BuildOrBuy Network News http://www.buildorbuy.org/ http://www.buildorbuy.net/ Subject: Giga Newsletter For June 2002 Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 18:30:12 -0700 From: gigainfo@tascam.com To: news@buildorbuy.net You've received this e-mail because you requested to get updated information about GigaStudio, GigaSampler and associated audio tools. If you do not wish to receive future notices via e-mail, then please reply to this message with "REMOVE" in the subject header. Be sure to include your name and e-mail address as well. === Giga Newsletter For June 2002 It's Like A Mall…For Giga! Did you know that you can get GigaStudio software, sound libraries and more Giga-related stuff from the comfort of your living room? You did? Well, did you know that the online Giga store has been recently re-designed so that it offers fully secure shopping? If you can't find that elusive sound library at your local dealer, be sure to check out the huge selection at our online shopping site. http://www.shopteac.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=SN Giga In The Gaming World In last month's Giga Newsletter, we talked about GigaStudio in the "music for TV" world. This prompted a flood of responses from hundreds of other Giga-maniacs who are using Giga for every TV music production situation under the sun, including commercials, news shows, sports shows, reality TV, infomercials, and a ton of cable specific programming. Another interesting area where Giga is becoming the standard is in the computer gaming arena. I recently spoke with Wolfgang Hamann, the project leader at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, Canada. With a staff of over 250, Radical is a complete video game production facility where titles for X Box and Game Cube are conceived and created from beginning to end. Obviously, as technology marches on, the quality of the games being produced must advance as well. As Wolfgang points out "We wanted to improve every facet of the games we create, which most certainly includes the music aspect of the game itself". Radical was recently turned on to the power of GigaStudio and the buzz surrounding the product. Realizing the potential to raise the bar on the quality of the music that could be created, Radical turned its staff of composers loose on four GigaStudio 160 systems. The first two products from Radical featuring music created with GigaStudio will be released in the fall in the form of game versions of the wildly popular "Dark Angel" TV series as well as a little Disney sleeper called "Monster's Inc." :-) Stay tuned for more details on Giga in a gaming world! "What's In The Box???!!!" I often get asked what people should keep in mind when putting a system together to not only run Giga, but to make it really smoke when it comes to performance. Realizing that this is a very common question, I figured that I would write something up and make it available for all of you. GigaStudio is a powerful computer audio application. Working with audio on your PC has a different set of considerations than other, less system-intensive computer chores. Here is a brief description of specific system components that play an important role in how well GigaStudio will perform: Processor: Pentium, and most recently, AMD processors are considered the standard for doing any sort of audio work on a PC. To get the maximum performance from GigaStudio 160, you need to be running a processor with a 800 MHz rating or higher spec. Processors like Intel Celerons are fine for basic computing chores, but are not well suited for audio and should be avoided. RAM: Although Giga streams the samples from your installed hard drive, GigaStudio does buffer a small portion of each sample into the installed RAM. This allows your computer to play back the sample with minimal response latency. The amount Giga buffers into RAM is a mere 64K per sample (a little less than 1/4 of a second). With this in mind, it is a good idea to put a respectable amount of RAM into your system. A bare minimum of 256 MB (and a recommended 512 or more) is a good amount to have and will make your computer audio experience much more pleasant. Hard Drive: There are 3 considerations when choosing a hard drive for your Giga computer: 1. RPM Rating: A minimum rotational speed of 7200 RPM is recommended to run Giga efficiently. It is not really necessary to run SCSI drives, but if you have them…use em'. A good ATA 100 drive will also do the job just fine. 2. Seek Time: Seek time is the measured amount of time it takes for your drive to access the data. When streaming instrument data from a hard drive, you want to be able to access the data as fast as you can. The faster the seek time, the better the performance. A seek time of no more than 8-9 milliseconds is recommended. 3. Size: Keeping in mind that Giga instruments are rather large, you need to make sure you get a hard drive that will give you enough room to put all of your instrument data. The flip side to this drive consideration is that although drives are getting bigger and bigger (100 GB and higher these days), the components within the drive, specifically the platters that the data is written to, are being made thinner to accommodate a larger storage capacity in a traditional form factor. This is not unlike the analog cassette tape issue, where the tape is thinner at 90 minutes and higher to fit inside the plastic cassette housing. A drive streaming Giga instruments will be working quite hard, so you don't want to go too far beyond the 60-80 GB size rating. It is also a good idea to put all of your Giga instruments onto a separate drive from your OS and program data. This is common practice in the world of computer audio, and is most certainly a good idea with Giga. OS: Giga will work under all four (XP, 2000, 98SE, and ME) of the Windows OS offerings from Microsoft equally well. There are slight differences between them, and it might be a good idea to do some research to find out which one will work best for you. The TASCAM Giga user forums are a great place to see what operating systems other Giga users are successfully running. http://www.tascambbs.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php Giga Tip: Distributed Wave One of the most overlooked, yet powerful features of GigaStudio is the Distributed Wave function. Unlike the Instrument Editor within Giga, which allows you to build detailed and elaborate instruments, Distributed Wave lets you map single samples to keys on your keyboard in seconds. Here are a couple of situations where this can be extremely useful: Drum Loops: I had hundreds of loops that I had acquired over the years on CD-ROMs, floppy disks, and Zip disks. I loaded them all on to my Giga computer's hard drive, and mapped them out in Distributed Wave. In seconds, I had created four different Giga instruments with all of the loops available at my fingertips. Sound Effects: A person doing sound design can now have thousands of sound effects loaded on to their Giga system, and by using Quick Sound within GigaStudio, find specific sound effects and quickly map them to keys in seconds. Imagine being able to locate all of the footstep or door slam samples you have, and map them across a keyboard in seconds! Drum Sounds: Perhaps you work with electronic music, where multi-velocity layered drum samples are not always necessary (ironically, I say this as I listen to Depeche Mode "Ultra"). A lot of the music created in the last 10 years is made up of sound bytes, processed drums, and a bevy of drones, scrapes, shots and sounds that are not necessarily of this world. Map em' out and use them in seconds…long before the musical trend changes yet again :-) I mentioned drum loops earlier, so let's do a step by step procedure and map some loops using Distributed Wave. If you don't have any loops on your system, try the process with any other group of .wav files: 1. With Giga open, click on the Distributed Wave tab. You will now see three very important regions where we will be working: The virtual keyboard where we will trigger our mapped samples, The Loaded Waves window which acts as a temporary holding pool for the samples, and the Wave Palette which is where we will put all of the final sample choices and build our Gig instrument. 2. Using the Quick Sound database search engine, locate a group of .wav files that you want to map (make sure that Quick Sound is set up to look for .wav files). I know that all of the loops I put on to my system were renamed as "Funky Loops". By typing this into Quick Sound, all 378 loops show up in the results window. 3. Now that I have found all of samples, let's try actually mapping them out. First thing we need to do is tell Distributed Wave where to start mapping the samples. On the virtual keyboard, you will see a green triangle. By right clicking on any key on the virtual keyboard, you are able to move this marker. This will determine where Distributed Wave will begin mapping the samples from left to right. 4. Now select a group of .wav files to map. Keep in mind that although there are 120 keys on the virtual keyboard, you will only be able to access 88 from a keyboard controller. Drag the selected group of samples into the Loaded Waves window. After a couple of seconds you will now see all of the .wav files you selected are now listed in this window and mapped across the keyboard. Using your mouse, you can now audition any of the mapped samples. 5. At this point, you can create a .gig file by right clicking in the Loaded Waves window, or if you are auditioning a large group of samples (like sound effects) to select a handful of appropriate sounds, you can highlight samples that you want to keep and press the Add button just above the sample pool. This will move the selected sample into the final Wave Palette. Once you have moved up the desired samples, you can then press Reset to clear the Loaded Waves window, and continue the process of auditioning more samples. When you have gathered all of the final selections in the Wave Palette window, you can then save the group as a .gig file by right-clicking in this window. As you can see, the Distributed Wave feature can be extremely helpful in setting up groups of samples on the fly. Keep it in mind when you need to map samples as quickly and painlessly as possible. New Intrument Editor Tutorial Check out the new GigaStudio Instrument Editor Tutorial created by long time Giga-guru Kevin Phelan. Kevin is no stranger to GigaStudio, and his tutorial will walk you through one of the more complicated aspects of GigaStudio, the Instrument Editor. Kevin's experience and insight sheds incredible light on this powerful feature of GigaStudio. It's free, so have at it! Soundcard Spotlight: Creamware Creamware has been a major player in the computer audio arena for the last 10 years, and although the company has been primarily recognized in Europe, Creamware's American profile and presence has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Known for exceptionally innovative and sonically robust products, Creamware has really jumped behind the Giga movement in a big way by offering GSIF compatibility with their sound card products. Check them out at: www.creamware.com Developer Spotlight: Dan Dean In professional music production communities, the Dan Dean series of orchestral libraries is considered to be some of the finest available. Calling scenic Mercer Island in Washington his home, Dan's first instrument and love is the bass guitar. In the early seventies, Dan began his career as a session bass player in Los Angeles and later in Seattle. A few years later, Dan started his own music production company, and spent much of the last 25 years doing music for advertising clients like Microsoft, Coke, and Hewlett Packard. It was in this environment that, not unlike many of the other library developers, Dan created his first sampled instrument out of a desire to simply "build a better sample library". It was no surprise that the first instrument from a bass player would be a sampled bass…what was a surprise was the response he got from other sample users. Tremendous interest in his sampled bass library led to what we all know now as the Dan Dean Giga-Bass. Dan also had his hands in most of the high profile composing and engineering circles in the Northwest as well. His experience recording and composing with classic orchestral instruments like strings, brass, and woodwinds led him to take his sample library development to the next level. With the help of a newly released piece of software called (come on guys, ya gotta know this one by now!) GigaStudio, Dan raised the bar in the sampled orchestral instrument world with his Solo Strings, Solo Woodwinds, and most recently, Solo Brass. Check out all of the Dan Dean titles here: http://www.shopteac.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SN&Category_Code=SL_DD New Giga Titles Kodish Drum 'n' Bass Pure adrenaline Drum 'n' Bass dance loops. There's a unique drive and power to Kodish's playing; Kodish offers the machine-like energy of Drum 'n' Bass with the emotional impact of real drums; a very powerful combination. Sub-sonic synth grooves and hits played by Cliff Hewitt (Apollo 440) round out this disc. You've hear Kodish live and on recordings by Apollo 440, Chemical Brothers, Maximum Roach, the Jean Michel Jarre remix concert and more. Sampler layouts offer complete control over each instrument/loop in the set. This enables access to only the hat loop or kick loop. Overhead and room mics were recorded on discreet tracks thus enabling user control over tight and dry or big and wet. Mixes of the entire groove are also included. Some loops are heavily processed and trashed out. A complete set of multi-sample single hits is also included. http://www.shopteac.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SN&Product_Code=SL_QAL_KDB&Category_Code=SL_QAL Voices of Native America Volume 2 The most widely anticipated sequel in the history of sampled sounds. Sample producers Douglas Spotted Eagle and Doug Morton have teamed up again. The first volume set a new standard for producers of sample libraries. Volume 2 focuses more on component-based loops and rhythms of Native America. Instruments include deer toe shakers, Taos Drums, Social Drums, and shakers. More flute phrases, single hit big drums and vocals are also included. http://www.shopteac.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SN&Product_Code=SL_QAL_VNA2&Category_Code=SL_QAL Let Us Hear From You GIGATEAM@tascam.com is the connection if you need to find a local Giga dealer, or have a question, request, recommendations, etc. === If you would prefer not to receive further messages from this sender: 1. Click on the Reply button. 2. Replace the Subject field with the word REMOVE. 3. Click the Send button. You may receive one additional e-mail message confirming your removal.