macProVideo.com, a pioneering Internet classroom that focuses on creative arts tutorials, let us know that they’re celebrating their 20th anniversary.
Founded in Vancouver, British Columbia by Martin Sitter, MPV has grown to become the largest independent online community dedicated to creative arts education, offering a library of over 2,000 courses. He was joined by composer and synthesist Steve Horelick, as a publisher, shortly after the company’s launch.
Their website now offers a remarkably deep selection of tutorials focusing on synthesis and digital audio. Their video tutorials cover individual synths, DAWs, synthesis, audio recording, mastering and post production, music theory, styles, sound design and more.
In addition to the audio and music tutorials, the website also covers video, graphics, web development and more.
In celebration of their 20th anniversary, the website is discounting all the courses in their collection, so you can download courses at less than half their normal price. See the website for details.
Free Native Instruments plugin enables you conduct a choir of 1,000s of Jacob Collier fans “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”
Enter Jacob Collier Audience Choir, an awe-inspiring, free instrument from award-winning multi-instrumentalist and Native Instrument Artist Board member Jacob Collier. Created using audience recordings from Jacob’s Djesse world tour (Djesse Vol. 4 out now!), this instrument allows you to harness the emotive power of a huge choir, and sculpt it in exciting ways.
The new free plugin captures the sound of Collier’s audience choir in a software instrument. The audience choir is a regular feature of Collier’s live shows where the Grammy-winning artist invites his audience to participate in the performance of his songs, conducting them “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”.
Jacob Collier Audience Choir is built on recordings of 22 concerts in different cities around the world, from Adelaide to Zurich; as notes are played, you’ll be able to see which recordings you’re hearing on the plugin’s interface. The plugin offers four different vowel sounds (Aa, Mm, Oo, and Ee) which can be blended via the XY pad on the interface’s right-hand side.
The instrument also features a chord generator, so you’ll be able to play diatonic chords with single notes, and a slider for dynamics control. A timbre knob acts like a low-pass filter, and the onboard delay and reverb do exactly what you’d expect them to do, with five reverb types onboard. You’ve also got a control for stereo width, and you’ll be able to shape your envelope with dials for attack and release.
Open up a separate panel and you’ll find more advanced controls that allow you to automatically tune the chords you’re playing to the just intonation tuning system in real-time. “One of the most amazing things about audience choirs is that people often automatically tune to each other in just intonation, because the way the piano is tuned doesn’t usually apply to groups of singers en masse”, Collier says. “It’s kind of an amazing part of this plugin that it’s able to adapt as people would in real rooms to be very much in tune.”
In addition to the choir sounds, the plugin’s equipped with percussive sounds and a number of other samples of Collier’s audience shouting various words and phrases. The plugin supports polyphonic aftertouch, so you’ll be able to get expressive with MPE-compatible controllers like the Native Instruments Kontrol S MK3.
“I’ve spent the last few years touring around the world, playing shows in every corner of the globe […] one of my favourite parts of the whole experience has been the ever-expanding evolution of the audience choir”, Collier says in the video embedded above.
“Over the course of this experience, one thing I was dreaming about was: what if I could sit in the comfort of my own home, and you could sit in the comfort of your own home, and experience the feeling of an audience choir at your fingertips? So I teamed up with the mighty Native Instruments gang and we put together this amazing instrument, built from real samples of real audiences the world over”.
Download Jacob Collier Audience Choir now at Native Instruments website.
Is AI coming for your DAW also? The latest update to Google’s text-to-music AI promises “an infinite AI jam that you control”
Google has launched an update to its generative text-to-music AI MusicFX that lets you layer and mix music generated by multiple text prompts together in a single evolving composition.
Launched last year, MusicFX is capable of generating sounds, musical ideas and even entire tracks on demand in response to detailed instructions. The AI can understand prompts relating to genre, mood and instrumentation, it can account for the experience level of the ‘musician’ it’s imitating, and it can generate music that is suitable for a specific context, like working out or studying.
Google’s latest update is a DJ mode that adds a mixer-style interface to the platform. As you type in multiple prompts, MusicFX DJ will layer them together in a single composition, syncing each track like a DJ.
You are able to adjust the intensity of each layer using the sliders on the interface and add up to ten layers of music to your composition. The dice icon beneath the mixer will generate a random prompt and the shuffle button will randomize the levels of each layer. Unlike the regular version of MusicFX, there’s no option to export the results.
Google DeepMind’s Adam Roberts shared the news this week on Twitter/X, commenting: “I love music most when it’s live, in the moment, and expressing something personal. This is why I’m psyched about the new “DJ mode” we developed for MusicFX. It’s an infinite AI jam that you control.
“Try mixing your unique of instruments, genres, or favorite foods–whatever your desires. Hone your skills as a prompt DJ to create a smooth, consistent set. I’ve been having a blast learning to express my own musical ideas with this unique instrument, and I’m stoked to see how others use it! We’re working on lots more features to unlock your creativity, so stay tuned!”
MusicFX DJ pushes AI-powered music generators like these closer to the realm of the DAW by giving you more control over the mixing and editing of multiple parts, rather than simply spitting out audio clips on demand.
Advancements like these point towards a future where AI-powered music software will be able to generate melodies, chords and timbres, create arrangements, edit samples, apply effects and even mix and master entire tracks, all in response to instructions delivered by text or speech. Whether that’s a good thing or not, we’ll leave you to decide.
