Page 10 - ACCENT Aug 10

10 ACCENT Special Edition - August 2010
ACID Music Studio 8 released
A powerhouse for music education
For many years now, ACID Music
Studio has been one of the most
popular software programs in
education. It’s engaging and fun
to use, but is also a very useful
teaching tool.
The appeal of ACID Music Studio is primarily
its ease of use. And to some extent, this
gives rise to a bit of a quandary... how to
maintain this simplicity and increase the feature set
with the release of each new version. As a result,
the basic functionality has changed little... with just using stills and so on. This makes ACID Music
a couple of the new features enhancing the manipu-
lation of loops.
Quality timestretching
ACID Music Studio has always done a good job of
timestretching... i.e. changing the speed or duration
of a loop without affecting the pitch. The new
Zplane elastique timestretching feature improves
on this even further, particularly with more extreme
examples of timestretching involving vocals. You
can also use the ‘Preserve formants when stretch-
ing’ option to avoid the “chipmunk” effect.
Tempo Curves
It’s now also possible to input tempo curves into
compositions. This allows you to easily create grad-
ual transitions from one tempo to another over the
duration of a project. There are 6 transition types
including Linear, Fast, Slow, Smooth, Sharp and
Hold. Tempo curves are an efficient way to create
dramatic or subtle tempo changes in your project,
and an invaluable tool if composing music for film,
when such changes can be quite frequent.
Perfect for composing soundtracks
It’s worth noting here that, while it’s not a new fea-
ture, ACID Music Studio does support all popular
video and graphic formats, and is the perfect tool
to introduce students to arranging and composing
soundtracks for film, visual arts, “story books”
Studio particularly relevant to middle school as an
introduction to music creation using technology.
New Mixing Console
Previously only available in Acid Pro*, the new
audio and MIDI mixing console provides an inte-
grated view of all tracks and busses in your project
with the appearance of a traditional hardware-based
mixer. Supporting up to four audio busses and four
assignable effects chains, the additional routing op-
tions allow for a more flexible and efficient studio
recording environment.
Again, for middle schools students, this can be a
great way becoming familiar with mixer layout and
functions while also learning practical mixing tech-
niques, before being unleased on real (and often
expensive) hardware.
Remix it
There aren’t too many students who wouldn’t
jump at the chance to remix their favourite songs.
ü Middle School
ü Secondary
ACID Music Studio’s Beatmapper function takes
the guess work out of this process, freeing up more
time to spend on the creative rather than technical
process.
When remixing a song the first few
steps are to import the song, deter-
mine the tempo and divide the song
into workable lengths, called re-
gions. Determining the tempo of an
entire song can often be a frustrating
and time consuming process... par-
ticularly if there are tempo changes
throughout the song. With Beatmapper this process
is simple. This tool automatically determines the
tempo of a complete song, and new markers in
ACID Music Studio allow you to Beatmap songs
with varying tempos and time signatures.
Finally, the finished project can now be exported
in additional file formats such as AAC and FLAC ,
allowing for more options with media and hardware
devices including the PSP, iPod and iPhone.
In addition to these new features, ACID Music
Studio comes with over 3,000 loops in a wide
variety of genres; an array of audio effects includ-
ing reverb, delay, chorus, phase and more; support
for DirectX and VST audio effect and VST virtual
instruments; inline MIDI editing; multitrack audio
recording; publish songs to web and burn straight
to CD.
All this makes ACID Music Studio suitable as an
ideal starting point for students in upper primary,
right through to film composition and other music
technology studies in senior secondary.
If you’re new to ACID Music Studio there are
33 ‘Show Me How’ tutorials, with step-by-step
instructions for using all the main features. These
will undoubtedly prove very useful to students and
educators alike.
Highly recommended for middle
school thru senior secondary!
More details from Music EDnet
Ph 1300 723 700
Email: info@musicednet.com.
*When visiting schools we occasionally discover they have
purchased copies of ACID Pro. In the majority of cases this is an
unnecessary expense, as ACID Music Studio more than covers the
requirements for secondary level studies.