We have, in the past, been guilty of the odd April Fool article but, ironically, many of the daft ideas we proposed eventually became actual products. However, sometimes new things come along that seem too far‑fetched even for an SOS April Fool.
If we'd written an article in the '90s which suggested that you would soon be able to buy a piece of software that would let you sing any melody, and then automatically produce a complete backing track of high‑quality MIDI sounds to accompany it in a choice of styles, you would have been certain it was a wind‑up, especially if we'd told you it was available for less than the price of a round of drinks at your local. And yet we saw exactly that at the NAMM show, in the form of Songsmith. Marketed by Microsoft, Songsmith combines their technology and expertise with the pattern-generation system developed for Band In A Box and sounds from US education and sample specialists Garritan. Whether you see it as dumbing‑down music or a means of empowering singers by giving them the means to get their ideas into demo form is up to you, but there's no denying that it's a clever concept and one that I'm sure we will see evolve over the coming years.
Another 'unlikely' product unveiled at NAMM was the MOTU Volta plug‑in, the general product description for which reads exactly like an SOS April Fool article. You know the sort of thing — plausible technology but who in their right mind... The idea behind Volta is that all those voltage‑controlled synths and modular systems out there (see our article on modulars in this very issue) can be controlled from a software plug‑in that uses multi‑channel audio interfaces as control voltage output ports. The more channels you have, the more parameters you can control simultaneously. As it happens, MOTU interfaces use DC-coupled circuitry, so they're perfect for this. What's more, the oscillator outputs can be fed back into the interface inputs, allowing the system to calibrate itself for accurate tuning. A niche product maybe, but what a great idea!
With so many real products now paralleling our April ramblings (we joked about DAWs for game consoles but now they're available in phones, for heaven's sake!), maybe it's only a matter of time before we see miniature air‑bags that deploy automatically if you drop a tube or ribbon microphone, software that can mix songs for you, helium‑injection automatic pitch‑correction for wind instruments, or DAWs that rate your finished mix and tell you on a scale of one to 10 how commercial it is. After all, who would have believed a thing like Auto-Tune could ever exist when home recording first gained a foothold in the early '80s?
Paul White Editor In Chief