When a game studio requests gameplay underscore, it’s often best to provide several versions of the same loop so that they have the option have mixing in real time even if they don’t have the budget for a full adaptive/interactive score, so the game ends up with more music than the developer has actually commissioned. Here’s an example of how I did this on a recent project.
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I’ve been a part of the closed beta for Record, Propellerheads’ new software audio recording system which essentially adds live recording and better mixing to Reason, and now that the beta is open I can share some of my experiences.

Firstly, I really do like Reason although I do not use it as often as I once did, and I do agree with the opinion that its default darker bump in the low and low-mid range is better suited to dance and electronic music than most of what I do. Record has the same default bump. This is not a bad thing, it’s just part of the PH character. It can also be changed, if you avoid the mastering suite and work the EQ in an external rewired DAW.

Secondly, I am still not really sure what the target audience is for Record. I like it and it is fun to use — most software is not so fun to use, but Reason has always been fun, stable, and relatively lightweight. Record fits along the same lines. But there are many things lacking that prevent it from being considered a full DAW for commercial scoring: lack of plugin support and lack of video support being chief among them.

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I’ve posted a couple of articles on how to set up PLAY with multiple computers and audio interfaces in networked fashion, and on how to run PLAY standalone with Logic on the same machine. The latter article employed Soundflower, which is handy especially if you’re on a laptop out on the wild and don’t have big clunky metal things cabled together, but it seems a lot of people want to use the networked approach — cabling hardware interfaces — on a single desktop computer, which has some advantages over Soundflower and other software buffering approaches.

This basically entails cabling an audio out of one interface such that it connects to an audio in of the same interface. But there are some gotchas in making it work on a single computer that you don’t run into if you do this with multiple interfaces across multiple computers.

Gerald Berliner of More Human Than Human has put up some YouTube videos explaining how to set this up. Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B7F3CA4BF0FF6D1F

Creating loops involves some simple but important production techniques, and composition which does not draw attention to the loop point. Here are a couple of tricks and examples to make it work.

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I was asked how to run the EastWest Quantum Leap PLAY engine in standalone mode with Logic on the same computer. Below are the steps for doing so.

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Update: The post below is relevant only for Kontakt/Intakt versions of this instrument and does NOT apply to the current PLAY version.

A few weeks ago I posted the steps I took to get Choirs, WordBuilder, and Logic running together. That was on a G5 Mac, however — users of this software may know that since there is not yet a PLAY release of Choirs, Logic Pro on Mac Intel machines can’t run the same setup. Here’s how you can set this up on a Mac Intel machine, as a stopgap until a PLAY release becomes available.

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NOTE: The instructions below refer to a setup on a PPC (non-Intel) Mac — I added separate steps I took for Intel Macs here.

Setting up EWQL Symphonic Choirs with WordBuilder in Logic Studio is not as straightforward as doing the same in other DAW’s, mainly because of the way Logic handles routings, which is (imho, as someone who otherwise likes Logic) ridiculously complicated.

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In working on a minimalist piece, I needed to add a clean guitar sound similar to that of The Edge in “Where the Streets Have No Name” (where his signature sound is especially good compared to most of his other recordings).

The Edge has a very simple signal path in most cases, basically just a signal split into two different delays and into his amps. The delays are obviously set to match the tempo of the song, but are seldom exact beat-per-minute matches; they’re millisecond approximations that either push or pull the groove a bit instead of being right on top of it, so the digital delays that sync to BPM aren’t exactly what’s needed.

I stumbled across this site which has a detailed analysis of The Edge’s sounds on various songs, maybe it will be useful to someone else as well:

http://www.amnesta.net/edge_delay/

Finally, a quote from Bob Dylan about The Edge and his heavy use of delay: “Everybody’s going to remember your songs, it’s just that nobody’s gonna be able to play them.”

I decided that the best way to achieve a ‘human’ performance was for a human to play it. As a six-string electric bassist, I decided that I would prefer to just play these works myself rather than spend the many hours it would take to achieve an adequate MIDI performance.

So writes David J. Grossman, who transcribed various Bach works into midi files.

Getting the notes into a sequencer is not as challenging and as time-consuming as is creating a great sound from virtual instruments. Tweaking velocities, mod wheel expression, switching between patches or inserting the correct keyswitches, humanizing and quantizing and cutting to grooves, making tiny tempo variations — programming a musical interpretation to generate a realistic performance requires all of these, and this is before we even reach the production stage, where we deal with EQ, effects, and more.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been composing on a Studiologic SL-990 Pro controller. It’s a full 88-key controller with hammer action, meaning the keys respond like those of an acoustic piano. In fact, it seems to have actual hammers under the hood (I can hear them clicking if I listen closely and hit hard).

Here’s how it looks:

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