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Yamaha Motif XF First Video Preview – part 1 of 2
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Bert Smorenburg gives SonicState a first look at the new the flagship workstation from Yamaha
Browsing all pro audio articles tagged with Yamaha.
Yamaha Motif XF First Video Preview – part 1 of 2
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Bert Smorenburg gives SonicState a first look at the new the flagship workstation from Yamaha
Yamaha A/V Receiver Lines Fully 3D Compatible with HDMI 1.4a
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
With the recent launch of its AVENTAGE Series, Yamaha Electronics Corporation, today affirmed that its entire line-up of current A/V receivers, including the RX-V67 Series, support the newest HDMI 1.4a specification, making them fully compatible with all mandated 3D formats.
Yamaha Joins Other Orange County Organizations to Help Spread The Music
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Groundbreaking Drum and Bugle Corps to March at 2010 DCI World Championships in Indianapolis as All Yamaha Ensemble.
Steinberg HALion Sonic
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
HALion Sonic offers more than 1,000 sounds created by top sound experts at Steinberg and Yamaha—from finest detailed acoustic instruments to legendary synthesizers, club sounds and soundscapes, from ultra-realistic acoustic drum kits to the latest electronic beats.
Native Instruments Releases Abbey Road 80s Drums
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Native Instruments has released Abbey Road 80s Drums, with two drum kits for use in the free Kontakt Player and the Kontakt 4 sampler. Abbey Road 80s Drums contains two characteristic instruments that significantly contributed to the sound of the respective musical decade – a vintage Yamaha 9000, and a Slingerland Magnum Chrome with single-headed concert
Update for MR816 CSX/X available
Monday, August 23rd, 2010
Steinberg released an update for the MR816 CSX and MR816 X Advanced Integration DSP Studio. Version 1.6 of the Tools for MR includes several main revisions and enhancements: The Yamaha Steinberg FireWire driver now supports the Yamaha FW16E FireWire Expansion Board and offers a better performance on Apple Macintosh computers with faster processing of the audio input and output. The Steinberg MR Extension also sees several minor enhancements. Please read the Release Notes for the list of fixes and improvements. Download Tools for MR 1.6
Zac Brown Joins the Yamaha Family
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Yamaha C2 grand piano accompanying him for future songwriting
Star of Indiana Alumni Corps Returns to The Field With Yamaha
Monday, August 16th, 2010
Groundbreaking Drum and Bugle Corps to March at 2010 DCI World Championships in Indianapolis as All Yamaha Ensemble.
Propellerhead Reason 5 and Record 1.5: what’s new?
Monday, August 9th, 2010
Propellerhead’s Reason 5 and Record 1.5 will be released on August 25: it promises to be quite a day for fans of the company’s two music production applications. As you’d expect, both updates will come riddled with new features, both major and minor, but what are they and how do they work? Based on our experiences with the beta versions of Reason 5 and Record 1.5, we’ve put together this hands-on guide. Reviews will follow in due course, but for now, sit back and discover what you’ve got to look forward to. NEXT: Kong Drum Designer Related Stories Universal Audio updates UAD-2 bundles Yamaha Motif XF workstation keyboard: more ROM and expandable iPhone/iPad iOS music making app round-up: Week 2 touchAble: play Ableton Live from your iPad SampleRadar: 320 free ska samples
SampleRadar: 320 free ska samples
Friday, August 6th, 2010
MusicRadar has already given ska the A-Z treatment , so rather than attempt to sum up the genre in a couple of lines, give that a whirl and you’ll get a comprehensive 26-step guide. Right here, though, we’re exclusively about the royalty-free samples: dive in and download. What you need to know The samples are supplied in a massive 130bpm construction kit. In here you’ll find Major, Minor and Percussion folders, which contain bass, brass, organ, sax, trombone, trumpet and drum loops. All the samples are supplied as 24-bit WAV files so can be imported directly into your DAW or sampler of choice. Because they’re royalty-free, you’re welcome to use the samples in your music in any way you like – all we ask is that you don’t re-distribute them. The ska samples are supplied in a zip file, so you’ll need to extract them before you can see them. Enjoy! Example sounds Beat Bass Organ Brass Ska samples: click to download Ska samples (371MB) These samples originally appeared on Computer Music magazine’s cover DVD. Check out the latest issue for many more. Tutorials A-Z of ska {PAGEBREAK} Related Stories MOTU ships BPM 1.5 Universal Audio updates UAD-2 bundles Yamaha Motif XF workstation keyboard: more ROM and expandable iPhone/iPad iOS music making app round-up: Week 2 touchAble: play Ableton Live from your iPad
Yamaha Introduces ‘AVENTAGE’ A/V Series; Defined by Obsession with Details to Achieve Peak Performance
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
The AVENTAGE series is the result of Yamaha’s meticulous design process to refine and re-engineer the A/V Receiver from the ground up, and to make subtle changes that mean the difference between good and great sound. Yamaha’s R&D team took a granular look at every design aspect, including circuitry, construction, components, volume and sound reproduction qualities—even eco-friendly considerations for power consumption. The end result is a work of visual and acoustic art that enthusiasts and custom integrators will appreciate. The AVENTAGE series also offer a 50% longer warranty (three year warranty).
iPhone/iPad iOS music making app round-up: Week 2
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
When it comes to music software, there’s currently no more vibrant or fast-moving platform than Apple’s iOS. New tune-making, DAW-controlling and other producer-friendly apps are appearing on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad every week, and they’re getting better all the time. About time, then, that MusicRadar ramped up its iOS coverage. As well as bringing you reviews of the most relevant apps, from now on we’ll be wrapping up the new releases and software announcements in regular round-ups, of which this is the first. Also, make sure you check out these regularly updated features: The best iPhone music making apps The best iPad music making apps If you’ve got a new iOS app, make sure you let us know about it by emailing musicradar.pressreleases@futurenet.com with all the details. NEXT: circular sequencing on the iPad Related Stories MOTU ships BPM 1.5 Universal Audio updates UAD-2 bundles Yamaha Motif XF workstation keyboard: more ROM and expandable touchAble: play Ableton Live from your iPad SampleRadar: 320 free ska samples
Yamaha Motif XF: Perform, Produce, Customize, And More
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
It’s not the XS, it’s the XF — Yamaha has introduced its new line of Motif XF keyboard workstations in several different models: the 88-key Motif XF8, 76-key Motif XF7, and 61-key Motif XF6. read more
New Yamah Motif XF coming next week
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Yamaha will be releasing the next generation music workstation Motif with the Motif XF. The XF is based on the XS but with groundbreaking Flash memory expansion capabilities that will set the standard for keyboard workstations for years to come.
4Pockets Aurora Sound Studio HD
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
The preview video for Aurora Sound Studio HD had certain team members compulsively checking the App Store for its release, for it promised a full production studio for the iPad. Not a DAW, mind you – no audio recording would be provided, for one thing – but an electronic studio with everything you need to compose and perform electronic music: drums, subtractive and waveshaping synthesisers, a sampler, mixer and effects, all tied to a multitouch grid interface resembling the iconic Yamaha Tenori-On. Aurora HD delivers on its promise in spades, albeit with a couple of caveats. The interface is divided into tabbed pages, some of which are geared towards arranging your sequences, while others are aimed at live performance with instruments and effects. Sequences are arranged in 14 layers, each with a fully editable instrument assigned. Each layer has three send knobs, for routing the signal to a trio of aux send channels, with a choice of nine effects for each. Additionally, you can apply the Atomizer and M-Gun functions in real time, the former being a sort of sample-and-hold function (think Ableton Live’s Beat Repeat), while the latter is a per-sound ‘drum roll’ function. Songs can be exported as WAV and AAC files, or even as MIDI. The latter ensures that compositions sketched out on Aurora can be reworked using your DAW’s instruments and effects. So what are those caveats we mentioned earlier? Well, the big one is that there’s no way to write any sort of velocity data to the individual layers. You can, however, fake it using the synthesiser’s built-in MSEQ function, but this is only available to the analogue synth. Also, a mere three effects slots seems miserly, and there’s no compressor. In addition, while you can upload and share songs via an online Song Library, this can’t be done with songs that include your own samples. Nevertheless, 4Pockets has brought in a winner, albeit one that carries a price tag considerably higher than those to which App Store customers are currently accustomed. The problems are few and do nothing to get in the way of what is a truly inspiring production environment.
Podcast: SONIC TALK 183 – I’m Not In Love Fruitbat Tickler
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
New Macs, NanoStudio, Yamaha EX1, 10cc
Takashi Mizuhiki DXi FM synthesizer
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Yamaha’s interpretation of Frequency Modulation synthesis needs no introduction. It’s a sound splattered across many ’80s synth classics, and recreated by various soft synths. DXi brings FM to your phone, but it’s closer to the DX27 than the legendary DX7. There are four operators rather than six and polyphony is reduced from 16 to three, from what we can tell. DXi also offers a neat 16-step sequencer and an effective XY performance pad, to mix operators and patterns in real time. Sound editing is primitive. You can flick between eight algorithms and edit a four-stage amplitude envelope for each operator, but you can’t listen to frequency and feedback changes as you make them – you need to press Audition again for these to be heard. While DXi does sound good, and you can recreate many classic sounds, it lacks versatility for the experimentalists, and completeness for the purists, sort of defeating the point of it being a synth and not a ROMpler.
Listen: Personal Sounds of Circuits, from Micronaut, Phil Archer, Caribou
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Summertime is bringing a host of great new music to my inbox and mailbox. Here are just a few selections for this Tuesday morning. What binds them all together is a desire for truly personal expression and satisfaction, which often manifests itself as an individualized sound. Chris Randall is best known as the voice behind cult favorite plug-in developer Audio Damage, and the opinionated, sometimes loud-mouthed pundit of his blog Analog Industries. But he’s a musician first. As better-known figures debate the merits of copyright and Creative Commons without ever having recorded a note, Chris has quietly released a lot of his own music under CC licenses — and continued to collect revenue. Last week, he expressed his love for electronic sounds in a new EP under his Micronaut moniker, entitled Resistor . Despite his software business, it’s a largely hardware-based project. But it’s not a retro-tinged analog love note; the sonic palette is very much his own, and balances the digital and clean with the analog and grungy. I like what he says about it: “…whether you like the music or not is utterly unimportant to me. I finally feel … that I’m finding a voice for the Micronaut project that matches my internal music.” That seems as good a goal as any. Read about the process and how he releases his work on his blog, natch: Resistor… And check out the album below, via Bandcamp . If you like it, you can name your price for high-quality formats, starting at one buck. Metatrak by Micronaut At a different end of the spectrum, Phil Archer has a short, free EP consisting of “live recordings of me playing acoustic guitar along with a circuit-bent yamaha pss 280.” It’s an organic-sounding, meditative record that’s far more tranquil than what you might assume when you hear the words “circuit bending,” and definitely a change of pace. Phil describes his goals for the sound as “sparse” and “folky.” It’s completely free, even in lossless formats, again available on Bandcamp . thirteen by phil archer Finally, The New York Times Magazine has a terrific, if brief, interview with one-man electronic act Caribou (Dan Snaith), whose new album “Swim” is the sleeper hit of the summer. The Times plays up the “math” angle, because of Snaith’s PhD in math.
Resistor…
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
I just put the finished Micronaut EP, Resistor , up for sale on Bandcamp. The Micronaut page is here. I put it up for “pay what you want, at least a dollar,” as I’m relatively interested to see how it works out. The Bandcamp site is fairly easy to work as such things go, and gives you a nifty embedded player to use, to wit: Metatrak by Micronaut I’ll also be placing the album in Tunecore as per usual, to spread it to all the other services. Once it has been up for a month, I’ll do a “Numbers” post like you often see the big iPhone devs do, so you can see exactly how it worked for me, as a relatively known artist. (Relative to, say, my sister, who is not.) Regarding the album itself, it is what I feel are the best tracks of my weekend work over the last year and a half. I completed 15 tracks in all, but (as I hinted in the last post) I feel that the majority of them were quite derivative. I’ll probably put them in my Soundcloud account for interested parties. Most of the instrumentation in these tracks is hardware. Adam often says that his day job is software, so when he makes music he wants to use hardware, and I’m beginning to be of the same mind. When you’ve spent the entire day staring at a monitor tweaking presets, there’s something inherently more visceral about grabbing a knob and getting an immediate and satisfying result. This isn’t to say that “analog” is an important aspect.
Drumssette, Brilliantly Insane Tascam Tape-Based Drum Machine, More from Mike Walters
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Sometimes, DIY music boxes reach moments of mad genius. To me, they’re almost a kind of compositional conceptual art, executed as a set of circuitry and disguised as a piece of music gear. They assemble in series a set of solutions to design problems, but result in something – through the combination of invention and throwback, simplicity and absurdity – insane and wonderful. At least that’s how I feel when I look at the Drumssette, the latest invention from musical instrument engineer Mike Walters.
Rebates Galore, Pt. I
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Manufacturer: Bock Audio Rebate: Get $300 cash back! Effective Dates: 07/01/10 through 08/31/10 The Deal: Purchase a Bock Audio 151 from Sweetwater between July 1, 2010 and August 31, 2010 and get $300 cash back via mail-in rebate! Manufacturer: Yamaha Rebate: Get $500 cash back! Effective Dates: 07/01/10 through 07/31/10 The Deal: Get a DTX950K during the month of July, 2010 and score $500 cash back. Register online and postmark your submissions by August 15, 2010 to qualify. Manufacturer: Yamaha Rebate: Get $300 cash back! Effective Dates: 07/01/10 through 07/31/10 The Deal: Get a DTX900K during the month of July and score $300 cash back. Register online and postmark your submissions by August 15, 2010 to qualify.
Accordions For Ableton
Friday, July 9th, 2010
new Live Packs – There is a new Ableton Live Pack from DETUNIZED.COM available. It features an accordion and a melodeon. Also still in subscription: YACS (Yamaha CS-15) Live Pack Audio demos here: http://detunized.com/live_pack_subscription/
HALion Sonic Now Available
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Steinberg is excited to announce the release of the premier VST Workstation HALion Sonic, the long-anticipated successor to the highly acclaimed Hypersonic 2, which lets you work more productively than ever before. HALion Sonic excels in the studio as well as on stage, featuring a state-of-the-art sampling and synthesis engine, a world-class library and an intelligent user interface. Based on Steinberg’s latest sampling and synthesis technology, HALion Sonic is the go-to composition and production instrument, offering the complete range of sound shaping and creative editing features sound designers expect from studio-grade instruments. The exquisite sound engine offers four extremely powerful, yet easy-to-use modes at its core, including a fully editable Virtual Analog Synthesis Engine. Created by top sound experts at Yamaha and Steinberg, HALion Sonic boasts more than 1,200 first-class instrument sounds suitable for almost any conceivable style — from detailed acoustic instruments to legendary synthesizers, club sounds and soundscapes, from ultra-realistic acoustic drum kits to the latest electronic beats. But that’s not all: HALion Sonic also reaches a new level in intuitive handling and control. All of its features have been implemented with a focus on usability and that’s why HALion Sonic is just as easy to use on a hectic stage as it is in the creative environment of a studio. Unique Morphing Filters, innovative sound creation tools like the FlexPhraser, a seamless integration with Cubase 5 including VST Expression support and many other features deliver truly unlimited sonic dimensions. HALion Sonic is now being shipped to our distributors worldwide* and is also available in the Steinberg Online Shop . Find out more and listen to HALion Sonic *Availability of HALion Sonic at local outlets may vary regionally. US customers can expect availability at stores from the end of July.
Claire Huangci Plays Carnegie Hall Debut For New Yamaha CFX
Friday, June 25th, 2010
Winner of National Chopin Competition and Yamaha Artist Plays New Flagship Concert Grand Piano for the First Time in Weill Hall.
Yamaha Pocketrak C24 Review By Rick Weldon: You Can Hide This Recorder Anywhere
Friday, June 25th, 2010
The Yamaha Pocketrak C24 ($300 MSRP) is an incredibly small, yet full-featured, stereo audio recorder. read more
Yamaha’s Support Instrumental To Summer Symposium
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Yamaha Brings World Class Artists and Wide Range of Top Quality Percussion Instruments to Prestigious National Music Festival.
Yamaha Pocketrak W24 Portable Recorder Review By Rick Weldon: Catch A WAV (Or An MP3), Anywhere
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
The Pocketrak W24 ($299 MSRP) is situated at the top of Yamaha’s line of portable 2-track recorders. read more
Yamaha Introduces DSR Series Active Loudspeakers
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Yamaha’s new DSR active loudspeaker line includes the compact and lightweight full-range DSR112, DSR115 and DSR215, along with the DSR118W subwoofer, and promises class-leading power and digital sound processing, plus the all-new D-Contour multiband dynamic processing.
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