Record is now shipping, and the beta closed – and now is a perfect time to talk about learning.

Okay, let me explain something. Propellerhead doesn’t want Record to be called a “DAW,” for Digital Audio Workstation. I personally overcame my own distaste for the strange acronym today because, well, there’s not another good name for a related set of tools.

But I do think Record is different. Workstations are usually defined by being all-in-one environments, for hosting other third-party instruments and effects, and adding in additional features like notation and video scoring. Record is none of those things. You can even treat it like a virtual mixer or rack of processing tools and load it into your existing “DAW” of choice, or take something like Ableton Live and load it into Record for mastering.

But then, Record is the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it? Aggressively geared to be the anti-DAW, to avoid trying to be all things to all people, Record illustrates the variety of ways you can get your music making done.

We’ve had a good, healthy debate on this topic, so no reason to resurrect that. Instead, I have two pieces of news: one, Record is now actually shipping. Two, if you’re interested to learn how to use it, or just to see what they’ve done, the Props have assembled a terrific set of learning resources. For beginners, “Record U” promises to cover the basics of recording tasks as well as the software. (So far, the first episode, “Recording Guitar,” is available.) You can add that to lovely ReWire tutorials from the folks who developed the technology, and mini-tips on how to use the tools. Whatever you think of the software, it’s an exemplary learning site, just the kind of thing you’d hope developers would do.

Basics video
Record U
Tutorials Page
Micro Tutorials and iTunes podcast link

I’ve chosen my favorite so far. Love it or hate it, I think this illustrates some of the vision of Record. It makes moving tracks and devices as easy as racking up instruments and effects in Reason, and makes mixing and matching audio uncommonly easy. That could make Record a nice tool to have around for trying to take your pile of recordings and productions and turn them into finished tracks and albums. (A lot of this “love it or hate it” phenomenon seems to depend on your feelings about Reason, so Reason fans will also want to take a look at the Reason – Record integration video.)

Renoise has already earned a passionate following among lovers of trackers. The once-forgotten alternative to conventional sequencers, these music editors were beloved for their quick workflow and vertical, atomic approach to assembling beats and patterns. But Renoise is increasingly poised to appeal to other kinds of music makers, too, not just tracker purists.

2.1 you can sum up pretty easily: now you can integrate Renoise with other stuff easily. There’s ReWire support (appropriately enough for a tool beginning with “Re” in the title). And if you’re on Linux, you can pipe control and audio through the ultra-elegant, ultra-powerful JACK. (If you’re not on Linux, you may have just gotten a good reason to give it a try.)

http://www.renoise.com/

This is on top of a rapidly-growing set of features like multi-core balancing, automatic delay compensation, audio recording (cough, Reason), and MIDI inputs and outputs. In other words, this is a tracker you can use without giving up modern luxuries. Maybe it’s like the difference between having a tent in gorgeous mountainous wilderness, and having a mansion with a hot tub and a T1 Internet line.

ReWire is the headline, but some of the live performance tools may make an even bigger difference. Live control tools and live pattern sequencing could make Renoise a lot more useful in performance, even without just ReWiring into Live and recording clips. The pattern triggering looks especially nice, because it brings a feature Game Boy trackers have often used live. (Add JACK on Linux, and you could add your own custom instruments.)

And, oh yeah, the whole program runs on every OS, has an incredibly responsive and involved community that impacts the direction of the tool, and is distributed on a shareware model rather than with painful copy protection.

Full disclosure: I’m slightly biased by enjoying a couple of beers with Renoise’s Dac, and by the fact that I think this looks completely delicious.

Here’s the full changelog.

Sibelius today gets the biggest upgrade I’ve seen from the tool in a long time, with major improvements to the way the notation package lays out musical objects on the score, and ReWire support so you can integrate it with your host of choice.

This is an especially meaningful upgrade to me, as I’ve spent a lot of time with Sibelius since its first Mac release about a decade ago, both composing and teaching with it. In case you missed it Friday, I just spoke about some tips that can help with working in both education and composing:

Five Sibelius 5 Notation Tips, for Education and Experimentation with Scores

A couple of the recent upgrades, while nice enough, were not necessarily “must-haves” – a natural part of any upgrade cycle. But this to me looks different.

Here’s what’s new in Sibelius 6:

• Magnetic Layout: Sibelius has always been “magnetic” in that it automatically reflows objects and page layout to keep everything looking “tidy” as its English creators would say. It’s also always been fast at the task. The problem is, a lot of objects have still required lots of manual tweaking. Sibelius users, you know what I’m talking about: hours spent fine-tuning dynamics and text indications, rehearsal marks, and the like. Basically, all the objects that we’ren’t magnetic now are. (see above)
• Magnetic Layout implementation: In addition to the more intelligent objects and space optimization, you’ll see clever collision avoidance, and red-colored collision highlighting when a collision is unavoidable. It also looks like there are nice new guides for, say, making a forte, piano, and hairpin descrescendo all line up, something that required painful manual tweaks previously.
• Versions and comments: Scores now track and manage revisions, and you can create comments on the score. Theoretically, this is for collaboration and teaching, though I imagine it’ll be useful even to a solo composer as a score is developed – enough so that you may start to haul your laptop to rehearsals instead of just paper.
• ReWire: Sibelius will now act as a ReWire client, so you can record the output of the notation software itself (see the new instruments), or simply sync Sibelius to an existing project. Avid is naturally talking all about Pro Tools, but because the integration is with ReWire and not just Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, Logic, DP, and the like all become possible, too. I’ve never much liked the notation facilities in standard DAWs, so that’s good news – and this should be huge for the composer just wanting to record a quick mock-up with virtual instruments as well as someone doing film score.
• Notation improvements: Slurs have always been reasonably elegant and automatic in Sibelius, but when it comes to manually overriding those controls, they’ve been more challenging. Sibelius 6 includes (appropriately enough) six handles for controlling slurs. There are also optional stemlets when beaming across rests (hugely helpful for people who write complex, cough, rhythms in their music), automatic feathered beams (instead of the hack we’ve been using), and smarter articulation placement. There are new jazz repeat bars, and cautionary accidentals are finally added automatically. These are minor things, but quite frankly, it’s little details like that that often make the biggest day-to-day difference. (The cautionary accidentals alone might be worth an upgrade.)
• New integrated instruments: Profiting from Sibelius’ acquisition by Avid (formerly its Digidesign unit), Sibelius now acquires the lovely virtual instruments from the AIR team who have been doing soft synths for Pro Tools. There’s a new player, plus M-Audio’s General MIDI sound player. This replaces a previous player from Native Instruments. I love NI, but the NI player in Sibelius often wasn’t quite plug-and-play, and this promises to be an improvement. (See additional notes below.)

What do you really want from a recording tool on a computer? The Digital Audio Workstation answer to that question has for years been on giving you a generalized set of tools that try to anticipate every possible need. The “workstation” approach puts a whole bunch of functionality in one place, in particular adding features like plug-in hosting for supporting third-party effects and instruments, video editing and scoring, and music notation.

Record is a different animal: it’s a specialized tool focused on making music with audio, instead of a generalized tool. Reason has focused on synths, with a distinctive set of hardware-styled modules in a virtual rack. Record focuses on sound, with a distinctive set of hardware-styled modules in a virtual rack. Get it?

What’s left out is important. There’s no plug-in support, but by limiting use to the internal sound modules, Record is entirely agnostic about things like sample rate and can be far more flexible with modular audio routing and fluid tempo changes. (There’s also no MIDI out support, but if you’re looking to sequence external hardware, I might look elsewhere, anyway – especially with gems like Numerology out there.) Record also supports ReWire and has various export features, so the assumption is that – as with Reason – when you really want plug-ins, you can use your existing environment of choice.

Maybe you can call the results a DAW, if you really want to. But the one thing that isn’t debatable: Record is Reason for sound.

CDM was first with the official story from Propellerhead over the weekend, talking about the philosophy behind Record. Now we can talk about the specifics inside – and I have a test version here I’ve been working with while on the road.

Basically, Record combines comp-based recording with Reason-style racks and a whole load of goodies for processing and mixing your sound, including Line 6 guitar effects and an emulated SSL mixing desk. Why am I excited to begin working with it? Basically, it’s what happens when you flip the Record interface around. The most important screenshot (see any of these shots bigger by clicking on them):

Here’s what you get:

Sequencing – the collection of techniques that actually assemble events in our music – seems to get far less attention than it deserves. After all, there are fairly accepted ways of synthesizing sound, but as many ways of thinking about musical events as there are ways of thinking about composition. Among the big DAWs, you’ll often see pitches to upgrade based on new effects plug-ins or magical audio-processing abilities, but rarely MIDI sequencing improvements. (When there are, of course, I applaud.)

That makes this week’s pre-Christmas announcement of Numerology 2.0 all that more special. Numerology is a modular sequencer and that alone. It brings some of the modular capabilities usually found in synths to sequencing, with component sequencers and modulation for manipulating sequence evens the way you’d usually transform sound signal.

The upshot of all of this: you can play with musical patterns with the freedom usually reserved for synths. Features:

• Sequencing modules, including MonoNote (monophonic sequencer), polyphonic PolyNote (duh) and MatrixSeq, eight-track DrumSeq
• Component sequencers for modular-style sequencing, plus LFOs, envelopes, CV mixers, MIDI generators, MIDI processors
• Stacks: virtual equipment racks for easier composing / performance, and an integrated audio mixer
• Add software plug-ins (AU) or route to external hardware gear (yep, the computer is still awesome when it comes to sequencing outboard synths, even in 2008/9!)
• New, simple sound-generating modules for easy integration with the environment, including synthesis, polyphonic AudioSample and eight-part DrumKit
• MIDI remote control of parameters, plus custom CV, audio, and MIDI routing
• Timeline playlist arrangement
• Sync via MIDI clock, MTC, or ReWire
• Mac-only, 10.4.11 and later; US$99 until 1/4/09 (then $119)

System requirements are pretty tame (this is a sequencer, after all), so this could be a great application for an older Mac, provided it has a 1GHz or greater CPU. (PowerPCs included.)

How does it all work? Here are some videos to give you an idea. Hope to add this to my scary but delicious testing pile (New Years’ Resolution: more useful hands-on content).