The Effect of Minor vs. Major Keys Illustrated Nicely

Major Scaled #2 : REM - "Recovering My Religion" from major scaled on Vimeo.

Although it's apparently been around for awhile, I first learned about MajorScaledTV's videos yesterday via this post on Gawker.  What they do is feed famous minor-key songs such as the Doors' "Riders on the Storm" and REM's "Losing My Religion" and change them to major keys, presumably making use of Celemony's mind-blowing Melodyne software.  If you're familiar with the original material, the effect is quite unsettling.  And it illustrates very well the difference it makes whether a song is in a minor or major key.  It really is integral to how a song is able to manipulate our emotions, especially in conjunction with the mood of the lyrics.

Melodyne Tutorial: Creative Use of the Amplitude Tool

Celemony just uploaded a new video tutorial highlighting some of the less conventional uses for the amplitude tool in Melodyne.

Celemony Introduces Capstan

Celemony, creators of the ground-breaking Melodyne pitch-correction software have announced their newest product: Capstan, a tool aimed at correcting timing/playback speed issues introduced by faulty tapes or playback. Here's what they have to say:

"Being musically intelligent, the Capstan algorithm is capable of recognizing not only the minutest amounts of wow and flutter but also continuous speed variations within the musical material itself and makes possible detailed editing that extends even to drawing in the curve manually. It is based on the patented DNA Direct Note Access technology made famous by the award-winning program Melodyne, which is used worldwide in all major studios for the editing of pitch and timing.

Whilst the precise detection of the wow and flutter represents the actual technological revolution, repairing the recording is easy: the musical material is simply played back with the velocity curve inverted. Pure varispeed – guaranteed free from artifacts."

News from NAMM

As you are no doubt aware, the NAMM show started today. New product info is leaking out little by little and so far there hasn't been too much that has blown me away. The stuff that's interesting (to me):

• Spectrasonics announces new sounds for Omnisphere, a new bass instrument called Trillium, and an update to Stylus RMX which includes the new 'time designer' which allows loops to be used in different time signatures, to be locked to other grooves, and a new method of creating rules-based, musically useful variations on a loop.

• Akai has announced the APC40, a performance controller specifically for Ableton Live that looks pretty cool.

• Waldorf introduced a keyboard version of the Blofeld which adds 60MB of sample memory, and more excitingly, they also introduced the Largo, a software synth based on the same sound engine as the Q, micro-Q, and Blofeld hardware synths!

I'm sure there's more to come... Native Instruments isn't announcing until later this afternoon, but since they were only announcing 1 new product aimed at producers, and I assume that's the Maschine thing, I'm not hoping for much that's going to knock my socks off.

EDIT: How could I forget? Celemony is releasing Melodyne Editor, the first product based on their amazing looking DNA technology that allows users to alter notes within chords!