and a vocal on the fourth, and voila! Instant DIY song. (Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album was home-brewed using a cassette four-track machine.)But most musicians wanted to do more than that--and these days, companies such as Boston-based Cakewalk offer products that give the average home musician as many tracks as his PC's memory and hard drive will hold. Not to mention PC-based software synthesizers that are also infinitely more flexible than their 1980s counterparts. George Martin and Quincy Jones cost a lot more to hire, but the same basic technology they use in their recording studios is increasingly accessible to those recording home. Having launched in 1987, Cakewalk are currently celebrating their 20th year of business, and my interview with Greg Hendershott, Cakewalk's CEO, is an attempt to bridge the gap between those early days and now. Ideally, it will make a good overview to those new to PC-based recording, but dying to dip their toes into the water. It's 20 minutes long, 18.7 MB in size, and can be downloaded here, or via our Apple i-Tunes page. (No iPod required; virtually any PC can download and play an MP3.)

Abbey Road Keyboards And Vital Drums: Two New Tools For The Home Recordist

Ed Driscoll — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:09:26 EDT

Two new DVD-ROM packages, one a "refill" of samples for Propellerhead’s Reason 3.0 music creation software, and the other loops for Sony’s Acid music program (and Acid-compatible programs) demonstrate how far PC-based home recording has come. Propellerhead’s Abbey Road Keyboards samples seven instruments that have been in use in the world’s most famous recording studio since the days of the Beatles. Andy Babiuk’s extremely well-researched book titled Beatles Gear documents the drums, guitars and keyboards that John, Paul, George and Ringo personally owned. But Propellerhead’s Abbey Road Keyboards is a reminder that the Fab Four also had access to a variety of additional unique instruments as well, just by the nature of where they recorded. The instruments included in the Propellerhead set include a Steinway Upright, which the discs' accompanying 40-page booklet, written by vintage keyboard expert Mark Vail, says is called "The Mrs. Mills Piano" because of a popular 1950s British recording artist who used this instrument extensively. But the following decade, so did the Beatles: play a few staccato major chords on it, and you’ll immediately recall the opening to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". Mrs. Mills’ namesake piano was apparently also used on "Lady Madonna", and anytime the Beatles wanted a jangly honky tonk tack-hammer upright piano sound. Propellerhead’s set also includes samples of Abbey Road’s Challen Studio Piano, a warmer, darker sounding upright. And the Mannborg Harmonium, the original of which uses pedal-driven air pumps to generate sound. Also in the set is the Hammond RT-3; used in Abbey Road since the mid-1960s, it’s the classic Hammond B-3 organ’s big brother. If there’s a fog upon L.A., this is the instrument that’s generating it... For The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney recreated the opening notes he played on the Mellotron, on 1967’s "Strawberry Fields Forever".Those are the more traditional keyboards on the DVD. Things get a bit more exotic, beginning with the Mellotron M400, which powered some of the Beatles’ most iconic tunes from their classic Sgt. Pepper era, including "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", and "Strawberry Fields Forever", which many (including your humble narrator) feel is one of the Beatles’ crowning achievements as musicians and songwriters. The Abbey Road Keyboard collection also includes two instruments that rather stretch the definition of "keyboard", but are still fun nonetheless. There’s a Schiedmayer Celeste, one of the oldest instruments in Abbey Road, and a set of Tubular Bells, sampled from the same set that gave Mike Oldfield’s iconic 1970s album its name. They were also used on the Beatles’ "When I’m 64" and "You Never Give Me Your Money". Billed as "Abbey Road In A Box" (say, that phrase rings a tubular bell somewhere ...), in a nutshell, these are all beautiful recorded instruments, which Propellerhead wisely includes in both 24 and 16-bit samples. The instructions included with the two DVD set suggest using the more traditional 16-bit samples for laying down tracks, and then switch to the larger, more detailed 24-bit versions for the final mixdown. That’s a wise plan, as these 24-bit samples can load slowly and clog the RAM of even a fast PC. But boy, do they sound good. Vital Drums: Musical Building BlocksPropellerhead’s Abbey Road Keyboards will obviously appeal to those who wish to add a touch of the Fab Four to their recordings, and to add the final gloss to their productions with a variety of beautiful, and occasionally exotic traditional keyboards. In contrast, the loops contained within Sony’s new Vital Drums: The Vitale Collection are the building blocks of rock music. Traditionally, drums have been amongst the most important instruments in all forms of modern pop music, and simultaneously have long been the weak link of home recording. Most songwriters play guitar or keyboards-or both-so one way or another, they can also play bass, whether it’s a Fender electric bass or synthesized on a keyboard. But drumming requires its own skills -- it takes years of practice to serviceably coordinate all four limbs in time. And while guitarists and keyboardists can record their instruments quietly with headphones and practice amps, recording a full drum kit at three or four in the morning rarely makes your neighbors happy! Beginning in the early 1980s, drum machines proved to be one solution. But the first drum machines were thin and pathetic sounding compared to a traditional acoustic kit. Used deliberately as an effect, as Phil Collins famously did at the start of "In The Air Tonight", they could be extremely effective, especially in contrast to well-recorded real drums. And while drum machines have made remarkable strides, it’s still tough to avoid a mechanical-sounding rhythm track. While Sonic Foundry’s Acid Loops, a brand now owned by Sony, have recorded collections containing just about every key rock, pop and jazz instrument, some of their best collections have focused on drums and percussion. To record these CD-ROMs (and lately, DVD-ROMs), a professional drummer is brought into the recording studio, and perform a variety of patterns and styles. His recordings are then cut into one or two bar patterns as Acid loops, the tempos of which will sync perfectly to any recording program compatible with Acid loops. Previous collections of drums and percussion for Acid loops have featured such noticeable drummers such as Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac; Steve Ferrone, who’s played with Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Duran Duran, and a host of other superstar bands; and Tony Brock, who has backed Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, and Roy Orbison. It’s a nice bit of synchronicity that Sony’s new Vital Drums collection of patterns comes on two DVDs, each jammed with loops recorded in 24-bit stereo. Because it’s the work of two drummers: Joe Vitale, and his son Joe, Jr. The senior Vitale has played with numerous superstar artists, including The Eagles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and John Lennon. His drumming has also given Joe Walsh’s "Rocky Mountain Way" its languid shuffle, and the disc includes eight loops of various lengths filed under "Rocky Mountain Grooves", and a variety of other non-explicitly-named shuffles, amongst the mostly rock-oriented drumming found here. The Rocky Mountain Grooves are labeled as being recorded at 80 beats per minute, which is an indication that while they can always be used in faster-tempo songs, they may perform strangely at slower tempos. Which is why most of kits in the loop collection were recorded playing loops in tempos of 80, 90, 100 and 120 BPM. His son has also drummed with Walsh, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and played with Stephen Stills on his solo tours. As they told an interviewer, they each recorded many of the same patterns, then picked who played his track better for the collection. The drums on the Vitale collection (which also includes a fun making-of video) are recorded fairly dry, which is a good thing, as it’s much easier to add more reverb than it is to remove it. And different songs call for different reverbs. There are plenty of one-shot hits of each drum element to customize the included patterns and fills, and build your own. Drums For The Singer-SongwriterIn the booklet that accompanies the discs, Joe Vitale, Sr. tells his interviewer, "There are artists out there who need the Bill Bruford and Simon Phillips and fusion drummer sounds, but with most singer-songwriters, it’s pretty basic and fundamental." If that sounds like you, this is a terrific collection of loops played and recorded with remarkable tightness and clarity to add to your sonic palette.

Book Reviews: Rock & Roll Film Encyclopedia, The Techniques Of Film And Video Editing, Special Effects: The History And Technique, After Effects In Production

Ed Driscoll — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:28:56 EDT

Four recent books shed new light on film and television productions. So let's start with the book that's arguably the most fun of the bunch: John Kenneth Muir's new Rock & Roll Film Encyclopedia gives a genre of movies that have long been something of a black sheep amongst film critics their due. The expected biggies are here, including the Beatles' movies, the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same, the Who's The Kids Are Alright, and Prince's Purple Rain. But for a book with "Encyclopedia" in its title, it's frustrating that there are a number of lesser known rock movies that just don't appear.I would have loved to have seen a listing for Jayne Mansfield's The Girl Can't Help It from 1956, with appearances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, and Eddie Cochrane, a film the Beatles were tremendous fans of. And speaking of which, why not 1962's It's Trad, Dad!, which launched Richard Lester's career as a movie director and was a sort of dry run for A Hard Day's Night? Or 1974's Stardust, which featured rocker David Essex, along with Ringo Star in a supporting role, who nearly stole the film right out from under him. With another legendary drummer, the Who's Keith Moon, also in a minor role, the film, which pops up on cable movie channels from time to time, is well worth checking out. Also missing is Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary 1966 film Blowup, which helped first define Britain's mod era and then three decades later Austin Powers, and featured a knockout performance by the Yardbirds during the brief period the group had both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page on dueling lead guitars. Still, what's in the book is quite good, and for fans of this genre (and who isn't?), it's well worth a read. Just don't confuse The Rock & Roll Film Encyclopedia with one of Leonard Maltin's much more thorough movie encyclopedias. When The Shooting StopsBeginning with Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, which took its lead from the French New Wave movies of the day, one area where rock movies dramatically changed Hollywood was in their use of increasingly rapid-fire editing. That's the subject of Ken Dancyger's The Techniques Of Film And Video Editing, a scholarly but highly readable look at how editing has evolved over a century of moviemaking. As audiences have gotten more sophisticated, movie directors and editors have gotten much more comfortable increasing the pace of editing. And television, particularly beginning with the launch of MTV in the early 1980s, has only quickened the editing pace tenfold. The Techniques Of Film And Video Editing is a great book for both those who are fans of the movies in general, and those who wish to learn the basics to improve the editing of their college film projects, commercial video productions, or the quality of their YouTube clips. From The Earth To the Coffee TableIn a way, the same can be said of Richard Rickitt's Special Effects: The History And Technique, which in contrast to the handy portable paperback size of The Techniques Of Film And Video Editing, is a hefty hardcover coffee table edition. It's profusely illustrated with plenty of color movie stills, with a foreword from special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen. Rickitt's book covers the history of special effects from their earliest days in movies such as George Melie's A Trip to the Moon to mid-'50s Hollywood blockbusters like War of the Worlds and Forbidden Planet. And then the double-barreled technological revolution of and Star Wars, and beyond. An Army of RoddenberriesAs hinted by its cover sleeve, which features Gollum from Peter Jackson's recent Lord of the Rings trilogy, Rickitt's Special Effects: The History And Technique explores the movie industry's effects techniques up to mid-'naughts', and thus covers the ongoing digital era in special effects which began about twenty years ago. The same computer technology that empowered digital effects in Hollywood can now empower do it yourself productions. I'd call it an "Army of Davids," but I think that title may have already been taken. Or as Jason Apuzzo of the Libertas film blog wrote a few months ago, "We live in an era in which there may be better - and cheaper - film equipment available at your local Apple Store or Fry's Electronics than is available at your film school (or at your Hollywood studio, frankly)." That's where books such as Trish & Chris Meyers' After Effects In Production come into play. While their book has been on the marketplace for a few years, it demonstrating how Adobe's After Effects program can create professional-quality video graphics -- because it has created professional-quality graphics for the Meyers' big name clients -- making it an inspiration for anyone who wants to add a network TV polish to projects shot on a Diet Coke budget. England's 18 Doughty Street Website is producing something like 20 or 30 hours of live television a week - for the Internet. There are fan-produced Star Trek and Star Wars homages shot on shoestring budgets (at least in contrast to what Hollywood spends on catering alone) on YouTube with effects that would have made Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas weep only a few decades ago. As more and more amateur video makers and bloggers roll their own videos for sites such as YouTube and Google video, all of the above books serve two purposes. They're well worth reading to study the craftsmanship that's been built up over decades of experimentation in film, then television, and now digital video. They illustrate how high those craftsmen have raised the bar. High, but it's not insurmountable; hopefully these books will inspire a whole new group of artists. Their efforts are more likely to show up on the Internet than in movie theaters, but at least they'll be out there. And who knows? Maybe in a decade or two, we'll be studying the pioneering craftsmen at the dawn of the YouTube era.

Book Review: Gibson Guitars: Ted McCarty's Golden Era 1948-1966 Showcases Guitar's History

Ed Driscoll — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:39:24 EDT

If you asked the average fan of rock and roll who the two most important pioneers in electric guitar design were, he'd probably tell you Leo Fender and Les Paul. And while those two men certainly deserve their legendary status, there's a third name that should be added to the list: Ted McCarty. Ted McCarty (1909-2001) was a man who shunned the spotlight, letting his company's craftsmanship do the talking instead. McCarty was the CEO of Gibson, Inc. during its golden era, from 1948 to 1966, when McCarty left the company. As an executive McCarty was very much a hands-on engineer. However, unlike Leo and Les, he largely shied away from the limelight, which has resulted in his lower historical profile. A new book published by Hal Leonard spotlights the great Gibson guitars of the 1950s, and aims to restore McCarty's name and reputation. Gibson Guitars: Ted McCarty's Golden Era 1948-1966 by author/collector Gil Hembree (with a foreword by pickup designer Seymour Duncan) sets out to change that, and through interviews Hembree conducted with former Gibson employees of the era, fellow collectors, and with McCarty himself before his death at age 91 in 2001, does a remarkable job. Designing The Les PaulMost musical historians who researched the origins of Gibson's first solidbody electric guitar have come to the conclusion that the bulk of the design work on the instrument was done by McCarty and his engineers before presenting the instrument to Les for an endorsement deal. (Note that Les Paul himself tells a slightly different version of this tale. In either case, such an instrument wouldn't exist without Les's own pioneering efforts in solidbody guitar designs in the mid-1930s.) In Gibson Guitars, Hembree tells an amusing story of McCarty acquiring one of the first mass-produced Fender Telecaster solidbody electric guitars in 1951. After analyzing the instrument, McCarty said that he and his engineers thought that Fender's choice of a bolt-on neck was "infamy, as far as we were concerned" (and ironically, the core original members of the Les Paul Internet Forum frequently use similar language over half a century later). Nonetheless, McCarty recognized a musical revolution when he heard and saw one, and immediately decided "We weren't going to let him" -- Leo Fender -- "have the entire market". McCarty then asked his engineers to design a competing instrument that would be the first solidbody electric guitar from Gibson. It would take the basic concepts of the Telecaster -- two electric pickups, a thin solid body to cut down on feedback, with one cutaway for access to the higher frets on the neck, but with its binding, glued-in set neck, and especially its violin-like carved top, added to it the craftsmanship and refinement that Gibson was known for. The two competing designs would also strongly reflect the musical tastes of their builders. Leo Fender was a country music fan who built instruments for the burgeoning West Coast country scene; his goal was to provide to guitarists some of the same trebly tones as pedal steel players. But Ted McCarty was in love with warm chordal jazz guitarists, and wanted a much mellower-toned instrument, but with longer sustain. It was he who suggested mahogany for the body for its warmth and only a thin maple cap to add some treble and high-end. (In the 1950s, the "Black Beauty" Les Paul Custom's body was all mahogany.)The result was an instant classic; all it took was Les Paul and Mary Ford to play the instruments each week on their television series, for sales to take off. It was Les who suggested his namesake instrument's first color schemes -- gold for what would eventually be dubbed the "Standard" Les Paul model, and tuxedo or piano-style black for the afore-mentioned Custom. Eventually, another innovation was added to the guitar, the humbucking pickup, designed by Seth Lover, one of over 1000 employees McCarty would have on Gibson's payroll at the height of his period with the company. (Seth Lover's test bed Les Paul with his first humbuckers graces the cover of Gibson Guitars.) Today, original "Patent Applied For" pickups, as Lover's invention would become universally known fetch well over a thousand dollars each. Lover and McCarty had no way of knowing it, but they had created what a decade or so later, would become the sound of hard rock. In the mid-1960s, Eric Clapton mated a PAF-equipped Les Paul with an early Marshall amplifier, and rock and roll would never be the same. In the 1950s though, amplifier distortion was largely still a bug, not a feature. And Lover's PAF-pickup, played cleanly, provided the warm mellow tones that McCarty favored, but its dual-coil design cancelled virtually all of the hum an electric guitar's single-coil pickups could generate, particularly around fluorescent lights. Perhaps in an effort to both showcase this innovation, and keep pace with Fender's landmark Stratocaster design, beginning in 1957, the Les Paul Custom had three humbucking pickups, encased in gleaming gold-plated steel covers. A year later, the "Standard" Les Paul (now also PAF-equipped) saw its gold body color retired and replaced with Gibson's traditional sunburst finish, and underneath, (usually) carefully bookmatched maple tops, often with dramatic "tiger-striped" grain patterns. One reason why this change occurred was Gibson's effort to jumpstart what, oddly enough, had become a poor-selling model. There are numerous theories offered why, ranging from the undesirability of the darker-toned humbucking pickups amongst players who preferred the twangy Fender single-coil sounds, to declining ratings of Les and Mary's TV series, as rock and roll began its ascension. For whatever reason though, from 1958 to 1960, sales of Les Pauls declined precipitously, to an average of about 600 per year. Eventually, its body style would be retired after the 1960 model year. It would take the rediscovery of the guitar as a blues and hard rock instrument by Eric Clapton in England, and Mike Bloomfield in the US, both in the mid-1960s, to revitalize interest, resulting in Gibson reintroducing the model in 1968, where its remained an iconic best-seller, since. By then, McCarty had left Gibson, but his legacy remains secure: he not only spearheaded the design of the Les Paul, but also the ES-335 semi-sold body guitar. Hembree notes that the 335 was McCarty's personal favorite design, both because he virtually single-handedly spearheaded its design, and because its tone was mellower than the solidbody Les Pauls and (especially) Fender guitars. McCarty's Unique, Diverse Product LineBut McCarty was far from only a designer. As a result of his business acumen, Gibson's ability to combine a diverse product line with extremely high quality craftsmanship was unique amongst guitar manufacturers. Fender made great electrics and amps, but mediocre acoustic guitars, and Martin was a manufacturer of magnificent acoustics, but not of solidbody electrics. As Hembree notes, Gibson produced not just landmark solidbody guitars, but beautiful acoustic instruments. And extremely serviceable amps. And banjos. And mandolins. That's a testament both the craftsmanship of his employees, but also their boss, who wouldn't allow poorly manufactured products to leave Gibson's Parsons Street Michigan assembly line. Gil Hembree's Gibson Guitars: Ted McCarty's Golden Era is an extremely well-researched, heavily illustrated, and highly readable book, recommended to both musicians and fans, which goes far to restoring the name of a forgotten musical pioneer.

Return To Jupiter, A Look at the Jupiter-8 Synthesizer

Ed Driscoll — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:51:23 EDT

Many of today's musicians have probably forgotten the speed at which technology progressed in the early 1980s. Analog synthesizers went from being clunky, hard to tune devices with spaghetti-strands of patch cables to sleek, self-contained boxes that anyone, with a little practice, could get some remarkable sounds out of. A key driving force beyond this development was Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of Roland Corporation. In addition to advancing keyboard synths in general, Kakehashi also spearheaded the development of the portable drum machine and the guitar synthesizer. But one of Roland's best selling products of the time was their classic Jupiter-8 keyboard, produced from 1981 to 1984, and played by musicians ranging from Howard Jones to Jan Hammer to even Elvis Costello. It's recently been recreated in software synthesizer form by France's Arturia, their latest in a growing line of software versions of classic synths. Designed to work in PC and Mac formats as a standalone product, or synced to most digital audio workstations via RTAS, VST, and AU, Arturia's software reissue version of Roland's legendary Jupiter-8 synthesizer has some great sounds built into it. The unit ships with over 400 presets, and a programmable GUI which beautifully recreates the original Jupiter-8's hardware interface. The Jupiter-8 was noted for its wide range of sounds, from the expected fat analog tones, to more crystalline sounds that foreshadow Yamaha's DX-7, whose digital tones would supplant the Jupiter-8's dominance in the mid-1980s. There are also loads of interesting percussion effects, including snare and bass hits and even tribal-sounding sequences. Fun With Arpeggiation And then there's the Jupiter-8V's arpeggiator. Surprisingly, considering what a fun and useful sonic tool it is, there don't seem to be enough software synths that come equipped with arpeggiators. And even in the mid-1980s, when the Jupiter-8 was revised by Roland as first the Super Jupiter and later the JX-8P (inside a case whose aesthetics were clearly DX-7 inspired), that feature was inexplicably left off. During his Miami Vice days, Jan Hammer remarked to Keyboard magazine in September of 1985, "I'm not going to touch another Jupiter until they put the random arpeggiator back in. That's one of the most amazing tools of the last decade". Well, it's back; the Jupiter-8V's arpeggiator includes parameters for up, down, up and down and random, and over one to four octaves. In fact, it's a better version than the arpeggiator that the Jupiter-8 was originally equipped with, as its tempo can be controlled two ways: manually, or synced to the tempo of a track, when the unit is employed as a VST-compatible synthesizer in a digital audio workstation (DAW) program. Who's A Good Candidate For Jupiter? Apparently, a number of Arturia's software synths are notorious for their high CPU loads, and unfortunately, the Jupiter-8V is no exception, frequently generating a 20 percent CPU load on Cakewalk Sonar's RAM usage meter. (My test PC, built by Sweetwater, is a dual core Intel with two gigs of RAM, incidentally.) Many DAW programs have built-in "Freeze" functions for MIDI synth tracks to reduce CPU loads; the Jupiter-8V is a good candidate for this feature. So who is a good candidate for the Jupiter-8V itself? This isn't a product I'd recommend to beginners -- Propellerhead's Reason remains probably the easiest and most versatile software synth right out of the box. And Zero-G's Nostalgia contains a much broader cross-section of vintage synthesizers, though it lacks an arpeggiator. But if you owned one of the original Jupiter-8s and want to experience the joys of its analog sounds without the temperamental qualities of a 25-year old piece of hardware, or enjoy recreating the sounds of the early 1980s, then this is the instrument for you.

Book Review: The Making of Star Wars by J.W. Rinzler

Ed Driscoll — Wed, 30 May 2007 05:04:11 EDT

How The Force Was WonAt the beginning of the 1976 novelization of the Star Wars screenplay, Princess Leia says, "They were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Naturally, they became heroes."God knows, George Lucas was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If anybody lacked the necessary skills with actors and dialogue to be a successful director, it was him. Harrison Ford shouted to him while filming Star Wars, after umpteen takes of dialogue bursting with technobable, "You can type this s**t, George, but you sure can't say it." Or, as James Lileks recently wrote, Star Wars' dialogue "revealed its author to be unaware of the actual process of speech as practiced by most humans" -- in this or any other galaxy. While directors and writers blessed with less-than-perfect skills have survived during Hollywood's fat years, the seventies was the worst decade to be making movies in Hollywood since D.W. Griffith retired, something that Michael Medved once noted, "In 1965, the year before [Jack Valenti] left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million."And yet, somehow, Lucas managed to find -- and I apologize for the hoary old showbiz cliche -- the proverbial "lightning in a bottle." The end result not only made Lucas himself a millionaire many times over and seeded both his own production company and special effects house, it also transformed Hollywood in the process. And by transformed, I mean saved. Empire BuildingOf course, like any decent film, it's a miracle that Star Wars is as good as it is. It's an even bigger miracle that it got made in the first place. J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars is that story. It's a look back to those heady days of 1977, when Star Wars seemed astonishingly fresh and new. In other words, before the sequels and prequels, before Jar-Jar, even before the Ewoks. Rinzler describes how Lucas first assembled his story out of Hollywood serials, sci-fi pulp, and mystical Japanese samurai movies, then created the original concepts of what his characters should look like, and then assembled his crew. Flipping through Ralph McQuarrie's magnificent pre-production paintings, which are reproduced copiously in The Making of Star Wars, it's possible to say that he's the film production's biggest unsung hero. Lucas's early scripts were a pile of gobbledygook (and no one would confuse his final shooting script with Ben Hecht's). But McQuarrie's paintings so impressed the brass at 20th Century Fox that, while the film's script may be incomprehensible, if we just make it look like these paintings, we'll have a movie that easily looks as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey, or at a minimum, the first two of our own Planet Of The Apes movies. So why not give the tyro American Graffiti kid, who made a ton of money for Universal with his low-budget, hot rod flick a shot at his follow-up? Besides, his rookie THX-1138 movie looked pretty amazing, and he shot that for even less money than Graffiti.And of course, while his role was more obvious, the other secret ingredient to Lucas's success was John Williams. 2001 had used classical music, but amongst its Strauss waltzes were big honking slabs of downer modernist 20th-century noise by Gyorgy Ligeti. In contrast, Williams' Star Wars score did much to create a feeling of grandeur amongst some very stock characters in a souped-up Republic Serial environment. If Lucas had gone with an all-electronic score, or more 20th-century classical 12-tone noise, the results would have been disastrous. Designing The Dykstraflex In The Making of Star Wars, Rinzler quotes an observation by John Dykstra (who would become a near-household name thanks to Star Wars) as spotting the flaw in previous science fiction movies. While shooting on real sets with actors, the cameraman can pan, and zoom, introducing tons of kinetic motion and excitement. But once the film cuts to the exterior of the spaceship, almost invariably, the camera almost invariably becomes nearly stationary, Dykstra noted. In the past, this was necessary due to the prior limits of the compositing techniques to layer the typical elements of special effects shots: a spaceship or two, a planet, and stars. But after well over a quarter century of this technique by Hollywood, moviegoers knew subliminally that whatever they were watching, it was somehow phony. So Dykstra and the rest of the ILM crew began to assemble the first computer-controlled motion control camera. Because it could repeat its moves, the elements necessary to compose a shot could be created by the camera itself rather than by hand. The result was that for the first time, miniature shots began to have nearly the same tremendous freedom of movement that a cameraman had while shooting on a set or on location. That innovation would pay off big time for the film's third act, the Rebel's assault on the Death Star. Previous blockbuster science fiction films had delivered some amazing pyrotechnics, such as the destruction of Altair IV and its ancient civilization in Forbidden Planet, the Star Gate in 2001, and, even, on a much lesser scale, the car chase between Man and Robot in Lucas's own THX-1138. But the Death Star sequence was the first time that the same kinetic energy achieved within the typical Hollywood car chase or aerial dogfight sequence could be accomplished with miniature spaceships. A New HopeBut perhaps the real revolution within Star Wars is what happened after the Death Star exploded. It seemed like the first time the movie industry had presented its audience with both an escapist movie set in a heretofore unexplored world (or galaxy in Star Wars' case) and an unambiguously happy ending, since about 1968, something that James Lileks mentioned in his Strib encomium to Star Wars' 30th anniversary, "And what an ending, eh? Han Solo -- Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last -- conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force -- which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics -- and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes." After a generation of movies with tortured antiheroes who couldn't order a sandwich without making A Statement, it seemed remarkably fresh. If you read a tribute to the seventies movie brats such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, you'd believe that Star Wars crippled the movie industry's near permanent ability to tell dark, edgy, downer stories. (Martin Scorsese has always seemed particularly bitter about how the one-two punch of Rocky and Star Wars ruined Hollywood.) But in one sense, Lucas's film simply returned the industry, at least for a time, to what it once did effortlessly --creating big, escapist movies designed to appeal to a mass audience. Every once in a while, the movie industry seems to collectively forget that it must appeal to a mass audience looking to be entertained if it wishes to survive. To coin a phrase, Star Wars gave the industry A New Hope for survival. The Making Of Star Wars is an engrossing look back at how George Lucas -- a man at the wrong place and the wrong time--managed to, perhaps unwittingly, put all of the pieces together.