IZOTOPE OZONE 5 ADVANCED | £669 (€799/$999)

Ozone 5, also available as Advanced

REVIEW
It’s long been held that iZotope Ozone is a tool of the mastering engineer, a person steeped in arcane audio lore who exercises some kind of voodoo over final mixes in order to take them from passable to ear-gasmic. In doing so, obscure outboard (kit you could never afford) and in-box esoterica is brought to bear, its function beyond the ken of mere mortal project studio pilots. Mastering is, after all, the domain of an elite breed of engineer, scientist and audio wizard who, in another life, was a bat. What use, therefore, is a suite of mastering tools in the creative pursuits of tracking and mixing? The answer, in the way iZotope has engineered things, is: Lots.

Ozone 5 Advanced breaks down into six processing components, each of which is as legitimately employed in the composition, arrangement, recording and mixing stages of music production as in the final meltdown prior to publishing. At launch, announced last October 2011, iZotope’s Nick Dika spoke of Ozone 5 Advanced as offering: “…mixing and mastering engineers an even higher level of flexibility, precision and control.” Nick did not, however, mention we muzos who are never happier than when appropriating whatever comes to hand and slapping it capriciously onto the audio canvas, our muses to indulge. Before a blow-by-blow account of each item in Ozone 5, let’s settle back for video overviews of the standard and Advanced products…

IZOTOPE T-PAIN BUNDLE | *£59.95/*$99

*Be mindful that iZotope's European distributor Time+Space is offering this £59.95 money-saving deal on The T-Pain Bundle until a time that is yet to come (as about as accurate as can be had for now), while iZotope's US website has it at $99, a saving of $59 on the US SRP.

REVIEW
When a singer has a bad throat and there’s still a job to do, he or she may reach for a potion enriched by dextromethorphan, eg Robitussin. Interestingly, if you take a butt-load you enter an anaesthetised, dissociative state called robo-tripping. But what if the singer can’t sing anyway? Not through malady or overdosing on meds, but because they're tone deaf. Well, for the young, good-looking, pneumatic type who’s sectionable enough to want to give up every last shred of credibility in the pursuit of X-list celebrity, there’s good news. And yes, I am addressing those attention-craving nut-jobs who aspire to be assembled in facilities like The X Factory.

Singers who can’t sing have long been able to bluff their way, in live performance or on TV, by miming. However, trouble arises in pressure situations, such as facing a microphone in a recording studio and having no control over the pitch of what’s coming out of one’s gob. It’s a bad idea to use a real singer, as Milli Vanilli discovered, but there is a work-around: Robo-singing. And no, it doesn't involve DXM, ketamine or PCP, although you may need such stuff when the tabloid press has finished with your private life. Prior to that, we've a technological solution called autotune, by which the voice is cranked forcibly into pitch.

One artist taking autotune to the extreme is vocal-tech-toting radical T-Pain, a man inclined to mix it up with urban, or RnB, or something - well, he talks a lot, so let's call it rap with frilly bits. And his take on the genre has lately been given an extra shove by that most rad of software developers, iZotope. So, leaving a polemic on autotune in modern pop production until later, let's take a butcher's at iZ's The T-Pain Bundle.

HOW TO DEVELOP THE MINDSET OF A MUSIC ENTREPRENEUR: 5 TIPS ON POSITIVITY

Guest contrib Astrid Baumgardner says
you've power to change your perceptions

CAREER MOVES
In 2012, which at the time of writing is next year unless something goes really screwy at CERN over Xmas, MuzoBlog will be broadening its blogging horizons to include comment on career development in music. It's a move driven by technological change. Society is changing, the way we express ourselves artistically is changing, as is the nature of our relationship with the audience. However, such traditional qualities as talent, dedication, attitude and self-belief will still get you far. The road is long with many a wind-up, but it need not be heavy going. In scoping out a broader blogscape, MuzoBlog LinkedIn with lecturer in careers in music at the Yale School of Music, Astrid Baumgardner. She's a certified professional coach with an unenviable speciality: Getting musicians to get their acts together.

Here, she offers some muzo-mindset modifiers which provide an ideal preface to MuzoBlog's forthcoming career-moves coverage. If you're the type for whom the word 'business' in the context of music brings on an attack of the vapours, relax. It doesn't have to be that way. If you're using 'career' as a verb of motion, instead of a n or adj, in reference to your own professional development, put down the bottle. Just absorb Astrid's wisdom and prepare to become a power conduit...

FXPANSION GEIST 1.0.4.4* | £99**

REVIEW ROUND-UP
Zeitgeist, a German word that's firtled its way into the English language, translates as 'time' and 'spirit'. Sure, it’s taken to mean ‘spirit of the age’ but, taken literally, it encompasses two significant notions to those intent on fashioning spirited grooves in as little time as possible. Ironically, it seems to have taken an age for MuzoBlog to summon a post on FXpansion’s groovester Geist, but there is method in the timing.

Launched late last year, this sampling instrument was, and still is, billed as ‘a complete, integrated rhythm production sandbox for the studio, for the tour bus or the stage’, fusing sample-sculpting tools with peppy pattern step-sequencing, enabling you to rapidly browse, slice and assign loops to pads in a ‘slick unified environment’. Saving time when devising rhythm patterns was high on FXpansion’s agenda and the media coverage that appeared shortly after launch was, and is, very positive in the main, backing up the developer’s claims of speed and ease of use. Provided you’re au fait with step-sequencing techniques, that is. Well, time has lately become of the essence for those not already having a Geistly time of things, hence this timely article and the twin asterisks in the headline. To whit...

A BLACK FRIDAY FOR RP-DELAY

Buy Papen's RP-Delay for £10 and...

...get RP-Distort for £[cue tumbleweed]

EDITORIAL - BARG ALERT!
MuzoBlog is not typically a port of call for catching up on retailers' or distributors' special offers. However, very occasionally, a bargain will come a-romping to the field, horns waving, flags blaring, making like a mountain troll at the gates of Minas Tirith - ie, a conspicuous no-brainer you'd be daft to resist. That's not to say Rob Papen's RP-Delay smells of squished orc. On the contrary, this AU/VST/RTAS plugin, along with its comrade in ambience RP-Verb, is well precious. I'll leave it to Papen to point out the pertinent, such as extensive modulation implementation, the means to reverse reflections as you like and even simulate the characteristics of tape delay. Let’s just say that from now until 30 November, the download from UK distributor Time+Space will cost you but £10.

That's right, T+S is offering RP-Delay for 10 measly quid (or €12 in foreign) and, on registering the product with the developer, you get a free copy of RP-Distort. So, two juicy plugs that would otherwise retail for €98 in total (or $138 in the currency of a certain British colony that celebrates Thanksgiving, or some such) can be yours for the price of a small-ish turkey. I happen to know that both effectors are particularly fruity because both are deployed in The Surgery, MuzoBlog's test facility, and are gaining much favour. The AU and VST incarnations are 64-bit (as well as backward compatible for 32-bit environments), hence multiple instances can be loaded on multi-core, well RAMmed computers with impunity ready to echo and distort programme material into whatever space or state of distress is appropriate. In lieu of a more comprehensive MuzoBlogpost on each, like wot I wrote for Papen's RP-Verb in September 2010, I'll point you to RP-Delay's and RP-Distort's product pages at the developer's site for a take on the headline features and audio examples a-go-go. So ready your plastic and prepare to poke T+S's shiny new servers.

EASTWEST THE DARK SIDE | €355.81/$395

REVIEW
Upon a time, a man named Doug saw a huge, gaping hole. Peering into its murky depths, he neither saw nor heard a thing. Not a peep, ping or wobble-bass. Then and there, he avowed to fill this hole with sound. But not with the pristine timbres of real-world instruments - he wanted something more edgy and with a dollop of bedlam. So began his journey towards The Dark Side - a product addressing a hole in a market crying out for banged-up, distorted, ouchy-sounding sonics. Says our protagonist Doug Rogers, founder of specialist sample-production powerhouse EastWest: “The Dark Side idea came to me when I was mentoring a young alternative group about some demos they sent me. To my ears, the tracks didn’t sound tough enough for their intended market, so I told them they needed to toughen up their sound.” Trawling the sample library market, including EastWest’s considerable catalogue, he couldn’t find the “mass aural destruction” required to finesse the band’s ditties. So, partnering with Grammy-winning producer and famed doyen of distortion devotees everywhere Dave Fridmann, he set about trashing the timbres of traditional instruments in order to achieve full-on sonic mayhem in a neatly organised EastWest instrument.

TOONTRACK EZMIX | £45.95

REVIEW
There are those who assert that the greatest invention in the history of humankind is the wheel. Then there are the more pragmatic who point out that even more significant was the invention of the second wheel. And it's this notion of reinventing the wheel that, while a boon for cyclists in a hurry, can cost valuable time when mixing a track in a hurry. Come mixdown, a common enough approach is to flatten the EQs, set all effects and other processing to neutral, zero the faders and start from scratch, effectively embarking on reinvention. Naturally, the experienced engineer or producer will have a few tricks up his or her sleeve and will rapidly deploy them as the programme material dictates. If it's a rock track, application of the ideal EQ, compression and ambience for the drums will be second-nature. A wafty ballad may demand a particular reverb on the vocal and, if the singer is an X Factor winner or other B-list celebrity, there'll be the immediate lunge for an auto-tune insert. Such experience, typically arrived at through trial and error, is hard-won, but pays dividends when rushing a production to market.

For the inexperienced, or the project-studio pilot wanting good results fast without having to absorb years of sound-engineering lore, wouldn't it be handy to have preset production techniques instantly to hand? Rather than doing battle with an incomprehensible 30-band graphic EQ, suffering compression depression or wracking one's brain in search of the right reverb setting, how about instant track processing that's just the ticket and within easy actuation via a few mouse-clicks? Enter Toontrack EZmix, a VST/AU/RTAS plugin for Windows and OS X developed in conjunction with renowned DSP developer Overloud and engorged with the collective experience of a small army of audio engineers.

ABLETON LIVE 8.2.6 | FROM €349 PLUS PUREMAGNETIK RETRO SYNTHS | €FREE!*

REVIEW: UPDATE
If you’ve had your head in a bucket for the past 10 years, three things may have happened. You’ll be sick of the smell of KFC, you may have acquired the shredding skills of Buckethead himself and you will not have encountered mention of Ableton’s DJ-friendly, muzo-matey digital audio workstation (DAW) Live. You may also be unaware of the fact that Live has cranked itself up to v8.2.6 and, for a limited period, there’s a FREEBIE worth €79 going FREE, at NO COST and FOR NOWT. Fans of retro synthesizers - Moogs, ARPs, Korgs and more - steel thyselves for a bargain. Provided you’re a registered Live/Suite 8 user, that is. Meantime, for the bucket-bonce afflicted, let's rapidly recap this DAW's past decade. Live burst into life in October 2001 and was initially perceived as a tool enabling those who’d become bored playing other people’s records (ie, DJs) to realize aspirations of producing their own material. Live’s main selling point was the ease with which loops could be imported and warped to match the tempo and pitch of a project, then triggered at appropriate points for on-the-fly creation of new tunes (or ‘toonz’, even).

Real musicians were quick to latch onto Live’s potential for easy and intuitive jamming - something not so readily possible with regular DAWs, which require some degree of careful prep when composing new material. The simplicity of Live’s two uncluttered interfaces was, and is, a big draw. We’ve Session for triggering audio and MIDI clips, providing an excellent environment for musical experimentation and improvised live performance; and Arrange offering a more traditional sequencer-style layout when it’s time to stop wincing about and structure a coherent composition. If this is all new to you, and you've a spare minute, let's have developer Ableton’s CEO Gerhard Behles give a brief overview of what Live is about...