Chordspace is a tool that lays out a palette of chords in 2D space, and allows those chords to be played by either mouse clicks or MIDI input (it’s a VSTi plugin). While you would rarely want to pound a bunch of block chords in a recording, the value here is in quickly exploring the space of chord progressions. The layout is inspired by jazz theory, and I was amazed at how quickly I derived interesting chord progressions just by clicking around with the mouse. Try it out, it’s free. Also I always give bonus points for a pretty-looking UI.

Chordspace Playa also allows rapid exploration of chords, but goes one step further and allows part of the keyboard to manipulate the "current scale" and the "current chord" while the other portion of the keyboard plays a melody that is constrained and modified according to the left-hand (chord/scale) state. A novel way to explore melodies and chord progressions, and also a great tool for someone who isn’t an experienced keyboard player to get some experience playing interesting solos (since scale constraints can get you more sonic complexity for a given amount of finger dexterity, for example by mapping all the white keys to an interesting scale that changes with the state of the left hand). Reminiscent, incidentally, of the somewhat-forgotten Hotz Box, a similar tool that was ahead of its time when it came out in the ’80s.

Tonespace is another creative chord exploration tool, with a very different feel and set of inputs and outputs than the Chordspace products, leading to a different exploration vibe. Interesting options for routing MIDI and mouse input, and a variety of different layout options, all inspired by different theoretical frameworks for harmony analysis.

VSTNotesXL is probably the most powerful example of a series of very simple VST plugins that let you type notes into a text box. A simple idea, but powerful and important: the idea of "take accurate notes during sessions and never lose them" has been reiterated since the dawn of the analog recording area, and we certainly should be making this easier with digital tools. VSTNotesXL in particular has two particularly interesting features: the ability to embed images, and the ability to "turn pages" through MIDI automation. Embed performance notes, chords, etc. I think there is a powerful set of features still waiting to be developed in this area of attaching metadata, thoughts, and notes to tracks and settings.

VSTNotesXL costs $17; there are several simpler plugins that let you attach text to a track which are free: TrackPad, NotePad, VSTNotes, and DXPad.

Songframe is a "song development toolkit": it’s not a DAW or a multitrack environment (though it contains elements of a traditional DAW) or a tool for producing finished music, but rather a tool for operating on music at the level that songwriters actually think. It uses constructs like verses and choruses and chords that are surprisingly lacking in modern multitrack environments. This is a unique product that I think will be the first of many products to address song creation, not just recording.

Synfire is a “music prototyping” environment, generally organized around MIDI sequencing, but bringing in a lot of smart concepts around harmony and phrasing. Even seeing chord progressions tightly integrated into a MIDI editor is refreshing: though I’m not sure I’m ready to dive in and make this my prototyping tool of choice, this type of product is a significant step toward bringing the way (many) musicians think together with the tools we use. This is also the reason I put Songframe and Songsmith on this list; musicians think a lot about chords, so isn’t it surprising how little chords are represented in standard DAW software?

Harmony Navigator is a tool for exploring harmonic progressions with some intelligent guidance based on the statistics of harmony. It’s somewhere between the ChordSpace products I discuss above ndash; which are really “live” tools intended for interactive prototyping ndash; and something like Songframe, which is really a songwriting environment that’s a little closer to a DAW. Harmony Navigator also has some automatic accompaniment features reminiscent of Band-in-a-Box, since after all you do need to hear chords played in a meaningful way in order to explore them.

So far I’ve been more excited about the simpler tools offered by ChordSpace than the rather heavyweight tools form Cognitone, but I think all of these products suggest an exciting trend toward integrating chords as a core representation in computer music, and it will be very exciting to see which of these features eventually make their way into major DAW products.

GTG Micro Keyboards is just a really simple VST plugin that highlights MIDI input on a visual keyboard as it pass through. This is not a profoundly new idea, but I highlight it here as an example of a slick and portable way of doing it, and also as a hint of what may be an interesting and deep area: visualizing symbolic music for education and insight in the context of home studio software. While there is a huge set of plugins for spectral visualization, there really isn’t much beyond the traditional piano roll for visualizing music at the notes/chords level. This could be an exciting new area: what could you learn from sitting back in your studio and "watching" your track at a musical level while you listen?

Auricula provides a series of plugins that manipulates your sound in a variety of ways, then "quizzes" you by asking you what manipulations it made. The goal is to train your "producer’s ear" to recognize different types of audio manipulations. They have modules for EQ manipulations, dynamics manipulations, distortion, etc. I think it’s genius; I’m always jealous of my bandmates who have trained producer’s ears and can pick out the frequency range of a .5dB boost, etc. I wish they had VST versions of these products in addition to the AU versions.

We’ve had all sorts of samplers for decades, and we’re just starting to open up the possibilities for vocal modeling (see below). While it’s obviously not possible to provide vocal sample libraries for songs that haven’t been written yet, Liquid Adlibs finds a clever intermediate: it’s a sample library full of “ooh’s” and “woah’s”, with enough flexibility and programmability to let you find unique and appropriate uses in your own music. At the very least, a really cool prototyping tool if you don’t have a team of background singers in your home studio.

Quantum Leap Voices of Passion provides similar functionality.

While there are lots of synthesizers out there with significant customizability, SynthEdit takes this idea one step further by letting end-users (who aren’t C++ experts) actually edit and export a set of synthesizer parameters as a VST plugin. Of course there is some amount of flexibility and some set of limitations built into the editor, so the difference between this and some other synthesizer with a lot of dials might be subtle if you haven’t worked with VST plugins before. But I think the idea of actually exporting a re-usable, standalone plugin is really clever and could become a new trend, especially if hardware VST players (see below) become more ubiquitous.

Plogue Bidule is another interesting option in this space that does everything but allow exporting of plugins. It’s an extremely modular synthesizer design environment that allows modeling from a physical level and/or modular combinations of existing VST plugins. While you could achieve a lot of this in other environments, Bidule presents a simplified UI that makes this type of design much easier than in a complete multitrack hosting environment.

The problem of automatic transcription (i.e., converting audio to MIDI) is still somewhat open. There are products that do this (see below), but none of them work all the time. TwelveKeys is an interesting intermediate that isn’t an automatic transcription assistant, but rather a UI and set of analysis tools to help the user transcribe audio. This is indicative of a generally interesting approach to problems that computers aren’t quite ready to solve yet: keep the user in the loop, but give them some algorithmic help. This is also potentially a valuable tool that lets you improve your transcription and listening skills, which will always have value for practicing musicians, but also “get the job done” faster than you might without any computer assistance.

VocalLab AU (an AU plugin) is, at its core, a pitch-tracker: it tracks the fundamental frequency of its input and plots it. But by providing a very simple interface, the authors (Laidman and Katsura) have pitched it as a vocal trainer. And while it’s far from a singing course, I think it actually could be a very valuable tool to help singers better understand the pitches that are actually coming out of their mouths. It also operates on the level of fairly raw frequencies, rather than a musical score, which means it’s likely quite reliable, since in general we’re good at extracting frequencies from audio but not so good at converting those frequencies to nice clean musical scores.

Crowd Chamber is a VST plugin that processes audio through a simulated auditory scene with a customizable set of virtual audience members, intended to make sounds - e.g. applause - sound huge and stadium-like. Some of the demos are awesome, some sound like this is just glorified reverb, but I think the idea and the UI are really clever. I would be interested to see something like this packaged as a synthesizer - rather than a processing plugin - to create crowds from scratch.

This series of plugins from Waves encapsulates basic functionality that is anything but new and exciting: EQ, compression, some basic effects. But what’s exciting here – and what I think will signal the beginning of a new trend – is that instead of exposing exactly the same controls that would have been exposed on an analog EQ box, compressor, etc., these plugins expose a human-selected set of knobs that actually map to some complex relationship among the underlying parameters. The “human” in this case is famed producer Tony Maserati, and I expect this type of “signature series” plugin will be a common – and useful – packaging in the future. The idea is to expose precisely the most intuitive and useful parameter set given the flexibility in the underlying system, and who would know better than an experienced producer what that useful set it?

Though I’ve always been cynical about other “signature series” equipment, I think this is a fantastic idea. Why should the parameterizations we use on our digital equipment be defined by the parameterizations that were easy to expose on an analog box?

Tank-FX is a Web service where you upload an audio file and get back a reverb’d version of that file. Why is that interesting? Because it’s not doing the reverb in software, it’s playing it out a speaker in Germany, letting it bounce around a concrete chamber, and recording the sound through a mic. This suggests a whole new world of audio processing models, where physical elements that you don’t have physical access to can be part of your signal chain. Furthermore, this is among a small class of pseudo-real-time effect-by-Web-service systems, which is a new and potentially interesting business/deployment model for audio processing.

Band in a Box is an automatic accompaniment tool: in short, you type in chords and specify a musical style, and it generates a MIDI arrangement. Band in a Box has been around forever, and it is in fact part of a larger class of style-based, chord-programmable automatic accompaniment systems. But it’s also far and away the best and most comprehensive of those system, so I’d really put it in a space by itself.

It has applications from songwriting to prototyping to arrangement to live backing music. The quality of their audio – particularly for backing music applications, where the lack of complete control and ownership may be less of an issue than for songwriting and studio applications – has gotten pretty incredible too, further pushing Band in a Box into its role as the definite automatic accompaniment tool. Users frequently criticize its somewhat outdated UI, but no one disagrees that it is the definitive leader in the space, and even musical elitists have come to terms with the fact that there are numerous applications for automatic accompaniment, none of which amounts to replacing musicians.

Songsmith automatically generates accompaniment for vocal melodies, and lets users explore possible accompaniments using simple interactions. Its goals are two-fold: give novices a taste of songwriting, and give songwriters a quick way to play around with new songs or spark new chord ideas.

In the interest of full disclosure, I poured several months of my life into Songsmith. Which is why I won’t go into too much detail here.

BallSequencer is a VSTi plugin that is based on the metaphor of balls bouncing around in a virtual room. The position of the balls gets mapped to MIDI cc’s, allowing a novel and intuitive way to create interesting oscillating effects. I’m not sure quite how powerful this plugin is, but the basic idea of using physical metaphors to synthesize audio or MIDI is brilliant and has all sort of implications. What would more sophisticated simulations look like in a VST plugin? What does it mean to generate music from a game of Quake?

Mixed in Key is an offline analysis tool to help DJs with harmonically-informed mixing. Its primary function is key analysis (hence the name), and their literature helps bring users up to speed on how one might go about harmonic mixing given key analysis of all your source material. I think MiK is a great success for modern audio analysis and for the use of machine learning methods in commercial audio software.

SPEAR provides a unique approach to audio editing that allows a user to edit audio in the spectrogram space, traditionally used only for visualization. It’s interesting and very counterintuitive to think about editing in this space, and moving spectral content at a certain frequency range and a certain time point in an audio stream to another time point. SPEAR hints at the idea that our traditional views for audio editing - the time-domain waveform and the piano roll - are just one of many ways to view a musical stream.

MoreCowbell.dj lets you upload an mp3 and add cowbell and/or Christopher Walken to it. There are only two sliders in the interface. Anyone who has seen it will know that it’s basically for humor value and may wonder why I’ve put it on this list. In fact there are three reasons I’ve included this on this list:

1. Novelty: just about anything unique and novel gets a place on this list.

2. It’s a Web service: there are very few audio-processing Web services out there, and this approach has not really entered the home-studio mainstream, other than perhaps mastering services where a user e-mails a recording to a professional mastering service (not really a Web service, since there’s a human at the back end). This simple demo does hint at a possible future model where audio processing is provided as a Web service, which has profound implications for commerce, competition, and anti-piracy.

3. Analysis backend: this is really an advertisement for the “Echonest” analysis suite, which is exemplary of a number of audio processing toolkits that have emerged, representing a major new business model for the audio wizards who have traditionally built tools and sold them directly to end-users.

FX Teleport allows you to host VST plugins remotely, leveraging CPU power available outside of your main host machine. This is a portable, slick solution that extends application-specific solutions that have been previously available, such as Giga Teleport (for GigaStudio) and VST System Link (for Steinberg applications). I haven’t seen this widely adopted yet, but it’s an interesting trend, in light of the general industry trend toward mesh computing and the home-studio trend toward multi-core support.

Indaba music is one of several online sites for musical collaboration, but in my opinion this represents the most interesting model for collaboration and the best site design in this space. This is not about real-time online jamming, which I believe will be impossible for the foreseeable future. It’s not about sharing files with your bandmates, which people do all the time using all sorts of file-distribution services. And it’s not about collaborative remixing, which is fine but not my bag.

Rather, Indaba is a site that makes a social experience out of the entire music creation process, by integrating a traditional discussion board with a nice suite of tools for uploading, mixing, and listening to individual tracks and/or whole songs. While professionals may never want to work on music with strangers, I think this could have a huge impact on how amateurs make music. If I could spend a few minutes trying out a guitar track to help someone else’s song, or upload a song I’m working on and have someone else provide suggestions or throw down a new vocal track, I’d do that all the time. It would be like practicing, only social and not boring. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds working on songs alone in my studio to be a little dull, yet doesn’t have time for full-fledged original music collaboration with local partners. If I could make songwriting and music creation fun and social, but still work at my own pace at home, why wouldn’t I?

To make this long discourse short: this is a model for online collaboration that I believe could have a real impact on how hobbyists make music.

VSTunnel is an interesting VST plugin that allows you to connect with other users running their own hosts elsewhere in the world, and basically hear the audio (on demand, not necessarily in real-time) that everyone is working on. It’s not a remote VST hosting service, it’s not a file exchange service, it’s not real-time jamming, and it’s not an online collaboration site. It’s a new model for collaboration that basically has me sitting down, doing my stuff on my computer while you (my bandmate or co-writer) are sitting at your computer, doing your stuff, and we’re sharing and exchanging audio as we make changes to our project. I’m not sure that the usage scenario is clear enough for it to take off, but I think it’s really clever, and I think it suggests fascinating possibilities for the possibility of “telepresence for music creation” – without the still-unrealistic assumption of shared real-time audio stream.

ObliqueVST is a really simple plugin that just shows you random pieces of text, somewhere in the neighborhood of fortune-cookie-content. Roughly speaking, the idea is that if you’re stuck, you might fire up a tidbit from ObliqueVST, and try to do something actionable based on what it says, regardless of how abstract it is. It’s almost irrelevant that it’s a VST plugin, but I think it does hint at a totally unexplored area: integrating source of inspiration – as fluffy as that sounds – into the digital audio workstation.

XYZControl generates MIDI CC messages based on mouse movement; it hosts a simple UI that reads mouse position and mouse wheel events. This is pretty simplistic, and is already integrated into some synthesizers or hosts (for example, it’s similar to the planar control available in Ableton Live). But it does suggest an interesting new model for what you can do with a plugin: offer a new user interface for controlling downstream synthesizers or effects. The plugin here is just a UI, which I think is very clever.

Nodal is a unique environment for generative music creation, i.e. controlling algorithms that generate music. It provides a graphical representation of a music generation network, allowing you to graphically express rules and conditions related to notes, keys, dynamics, etc. I’m not sure it’s all that intuitive for the average musician, since it does assume a certain algorithmic mindset, but what’s exciting here is that generatic music has been studied in the research community for a long time, and Nodal puts a face on it that’s at least somewhat accessible to an end-user, without requiring anyone to write code or implement algorithms from someone’s journal paper. Props to the author for making his work accessible like this!

Morph is a tool that allows blending between two sounds... not individual samples (i.e., this isn’t just a crossfade), but whole soundscapes. More interestingly, they’ve put a really intuitive UI on it that allows for rapid exploration. While their examples are fairly dramatic (e.g. a slow fade from a drum loop to a choir), I think work like this may find a niche in places where gentler, maybe even subconscious effects are appropriate. I’m excited to see what creative applications people come up with for this sort of tool.

Numerology is a modular step sequencer that allows you some programmatic control (without writing code) over sequenced music, incorporating filter-like modules for choosing notes in a step-sequencer world, as well as allowing more familiar spectral processing techniques on those notes. Particularly interesting to me is the use of chords as entities you can actually sequence. A theme on this page is my excitement about seeing the chord finally become a first-class citizen among the constructs used in music software, and Numerology extends that trend to step-sequencing. Folks with a theory background will be happy to see roman numerals as a primary representation here. The only product I’m familiar with that really sits in this space is Nodal (above), but, roughly speaking, Nodal is a little more “raw” and closer to writing generative synthesis code, and Numerology is a little more high-level: more restricted (it is a step sequencer at its core), but in a way that makes it a little easier to make music that sounds more listener-ready.

Also, props to Five12 for building a really slick and modern interface.

Sika is a VST plugin that allows the user to explore oriental scales, by both restricting the set of available tones and introducing microtones. This is a really efficient way to let a Western-trained musician with a Western-octave keyboard experiment with non-Western scales. This is a great idea; I wish they had packaged it to host a VST synth instead of packaging it as a SoundFont player. The setup and dependencies are sort of clunky, but the idea is fantastic.

This entry is not one program in particular, rather it represents an emerging area with the potential to impact the way people compose music. The problem of vocal transcription, or "voice to MIDI", has been open for decades, and has been pursued in the academic space both for music creation and for music search applications. Recently a number of packages have emerged that do some form of transcription, though I don’t think any of these have established a place for vocal transcription in music recording or music performance. WIDI VST, for example, is a real-time transcription system, though in my own experimentation it’s not quite reliable enough to replace keyboard entry as a means for getting the notes in your head into a sequencer. Celemony Melodyne is primarily a pitch correction and audio editing product, but in my experience it’s also far and away the most effective transcription system available, both in terms of signal processing and in terms of user interface. However, because transcription is not the focus of the product, it doesn’t quite explore the possibilities that vocal transcription offers for music composition and performance. In my opinion, these possibilities are huge: there is no more expressive and intuitive interface for exploring new melodies than the human voice.

Again, this entry represents a whole class of plugins and processing tools: operators that convert audio to MIDI, but not in the sense of transcription. Rather these plugins generate MIDI events to represent other properties of an audio stream, with tremendous creative possibilities. Examples are envelope followers (that output a MIDI representation of the volume of an audio stream), timbre analysis tools (which output a MIDI representation of the tone or timbre of an audio stream), gates (which trigger MIDI events when an audio stream enters or leaves a period of silence), etc. Putting even simple analyses in the hands of a musician through the magic of VST actually represents an exciting new set of tools. What other standard signal processing tricks might have implications for musical creativity if bundled into plugins this way?

Example plugins in this space include GateFish (gating), AudioTrig (triggering), and KT Drum Trigger (frequency-band-specific triggering).

Tools in this category allow you to replace the drums in an existing audio track with a new set of drum samples. This technology has been around for a while, but it’s pretty mind-blowing when you first come across it, and it’s one of the major successes of putting signal processing technology into the home studio to do something you couldn’t do in the analog hardware domain.

Drumagog is probably the definitive tool in this area, but others include ToonTrack DrumTracker, Raven dRT, and Boxsounds Replacer.

I included this entry to represent a bunch of “utility plugins” that perform various mundane tasks. I include them here not because I think the tasks are wildly innovative, but because they’re simple but interesting uses of the plugin concept. Examples include:

• GVST GFader (and its friend GGain), a simple fader knob that’s useful in the middle of a VST effect chain. Sonalksis FreeG is another free option for gain/fader/metering.
• Dodo Bird McDodo’s Super-Volu assures that the volume stays the same before and after some other plugin. What’s particularly interesting here is the usage model: you place one instance of this effect before and after the target plugin, and specify “ports” to let the two instances know that they’re related (since in general plugins don’t know anything about the chain in which they’re placed).
• Storm Software Professional Metronome is a VST metronome, sync’d to host tempo. Yes, most hosts have their own metronome, but this provides a richer set of options and a giant visual metronome. More importantly it meets the bar of “something different in a VST plugin”.
• Haydxn Timer is a simple VST stopwatch, useful, for example, for storing (with your project) information about how much time you’ve wasted trying to remaster some crappy recording.

Vocal synthesis – like real vocal synthesis, where you type in some lyrics and a melody and out comes a vocal track – is still somewhat futuristic. But make no mistake, it’s coming. And if people whined and moaned about pitch correction, imagine what the world will have to say about artificial vocal tracks. Personally I can’t wait. I’m a mediocre singer and would love to be able to write songs that I can’t sing. But more importantly, I’m just one singer and will never be able to hire a dozen other singers, and wouldn’t a battery of virtual singers be a powerful tool for hobbyists who want to dabble in different styles? Current technology is pretty limited, but it’s improving rapidly. Examples include:

• The Vocaloid series from Zero-G (Leon, Miriam, Lola, and Prima) is popular, and while not “realistic” yet, it’s definitely approaching “robotic in a cool way”, and is well on the way to realism. My understanding is that the core vocaloid technology is provided by Yamaha; Zero-G provides sample libraries and UI on top of this, as do some other vendors.
• PowerFx Vocaloid Sweet Ann uses the Vocaloid 2 engine from Yamaha, and their demos are getting eerily close to realism. Like maybe if the audio is in the next room, yea, that could be a real singer. I don’t say that sarcastically; I think it’s amazing where this field is headed.
• VirSyn Cantor 2 VST presents itself as a little less oriented toward realism and a little more oriented toward space-age (their demo’s are inspired by “A Space Odyssey”).
• Slightly less-developed products include Myriad Virtual Singer, Aquest AquesTone, and the very clever AudioNerdz Delay Lama, which strives more for odd-factor than for realism, but does it quite well.

We ask our home computers to do a lot of things, which leads to performance and reliability that is – even in the best case – not up to live-performance standards for many users. I may love my VST software instruments, but am I really going to bring a computer on stage that also browses the Web, sends e-mail, and consequently can’t deliver 2ms latency? A new wave of embedded systems has emerged to solve this problem: these packages host the same VST instruments and effects that are available on our home computers, in dedicated boxes that, roughly speaking, never crash and are crazy fast, since they only run VSTs. The most evolved products in this space are the Muse Receptor and the SM Pro Audio V-Machine. Is this the technology that’s going to finally unify the technology used for home studio work and live performance work?

The problem (if it’s a problem) of “room character” has plagued producers since the dawn of recorded music. When I listen to my recording in my studio on my speakers, how do I know what it will sound like in another environment? Producers go to great lengths to create “neutral” listening environments and learn the character of their rooms, but one would like to think technology could make a contribution here too.

The IK Multimedia ARC System is a software system that comes with a calibrated microphone; ARC will automatically learn the character of your room and allow you to correct for it. Especially useful in mobile recording scenarios or new environments that may not be set up professionally. Real Sound Lab Coneq has similar functionality, though it’s a more general-purpose system that is not quite so slickly integrated into the home studio/DAW universe.

I think the fact that IK Multimedia is leading the pack here has powerful implications for other technologies... one of the hardest parts of getting amp modeling systems right is that the modeler doesn’t really know what’s actually coming out of your speakers. Why couldn’t room correction be integrated with amp modeling, so the presets in an amp modeling package could actually make your guitar sound like the sounds the authors intended? Is this the technique that will let amp modeling go to the next level and win over a few more skeptics?

Mastering is a deep art that many amateurs would rather not get into, and the intuitive notions of “I’d like my recording to sound pro” and “I’d like my recording to sound sort of like this other recording” are still elusive. Of course, an automated system will never be a substitute for experience, good ears, and good tools, but I believe that an intelligent system could get a hobbyist 80% of the way there, and could perform the basic function of “make this amateur recording sound a little more pro”.

While automating the mastering process is still a distant dream, there are several packages that have tried to tackle the EQ portion alone. They all work roughly the same way: you capture a frequency spectrum from example and target recordings, and a new EQ curve is built to make the target sound more like the example. These systems mostly vary in the quality of the EQ itself; I believe the spectral estimation and matching processes are actually pretty similar among all of these products. They seem to do something interesting, but I would not say that any of them (of the ones that I’ve been able to try) actually transfer the vibe from one recording to another in a meaningful way.

With that said, I think this technology will get there, and may make demo-caliber (not pro-caliber, but demo-caliber) production more accessible to many hobbyists.

Here are a few packages that perform matching EQ:

• Logic’s built-in MatchEQ
• BIAS Repli-Q
• Voxengo CurveEQ
• Roger Nichols Digital FIREQ (formerly Elemental Audio Systems Firium)
• Pro Audio DSP Dynamic Spectrum Mapper, supposedly transfers both EQ and dynamics between recordings
• Izotope Ozone Mastering Suite
• TC Electronics Assimilator offers a cool "morph between two complete curve sets by simply moving one fader" feature. Assimilator is only for their embedded PowerCore platform.
• Har-Bal is an EQ system positioned in a unique space: it offers matching functionality, focuses strongly on its visual approach to mastering/EQ, and offers a very tempered version of the “one-touch mastering” vision. Of course there’s no such thing as “one-touch mastering” (yet), so Har-Bal claims not to fix everything automatically, but to be able to make reasonable adjustments and fix certain spectral problems automatically.

Just like everything else in the computer industry, mobile applications are a growing part of software for music creation. Musicians have always found inspiration wherever and whenever it comes; mobile applications generally try to leverage this to give you enough creative power to “capture the moment”, or to create the moment when you’d otherwise just be reading the in-flight magazine.

The iPhone seems to have become a popular platform for mobile music creation apps; I’ll list a couple of example iPhone apps here, and a couple of interesting hardware devices intended to enable mobile creativity:

• Intua BeatMaker, a mobile sequencer
• Guitar Toolkit, a suite of helpful tools for guitarists (tuner, chord book, metronome)
• Everything by Moo Cow Music, including virtual guitar, piano, organ, drum, and bass instruments, and their “band” recording environment
• Smule Ocarina, a breath-driven virtual instrument
• iZotope iDrum, a drum machine for the iPhone. There are several of these, but I find this one interesting because a major home studio software manufacturer has jumped into iPhone software.
• A bajillion other iPhone synths and sequencers, including products from Tingalin, Yonac, and Benjamin McDowell
• The Korg DS-10, a fairly sophisticated synth for the Nintendo DS. A host of other home-made music apps for the DS have also surfaced, though the iPhone definitely seems to have become a hipper platform for doing this.
• Speaking of Korg, the Korg nanoSeries is a set of very small MIDI controllers intended to give you dedicated control devices – including a small keyboard and a MIDI touchpad – for use with your laptop. I could totally see myself using this to work out some chords or melodies on the plane.
• Guitar amp modeling has also gone mobile, including pocket-sized, headphone-friendly products like the Waves iGTR, the Line 6 Pocket Pod, and the Korg Pandora Series.
• Mobile mp3 recording has also become just about ubiquitous; some of the more affordable recorders include the Zoom H2 (my recorder of choice), the Line 6 Backtrack, and the Yamaha Pocketrak.

This isn’t really an “emerging” area, and it pretty much is exactly the “digital emulation of analog stuff” that I promised I wouldn’t include on this page. But I mention this area because (1) it’s probably one of the most significant successes in the space of digital studio magic, and (2) I think there are a few more breakthroughs in the pipe for this space.

Amp simulators give you a bajillion simulated guitar amps on your computer, offering flexibility, portability, affordability, and fun to musicians from beginners to pros. Of course, particularly for live use, modeled amps don’t sound like “the real thing”, but I don’t think that’s the point (yet). I love having the huge array of sounds that amp modeling offers for recording and for messing around at home, but I still have not had a good experience with live modeling, so I still drag my amp around.

But I think two major advances will come that will finally convince skeptics that modeled amps are for real, in addition to general increases in quality and realism:

1. Models will at some point become more aware of your guitar, so the models and presets defined at the factory for a totally different guitar actually sound like they’re supposed to.
2. Technology similar to room correction will be incorporated into amp modelers, allowing software to become aware of the speaker, amp, and room that affects what a listener actually hears.

When those things happen... suffice it to say that no one intrinsically wants to spend $2000 on an amp that weighs 60 pounds and only does one thing, so modeling is here to stay.

For completeness, here are some of the predominant modeling packages available right now:

IK Multimedia Amplitube

Everything by Line 6, primarily packaged as firmware-based physical devices

Native Instruments Guitar Rig

Overloud TH1

Peavey Revalver MK III

Waves GTR

SoftTube AmpRoom and Softube Metal Amp Room

Much of the “virtual instrument revolution” has focused on the synths, guitars, basses, etc. that have been the mainstays of pop music throughout the analog era. But another aspect of this trend that’s really exciting is the availability of sounds made by instruments you might never have heard of, and instruments that an amateur musician would never possibly have access to. This includes rare instruments and “world instruments”, which we can roughly define as instruments that are common in some cultures but not universally recognized or played. In that sense, virtual instruments have the potential to diversify our understanding of world music, both as listeners and as musicians. You know how you always hear about rock stars discovering other cultures’ music? Well I for one can’t afford a lengthy trip to India to study traditional instruments, but virtual instruments can offer at least a piece of that experience in digital form.

Here is a partial list of just a few rare/world instrument libraries:

• Sonivox Guqin Virtual Instrument. What’s a Guqin? I have no idea... but all I have to do is click “free trial” to find out! That’s the beauty of virtual instruments!
• Garritan World Instrument Collection (including Native American flutes, ewe drums, kotos, koras, santoors, and many other instruments that have to at least pique your interest)
• East West Etho World 4 Professional

While samplers have allowed the incorporation of sound effects into MIDI-driven performance since the dawn of MIDI, and even general MIDI has offered a handful of sound effects, it would never have been profitable or practical to build a piece of dedicated hardware to really emulate some random interesting sound that might be fun to play with when performing or composing. In the VST era, though, a programmer can build a plugin that explores a particular sound effect to an arbitrary degree of depth. This will be a big piece of letting home-studio musicians weave interesting soundscapes into digital music, without field recording and with extensive flexibility. Here are a couple examples of sound-effect-focused plugins that I found interesting:

• Knobster MeowSynth. Emulates cat noises. Poorly, but that’s not the point. It’s interesting, and it’s clever that the little cat moves his mouth when you play notes. Brilliant.
• Knobster KeyWriter. Emulates a classic German typewriter, which apparently was a landmark typewriter of some kind. Actually the quality here is really good, and it’s surprisingly fun to play. Also brilliant.