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Broadway Big Band Dilemma Resolved
Alright, I got it all worked out. The clues were kind of in the manual - but only if you read it in the right order and made a few assumptions along the way.
Here is to get it working (thanks to kaver for helping me out):
1) If you didn’t already know (I didn’t) there are 3 applications that are in play here. Broadway Big Band Performer, Broadway Big Band Halion Player and Digital Performer. It doesn’t help that they all are variations of each others names.
2) Open the BBB Performer application (in your applications folder) then select an instrument and channel (use 1 for now).
3) Open up Digital Performer. Make sure “multirecord” is selected. Open an aux track and select the first BBB rewire 1&2 as the input.
4) Open up the BBB halion player. Under preferences set the port to “from …. whatever channel you selected in step 2. You will have to set this port EVERY time you open BBB Halion player as it does not get saved.
5) Load a corresponding sample into the halion player then point your midi channel in performer at that instrument and hopefully you are in business now.
This is a great library and it is worth whatever pain you have to go thru in order to buy/install/setup the thing.
Have Fun and send me some samples!
Broadway Big Band Dilemma
I have spent the last 2 days trying to get Broadway Big Band from fable sounds to work.
Needless to say, I am having a tough go of it.
I am trying to get it to work with Digital Performer 5 in rewire mode. As far as I can tell there is no AU support for 5.
The first thing to note that the manual does not point out clearly enough (especially for us not familiar with steinbergs halion player) is that there are THREE programs in play here.
So here is the order:
- Start Broadway Performer (in your apps folder)
- Start Performer (in your apps folder)
- Start Broadway Big Band Halion Player
It took me the better part of half a day to realize that Broadway Performer and Broadway Big Band Player were 2 different programs.
All that being said I have followed the manual at least 20 times and have yet to hear any audio.
The manual is enough to make your head hurt it is written so poorly.
This sample library is over $2,000 so I hope I can get it to make a sound sometime next week.
Doesn’t seem like that is so much to ask.
[news flash: all is working now. Here is my broadway big band/digital performer install help]
First Call Horns and OS 10.5 Leopard Kontakt Update
I am trying to install the update to first call horns and I cannot get it to show up in Digital Performer.
For OS 10.5 you need update your kontakt player to version 2 if you are like me and coming from OS 10.2.something (also known as the dark ages).
I found this seemingly helpful link on the big fish audio support page.
http://www.bigfishaudio.com/4dcgi/support.html
I followed it closely, everything seems to be fine but I cannot get First Call Horns to appear in my Project -> Instrument Track.
Kontakt 2 appears fine even though I have no libraries to open in it yet.
This is one of those problems you don’t know who to call. NI? Big Fish? DP?
Big Fish doesn’t seem to have support contact information so I contacted Native Instruments and am waiting to see what they say.
Digital Performer 5 Configure CoreAudio Driver
This is the first issue I had when installing Digital Performer 5.
The install was easy and it looks like the install disk has some good tutorials on it.
But, when I go to start up Digital Performer 5, this is the message I get:
Digital Performer cannot use this CoreAudio driver as it is currently configured because no outputs are available. You must configure the driver so that the MOTU Audio System can use at least one output pair.
For now I just chose the built in line output. I will try and use the TOSLINK connections once I have everything working in analog land.
Just an FYI - the built in line output is the miniplug in the back of the machine and the built in output is the headphone jack in the front.
The headphone jack is noticeably noisier than the line output.
Got My New OS 10.5 Leopard Machine
Just firing it up today and I am going to document all the Goods and Bads of getting my apps up and running.
Here are some of the apps I will be installing
Digital Performer 5
Pro Tools 7
Reason 4
Waves Gold
There are more but those are the big 4.
EastWest’s 20th Anniversary
Got some bucks to blow on samples? Now is a good time.
East West is offering a buy one, get the cheaper one free deal. It ends April 30.
I love their orchestra bundles. I have some of their old ones but nothing newer.
Is anyone using Symphonic Choirs? You type in the words and it sings them back as you play the keyboard. I would love to hear from someone who has used it.
Anyway, go pick up some great sounds then send me a sample of what you did.
- Matt
Creating The Perfect Demo: Pt. 1
My partner in sound quit a few weeks ago which left with the arduous task of trying to replace him. He was very talented at so many things and a pleasure to work with for so many years but it was back to the drawing board as far as trying to fill his shoes.
Since I am once again getting an influx of demos, I thought this would be a good time to explain what (I think) a good demo is and hopefully increase your chances of getting that dream gig!
Please Note: When I write the word “I” or “Me”, I am talking about the proverbial “Me” - that person out there that has to filter thru all the demos. This is person you need to please.
- 1) Have a website. Have a clean website with samples that are in an easy to listen/view format. Your MySpace page does not count. Those pages are not for people who take their craft seriously. There is way too much distraction going on with a page like that.
- 2) Your samples should play in the same page that the link is on. Be careful of putting in links to quicktimes. When you navigate away from the page, even to play the file, it is too easy to get distracted and move onto the next thing.
- 3) Since you now have the sample playing on the same page as the link you can - listen close, this is BIG one - write a description of what you actually did for that track/video. I have listened to so many tracks that were undocumented and I had no idea what the person actually did. The is especially important for score to picture when their is speech, mixing, foley, ADR, scoring, sound fx, etc. If you don’t document it, I assume someone else did it.
- 4) File Sizes: Be VERY careful here. even though most people are on broadband, that doesn’t mean I want to download your 150 meg quicktime video. In fact, I probably won’t and I will move on to the next candidate. I recommend uploading your file to YouTube and then embedding the code in your page so it plays right on your site. If you have to have a larger quicktime (lets face it, most YouTube videos look like crap) definately have a small streaming version that can be embedded in your page and then link (with the file size in the link name) to the higher quality one so the person has the option of seeing the great looking one.
I will end this segment here and pick up where I left off next time, but I want to stress this: The important thing is to have a clean page with minimal distractions and an easy way to pass information from the page to the viewer. The information is the descriptions, audio and video.
I have applied most of these things on this site when posting my videos. There is always room for improvement, but take a look around and hopefully you will agree that I have focused on “ease of entry” where it comes to just being able to click play on something that looks interesting and getting back some pretty timely feedback.
Until next time…
Desconstructing Golden Tee
This is a book that was written a few years ago for the release of Golden Tee Live but it is a pretty unique book so I wanted to share it here.
It covers all aspects of what it took to bring the game to life , from programming to art to sound and even gets into the business model of the game. It is unique in the fact that I have not seen any resources that cover the creation of a major game with this level of detail
On the sound side, one of the topics I cover is how we created our mega golf crowds when in reality we only had about 15 people at the crowd recording session. I had my digi 002 running of an inverter in my PT Cruiser and a REALLY long extension cord. Everything was going pretty well til the cops showed up…
For anyone really interested in an insiders look at how a game is created, I would highly recommend this book
And not just because I am in it…..
Silver Strike Bowling Sound Design
Silver Strike Bowling has been a very strong product for Incredible Technologies. Players seem to like the simplicity of it and after 3 years or so, are still engaged by it as we have done multiple updates. The game features what I have dubbed "Sports Rock". I didn’t create the genre but I think I created the name of the genre. To be officially classified as sports rock you must have 1) Heavy guitar licks 2) Herald like trumpets. What goes better together?
The first video is three videos strung together. Running time is about 1:30.
Three SSB Videos
The next video is the first video from the above montage just separated out. For the music, I used a Native Instruments guitar rig fx to get the wah wah sound in the music. I first came up with the basic rhythmic line using a bass type patch in FM7 (I believe) processed it a bit and then ran that thru the wah. It ended up sounding pretty cool. I got the general idea from the Snatch soundtrack which I reference quite a bit in my writing because it sounds so cool.
Attract Video #1
This is the same video with only the just the fx track. I took the music out to show the full effect of the sound design. At the end of the video as the ball is about to hit the pins and the screen starts shaking, I literally just started cutting out pieces of the audio in its entirety, leaving only silence, to give it that ugly choppy sound. No cross fades or anything. Having those complete gaps in the audio really creates that tensioned, choppy sound that goes great with the video.
Attract Video #1 - No Music
The next video is video number 3 from the first montage. The video is for a weekly countdown the game does to announce a winner. At 7 pm every friday, the game takes over at the bar, sets its own volume (pretty loud) and blairs out this tune and announces the sweepstakes winner. So far no noise complaints.
I love the part in the middle where it breaks down into the AC/DC type riff. Arena Sports Rock.
Countdown Video
This is the same video with only just the fx track. For the beginning section I was trying to go for a space ship powering up kind of thing.
Countdown Video - No Music
