Ed.: Make no mistake about it: digital sound tech, from mixing to processing, has evolved to a fidelity on par with its analog predecessors and opening possibilities well beyond what they offered. But the making of that evolution wasn’t easy, and it was more than a technical challenge. You can thank the creative spirit of people like Paul Frindle. As contributor Primus Luta explains to CDM, his work is about more than just engineering or tools – it’s driven by creative, musical energy. -PK

Author’s note: I wanted to bring this piece to the CDM audience because, whether we know it or not, if we Create Digital Music, we are indebted to people like Paul Frindle.  While this piece is on the technical side, one of the things that I hope readers will pull away is his creative spirit. May Paul inspire you to bring that same energy to the work that you produce in the digital realm.  You can read the full interview, with war stories from Virgin Records, Trident Studios, SSL and more at AvantUrb.

In the world of audio, Paul Frindle is a legend.  During his tenure at Solid State Logic, he was responsible for the channel electronics of the SSL G Series Console.  He was also a part of the team that broke the “damnable black art” of digital conversion.  He went on to cofound the (pre-dot=com) startup Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony (who would eventually take over the company), developing the application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console.  The result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in film.  Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone.  Where it was leading, however, could have been much different.

There’s something to be said for the traditional digital audio workstation, its linear arrangement view, and all its editing bells and whistles. When it comes to finishing a track from beginning to end – not doing live PA-DJ hybrid performances or racking up modular synths and effects or programming intricate cellular beats – sometimes the conventional approach can be welcome.

With lots of affordable alternatives – not to mention competition from stable, previous versions – the question with any full-freight, top-of-the-line DAW is whether it can “buy” your loyalties with enough extras? And, for that matter, might it even convince you to enjoy running Windows? SONAR has tempted me before, but 8.5.2 reaches a new level of maturity – and a new level of pack-in goodies to sweeten the deal.

Choosing a DAW is an immensely personal decision. It’s worth saying that we have a lot of exceptionally good choices from which to select tools. Even when they perform tasks in very different ways, any number of tools can achieve the same results. I have had a personal reaction to certain tools, though, and too often in reviews, we don’t get to talk about that subjective experience. I’ve actually started to work SONAR into more of the projects I’m doing, so I speak personally about it.

Sometimes, the best sounds come not from synthesis, not even from electrified instruments, but from the purity of a mic and acoustic instrumentation. It remains electronic, or even digital sound, but its source is organic. And so, one of the best reasons to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie in theaters is the wonderful noises that bounce around Hans Zimmer’s score.

Behind many great film scores are great soloists as much as great composers, and Sherlock Holmes is no exception. Zimmer worked with Diego Stocco, sound designer, sound artist, inventor, and composer in his own right. To realize the inner workings of the mind of Sherlock Holmes, violin player, the pair turned to Stocco’s own creation, a kind of meta-instrument made of all string instruments, dubbed the Experibass. Looking only at its appearance, the instrument looks like a practical joke, with the bridge and neck of a violin and viola pasted onto a Double Bass. But once you hear the creation, the instrument is sheer genius, combining the Double Bass’ superior resonance with the more delicate sounds of the treble instruments.

Brilliant as this instrument may be, let’s not get entirely distracted from the really important things in life, like how to make great pasta. Watch the video interview above for insight into the sonic and culinary recipes in the duo’s kitchens.

That’s just the beginning of the inspiration to draw from Diego and other artists whose work is heard from behind the silver screen in this blockbuster cinematic month of December.

The tricky thing about introducing a new feature is that you almost immediately hear from users about other features that would go well with that feature. (There’s a children’s story that goes this way.) The folks at Cakewalk have done what I think is a pretty amazing job of working through a big feature list, and throwing in additional goodies users get without even asking. They’ve also listened to users and been thorough in fixing issues – some quite particular – in 8.5. The result is that SONAR 8.5.2 brings a mature version of some significantly-changed features, and an unusually significant amount of stuff for a “point” release. If 8.5 was beginning to feel like 9.0, 8.5.2 definitely does.

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.