Gear/Site Review: Virtual Keyboard

Once in a while I came across a music app online that I think is worthwhile not as a tool, but as an amusement. The Virtual Keyboard is just such an application. The Virtual Keyboard is a web-based app that is (apparently) part of a teaching resource site for the Birmingham (UK) area. But this is the web, and if we can find it, we can play with it.

What Is It?
The Virtual Keyboard is exactly what it sounds like. Think of the cheap bargain bin synth at your local department store. Remove some of the features. That's the Virtual Keyboard. The keys are labeled with the note names, which really helps when it is used as a teaching tool.

What Is That Noise?
You get a whopping total of 9 dreadful (fun dreadful, not the bad kind) synth instruments. When you activate the keyboard (click on the screen), you can use your computer keyboard to play, or you can click on the keys with your mouse. Actually, the sounds aren't all bad. The double bass has a good low end, and shakes a few things on my desk when I hit a low D. It does require a brief delay to reload when you change instruments, so you won't be switching in mid-song with this.

Give Me A Beat
The Virtual Keyboard also contains 6 canned drum patterns selectable to accompany your master works. The drums are actually pretty good. Most are pretty synthy/dancy things, but there's a couple good psuedo-latin percussion patterns(Patterns 3 and 5), and a decent straight ahead rock beat that could actually be usable (Pattern 2). I'm not saying you'd want to sample it on your next track, but it's still pretty good for the context.

Chord Mode
There is a cool mode that you don't normally see in any synth. Chord mode allows you to build a chord one note at a time. You click on all the keys in the chord, then click "Play Chord" to hear what you just did, without the need for actually figuring out the fingering on your own. This is really useful(?), since the keyboard is technically polyphonic, but the notes don't always trigger at the same time. You'll get more rolling notes than chords if you try to play it properly.

You Get What You Pay For
There are, as you might guess, a few features that it lacks, since it was designed as a teaching tool. Volume is the big one. Most of the synths absolutely overpower the drum beats, at an almost laughable level. There is also no velocity sensitive mode, probably because your mouse and computer keyboard are on-off switches, so there's no way to specify the strength of the velocity. Also disappointing is the lack of a tempo control on the drum patterns. After these "lackings", there should be no surprise when I point out there is no record/playback mode, which I would think would be a great addition to this as a teaching tool. After all, hearing what you really played versus what you think you played is a major learning experience.

Final Thoughts
If you've got kids (or want to act like one), this is a great web app to goof around with, as long as your speaker volume is kept in check. The organ will likely drive you nuts, as will the saxophone, but the steel drum, double bass, and pan pipes are fun to groove with.

With zero learning curve, this is a nice teaching toy. The Virtual Keyboard is definitely worth a few minutes diversion before you get back to the world of your own music.

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Site Review: Tank-FX.com

In any reasonably priced studio (home or pro), one of the elusive sounds is reverb. Sure, there are any number of free reverb effects available, both software and hardware, but they all fall a little short of the ideal mark: real echoes in a real environment. Sure, you can get those echoes by recording vocals in a bathroom (a la Jim Morrison), but that is really impractical for most reverb needs. Some effects are getting closer (like convolution reverb) but there is a lot of CPU power you'll eat in a hurry when you use one.

I have recently found a German site that is a really fresh take on the problem of reverb. Tank-FX (http://www.tank-fx.com) is a site with a unique claim - they will play your sample in a concrete water tank and record the resulting sound. As their subtitle says, it is "Non-Virtual Reverb".

The Tank
My apologies if I get any of these details wrong - the details on the site are only in German, and I'm at the mercy of a semi-garbled translation by Babelfish. The tank itself is part of the Oberhausener train station, built in 1932, and was originally built to hold water that was used to refill steam locomotives. This tank is massive - 11 meters (36 feet) tall, 7m (23 feet) in diameter. Look around the site (especially the tab "aufbau", which translates as "structure") for pictures of the tank that they're using. Massive. Somehow, the operators of the site were able to get the permission to install speakers on the bottom of the tank and suspend microphones in the top of the tank. This is all wired to a Unix server, and suddenly you have a new FREE reverb toy online.

How To Use It?
This is really simple to use. Click the red "Record Sample" button at the top of the screen, and you get a clever rack-mount style interface. Samples are by default Normalized, but you can skip this with the "Bypass Normalize" button. Output format is selectable as MP3, FLAC, or Ogg-Vorbis formats. You also select you Wet/Dry mix.

When you hit the "Record" button, you are taken to another screen where you Browse to select your upload file. Uploaded files must be WAV files. This seems odd, since you can't get the output back as a WAV file, but we can still work with it. In a non-user friendly move, the "Do It" button is instead labeled "Submit Query". Then you wait for it to do its job and it gives you a file back that you can do a "Save as..." to save locally.

My Experiences So Far
I've been playing with Tank-FX for a couple days, and the results are pretty good, with a few words of caution. First, I have had mixed results when using any wet/dry mix. It seems that even a 50/50 mix causes the dry to seriously overpower the wet. I think the much lower levels of the wet sound are not properly compensated for in their mixing routines.

I have also found that as of this writing, the right channel is basically dead. You get a wash of static and only a faint trace of the sound. This was done with 100% wet signal, so you can hear the tank by itself. It's fairly simple to pull the MP3 output into Audacity and split the channels (and discard the right channel), and the sound really jumps out at you.

My recommendation is to run everything at 100% wet, strip the right channel, and mix it back to the original either in Audacity or within your DAW.

I have also seem on their comments board some people have gotten unwelcome environmental sounds back in their samples. Mostly banging, most likely from construction or other heavy equipment in the general area. This seems to be more of a problem if you're running sounds during the daytime (in Germany) and not a problem if you're running during German night hours. Do a little time research, and you should be fine.

Limitations
The limitations on the Tank-FX site are fairly few. You have to upload in WAV only. The file cannot be more than 60 seconds. Output in MP3, FLAC, or Ogg-Vorbis only. The space is a single defined BIG space, so you're only getting BIG reverb.

Yet, it would seem that all of these limitations still beat the heck out of digital fake-reverb if you're going for the big hall reverb sound. Of course, this is not the type of reverb you'd want to put your whole track through, but for enhancing a specific instrument, voice, or sound bite, this is a great option.

Wrap-up
I honestly think Tank-FX is one of the coolest net freebies I have ever come across. The limitations are really a lot less than your average free VST's limitations. And there is no "this is nice, but how about pay for more options" angle that we have all grown so accustomed to seeing. Check it out and give them praise on their board. This is one site that deserves to get some positive credit.

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Gear/Site Review: Hobnox AudioTool

I'm not really sure if this is technically gear to be reviewed or a web site with a cool app. I think it's a little of both. What I'm talking about is an online app that gives you the look, feel, and control of old school electronic music making. What I'm talking about is the Hobnox AudioTool.

Who are they?
Hobnox is a site that focuses on collaboration between artists and is very much centered on the collaborative spirit of the whole "Web 2.0" thing. There's a lot of content on their site, and it ranges from simple to inspiring to a plain waste of bandwidth.

What is it?
The Hobnox AudioTool is a simple point and click interface that simulates a number of major electronic instruments - the TB-303 bass synth, the TR-808 drum machine, and the TR-909 drum machine. You also have a host of other effects pedals to use - everything from compressors, flangers, delays, gates, EQs, Reverb - all standard stomp box effects are here. You also have a 16 channel mixer, a master output control, and signal splitters and mergers. That's a lot of gear to play with.

How do you use it?
The Hobnox AudioTool is extremely simple to use to get started. You connect up wires in the signal paths you want, and let the machines run. Sound simple? It is...if you know the machines. For those of us spoiled by the current style of DAWs to put our music together, this is going to be a completely alien experience. There is no central handler for the patterns in any of these machines. (Yes, you can make the 303 trigger from an external source, but it's still not "true" control, is it?) You build each pattern in each machine, and control them by turning the correct knob. The machines seem to be fairly accurate simulations of the originals, though the 808 doesn't have that unholy deep subsonic bass that the original was notoriously famous for.

No, Really, How Do I Use It?
If you really want to be serious about how to make something "real" with it, you will probably want to Google for programming guides for the TR-808, TR-303, and TR-909. These machines are so popular that there are a wealth of resources on how to use them. I'm not that old school, so I prefer the "what happens when I do this" school of thought. Nothing comes out planned, but it always comes out fresh.

What Can I Do Besides Play Around?
The Hobnox AudioTool includes a recorder function that allows you to record your "performance". It is saved under your Hobnox account (a clever way to encourage you to register on their site). So if you want to get all "old school" with your music, you can build your fantasy machine here, record it, and merge it into another project later on. The files are compressed with a Vorbis encoder, so you may need to convert the output file to another format, depending on your project needs.

Final Thoughts
According to the news on the site, this latest version (which is still listed as a BETA) has a lot of under the hood enhancements that will allow them to (in the future) give users the ability to create new synthesizers and effects. This sounds promising, but it also sounds like they are trying to get people sucked into the vortex of building add-ons for this toy/tool/thing. While I'm all in favor if user-developed content, it seems a little silly to have everything built from scratch for this system. Now what would be really great is if they would develop a VST host into the site, so users could plug in their freeware VSTs. That would give the Hobnox AudioTool a lot more flexibility and value.

As it is, Hobnox AudioTool is a cool toy. It is definitely one of the most advanced audio toys built on a Flash platform to date. It is definitely worth playing with at least once.

Check it out at:
http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool.1046.en.html

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Site Review: HowToTuneAGuitar.org

If you've ever looked for instructional guitar videos online, you'll find an ugly pile of subscription sites and "pay us and you'll play like Clapton in thirty days" claims that you know are extremely bloated. I've looked at a few sites that have appeared to be good, but I'm not going to spend the money to get into the subscription areas. It seems like it is a misguided use of my money. Recently I have come across a site that is playing by a (slightly) different set of rules: http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org.

Why On-line Tuning?
The name of the site makes it seem like a one-trick pony, but it actually has more goodness buried inside. First, let's talk about the main focus: Tuning a guitar. Yes, I know most guitarists have a digital tuner of their own, but when you're working at your desktop studio, sometimes it is easier to use online tools than to 1) find your tuner, 2) find fresh battery for the tuner, 3) unplug your rig to connect the tuner, 4) tune it, before 5) putting everything back the way it was, and you've forgotten what you were going to play.

Tune Me
The online tuner is a six note widget that allows you to turn on each note, and it will repeat a clean guitar tone of that note until you turn that one off. Then you can tune by ear to the tone it plays. (If you're really interested in wasting time, you can play a rudimentary tune on it, as long as you are only playing the open strings - but that's goofing off, isn't it?) What makes this so helpful beyond a pocket tuner is all of the alternate tunings. There are a ton of alternates both familiar (Drop D, Half Step Down, etc) and a lot that are completely alien to me (I have no idea WHAT a Buzzard tuning is, but I now know it tunes to C, F, C, G, A#, F). One weakness to the tuner is that when it is playing tuning notes for alternate forms of instrument, it uses the same tones. For example, the Dobro setting still sounds like a regular guitar. But this can be overlooked for two main reasons: It is a free tool, and I don't actually own any of the unusual instruments like a Dobro.

Another bonus is the tuner widget. It is a mini-version of the tuner on the site, but limited to standard tuning only. I have embedded it in my sidebar (Called "Tune-O-Matic"), if you want to play with it.

Tutorials
In addition to the tuner, the site also features a decent library of guitar lessons. These do not appear to be custom videos for the site, but rather the results of extensive YouTube digging. As a result, they are at various levels of helpfulness, and the "teachers" are at various skill levels themselves. But they are pretty good. (I particularly like the way the teaching video for "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" includes on-screen diagrams and read-along fingering and pattern charts overlaid over the video). Even though these are all YouTube embedded videos, the site provides a good filter for pre-screened content, so you don't have to waste time getting lost in the vacuum of YouTube, where people have been known to get lost for days.

Chords and Scales
They also another widget called "Chordbot", which gives you 4 fingerings for just about every possible chord you've ever heard of, in a nice visual of the fretboard in a very readable format. If learning the various scales is more your interest, there are also multiple fingerings presented for every major and minor scale, again in a nicely presented format (though as individual pages for each scale, unlike the integrated "Chordbot").

Reviews
There are a few "reviews" on the site as well, primarily of teaching tools and lesson software. I'm not too interested in buying lessons, as I mentioned earlier, but I took a closer look anyway. It didn't take long to realize that the "reviews" section is really just an affiliate link farm, with all the ones I checked linking to pages that were built in exactly the same endless one-page-infomercial format common with "get rick quick" e-book sites. So there isn't anything that I would consider a "review", and I'd recommend pretending that section doesn't exist.

Other Stuff
Yes, there is actually a section called "Other Stuff", which is a infrequent blog of guitar related topics. There seems to be some level of ranting against Guitar Hero, but that's to be expected from "normal" guitarists. Not a lot of action on the blog, so probably not something to be on the top of your feed reader (if at all).

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
HowToTuneAGuitar.org is good at their core proposition: tuning your guitar. They are also good with their collection of YouTube-scavenged Guitar lessons. And yes, the Chordbot and the scales are worth your while, too. The rest? Blatant ads that take up more space than their original content. Go for the tuner, stay for the Chordbot and the lessons. Skip the rest.

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