See www.cinesamples.com for products and demos.

PA: First off, how and when did you guys meet?

Cinesamples: “This one time at band camp”….  No seriously, that is where we first met.  A fancy band camp called USDAN on Long Island.  At the time we had both managed to get jobs accompanying musical theatre productions for children.  This must have been around the summer of 2000, just after getting out of high school.  It was really quite a nice job for two college students and we pretty much enjoyed ourselves heartily (well, except for the musical theatre part).  We did spend a great deal of time at lunch discussing the more interesting points of film music, mostly relating to obsessive John Williams observations.

PA: Briefly, what musical training do you both have, and if you studied privately with someone, who?

Cinesamples: For not knowing each other as children we share remarkably similar, musical, pasts.  We were both were trained as classical pianists from Julliard trained pianists who lived locally.  We both grew up playing a healthy diet of Beethoven and Billy Joel (the local hero).  In school Patti played cello (and continues to do so) and Barry played clarinet/bass clarinet.  In college we both started paying attention to composition - continuing studies at the USC Film Scoring Program under Brian King.

PA: Both of you have excellent professional composing credits. And I know from your web sites, that Mike B. is a concert pianist. With all these professional writing and performing opportunities in front of you, why did you each decide to join the growing ranks of composers who produce sample libraries?

Cinesamples: It’s actually quite a simple answer, we were looking for a way to do realistic harp glissandi on a project.  After searching all around for a solution we couldn’t find a really comprehensive answer so we decided to create CineHarp.  After using it by ourselves for a while we decided to make it public.  For most of our libraries this has been the same principle, record something that we need and can’t buy or something we really want.

PA: You’re the first sample development team to live on two coasts. With 3000 miles between you both, what’s your collaboration procedure?

Cinesamples: Instant messenger! — well until Barry moves back out to Los Angeles.  And lots of crazy phone calls.

PA: How did you meet Tim Starnes and what is his ongoing role with Cinesamples?

Cinesamples: Around the time we attending USC we both lived in this studio apartment building off of Hoover near downtown Los Angeles.  Despite the occasional drive by shooting, it was a charming place and our good friend Patrick Kirst (now on the USC Faculty) lived there also. Patrick was good friends with Tim from their undergrad studies and we met that way.

Tim is our audio quality control expert.  He also mixes and engineers most of the libraries.

PA: Are you recording most of your libraries in New York City?

Cinesamples: Yes and no.  For our larger ensemble works we like to go to Seattle - Bastyr is such a lovely place to record and the gear and crew there is first rate.

[Editor's Note: Bastyr is a European-styled chapel built in 1958 by Ralph Lund. It's five stories high, 140 feet long, and has 36 stained glass windows. The original score soundtracks About Schmidt and Die Hard With a Vengeance were recorded there. Click the Bastyr link above for more details on how recording takes place there.]

For our percussion projects we like to record at Manhattan Center Studios since that’s where we originally recorded Drums of War and it seems to make sense to keep that all in the same hall.  Both studios are fantastic and contain an incredible mic cabinet which we love to take advantage of.

Recently we had the honor to do the final sessions at the legendary Clinton Studios in Manhattan.  We were made aware of an opportunity to sample the actual piano used in Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations before it disappeared.  It was an amazing and emotional experience; we even managed to get the original microphones from the Davis sessions.

PA: Many of the independent composer/developers have opted to sell direct. Why did you make the decision to assign sales to a national distributor?

Cinesamples: We have established a mutually beneficial relationship with Big Fish Audio.  Tom Meadow and his staff have twenty years of experience in the market and the work they do allows us time to make new libraries and pursue composing gigs. It really works out for both parties involved.

PA: For a while, you provided libraries in both Kontakt and EXS24 (Logic) formats. Now it appears starting with Hollywoodwinds that your focus is on Kontakt exclusively. What prompted that decision?

Cinesamples: Well, it basically comes down to the scripting and DFD power of Kontakt.  A script heavy library (as most of ours now tend to be) simply cannot exist in any other form at this point.  For example, the time syncing scales in Hollywoodwinds are impossible in EXS24 format.  Also our customers prefer Kontakt to other samplers at a rate of 25 to 1 according to a poll we ran.

PA: Of all your libraries to date, Hollywoodwinds is the most unusual compared to the “standard” woodwlnd libraries currently on the market. How did you decide on the instrumentation?

Cinesamples: The instrumentation is rather standard, woodwinds in three’s. [Editor's Note: Woodwinds in three's were first used by Wagner, continued with by Mahler. In film scoring, John Williams often uses this section size.] It’s the usage of the section that is indeed different.  Whenever practicable, we like to record sections together because it is much more musical for the players in that manner.  If you, for example, have a “clubo” (clarinet, flute, oboe) unison they will naturally balance each other on the stage in a way that is impossible to get by recording them separately.  This was the entire principle for HWW and for all the ensemble patches we do.  So on HWW what you hear is what was we heard on the stage, we didn’t “stack” at all in post. It’s all natural.

We also knew that we needed to concentrate on capturing the piercing qualities of the piccolo and flutes in an ensemble patch - something which we were sorely missing from other libraries.  They are the only part of the WW ensemble you hear during a fully orchestration action scene and needed the attention.

PA: In your own music, how do you personally use Hollywoodwinds?

Cinesamples: Mainly we use the three keyboard patches while we are writing, mostly the tutti patch. We also have all the different tunings for each scale loaded in our template now that Kontakt 4.1 is out and memory is less of an issue.  Also we like to keep the atonal/tonal rips handy.  The other patches we go to when needed.

PA: What made you decide to release this library commercially, rather than keeping it to yourselves as part of your own competitive sonic arsenal?

Cinesamples: We like to share! By the way we love the way it works in collaboration with CineHarp and the way it will work with our future string libraries (which exist only in our minds).

PA: VOXOS. With Symphony of Voices, Symphonic Choirs, the many vocal libraries from other companies, and the newly released Vienna Choirs, Tonehammer Requiem and the recently announced Quantum Leap Choir - why VOXOS? With all these libraries in the field and coming, why add to it? What’s different about what you’re doing - especially since! All of your competitors are also composer/developers like yourselves?

Cinesamples: After VSL Choirs we were the first to announce a new choir library (before TH and EW) - we have just really taken our time in the programming phase.  The reason is simple: to make a choir library this large and complex takes a great amount of time and we didn’t want to rush in with an unfinished product.  For example, in our “phrase builder section”  there are over 100 different recorded samples per pitch. Multiply that by the full range and you can see how large the library gets and how long it took to record.   The key to the library is the concept and programming.  All the programming was well thought out and tested before we recorded a note, the concept and programming is uniform.

We think the VOXOS GUI (graphic user interface) will distinguish itself as being the finest solution possible within the Kontakt Engine which is the preferred sampler of most composers. Our Legato section also features SATB and fully legato soloists in cinematic style. For example the Soprano is based upon a Morricone model, the alto after Lisa Gerrard and the boy soprano was ever done in a cinematic style.  We decided to go cinematic rather then operatic.

PA: Let’s talk about syllables. In the YouTube video on your site you see a grid in the Kontakt player that contains 30 syllables. First, how did you decide on these syllables?

Cinesamples: Having 30 syllables (it may be up to 40 by release or in a future update) allows the composer massive flexibility in composing “lyrics” that sound different from one another.  I mean lets face it, in a typical trailer cue the human ear is not going to be distinguishing lyrics so easily. However, having 30 sounds based on five vowels allows you to make a very realistic sounding lyric, with only a few clicks and one pass on the keyboard. Having actually recorded all of these live on every pitch pays massive dividends on the short articulations.  Artificial synthesis hits a brick wall on shorts, having 3-5 micro cuts on a sound lasting a quarter second is going to sound fake.

The 30 words in the matrix are all from Latin and all take place in the Mozart Requiem which was the foundation for the lyrics.  We tried to find a way to balance the words so the user could really make some familiar words when needed “Dominus, Kyrie, Sanctus etc..” and also made up words which might better represent a made up language, which has its appropriate moments too.

PA: Right now there are literally thousands of choral composers, and tens of thousands church music directors, not counting companies that publish choral music. From the perspective of musical genre, can VOXOS with its legato program also do Palestrina? a Bach chorale? a traditional 4-part hymn?

Cinesamples: The full SATB  legato is extremely powerful  and something we spent a great deal of time recording and tweaking.  It seems SATB is the only way to go to achieve the Bach type choral writing properly.  For example, if the the sopranos had a melody line beginning in the alto range and jumping up to the pure soprano range how will that sound convincing without SATB?  You can witness in the YouTube videos, especially video #2, the power of keeping the voices separate and the convincing results they allow you to achieve.  Aside from the full SATB Sectional legato you get the boys legato and the three soloists.  That’s eight legato sections within VOXOS.

PA: What was your thinking about including a children’s choir?

Cinesamples: James Horner. No, really, we just knew we had to have it. It’s a modern piece of the orchestra nowadays and we were sure our clients would expect us to include it.  The boys were very charming to work with.  The solo boy is just one of the most emotional sounds a composer can present in a cue - perfect for those epic moments where less is more.  It’s a joy to play the solo boy legato patch, We were lucky to get a brilliant young man at the prime of boy voice.

PA: In the first video, you stated that you were adding to the library every day. At this point do you see you have a final design in place?

Cinesamples: Yes everything is recorded, chopped  and pretty much finished.   The entire library will be completely done and handed over to Native Instruments relatively soon. We like to spend time tweaking each legato sample and getting it just perfect so we don’t have update headaches and unhappy customers.  Regarding a final file size we don’t have one yet - but yes it will be over 30 GB.

PA: Finally, what Kontakt version will it be in Voxos ships?

Cinesamples: VOXOS will ship (or be downloaded) with the Kontakt 4 player.  The Kontakt 4 player is the only way we could have made such a powerful GUI and such user friendly scripting.  K 4.1 is an masterful achievement from NI. It should be the main sampler for most professionals by now.

PA: Fellows, thanks for your time. We’ll check back when VOXOS is released!

VOXOS DEMONSTRATION VIDEO WITH MIKE PATTI

PA - Originally you had a “monster” system spec for LASS to be spread over two computers for best results. So staying with your original spec for the moment, given that i7s are much cheaper now than last summer, would you still suggest LASS being spread over two computers? And if so, what would their specs be?

ANDREW - There are many users who use LASS on one machine without issues (I’ve been accused of being overly cautious with my ‘recommended’ system requirements — especially considering some of today’s faster computers. 4- and 8-core machines). When I started developing LASS, Quad and 8-core machines were scarce, but now it seems everyone has them. So if you have a decent 4- or 8-core machine with a good 7200RPM drive, you should be good to go. But even for those who have lesser computers, you can use the full mixes or you can even use LASS to the fullest by rendering MIDI tracks. However, as a safety dead-line precaution, I only recommend two computers for those “prime-time” professionals who would use LASS to the fullest with deep divisi writing on all string sections simultaneously and playback everything in real-time with no glitches at the lowest latencies.

PA -SSD drives have recently come into the forefront for newer libraries. I checked out Best Buy and found an Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB Internal SATA Solid State Hard Drive for under $230. Since LASS is 40GB on a complete install, would you consider an 80GB SSD hard drive sufficient?

ANDREW -More than sufficient!!! An 80GB SSD would be beyond our recommended specs… but it never hurts to have the “latest/greatest” drives if you can justify the cost.

PA -Looking ahead, you have a 1.5 update coming, the muted strings collection, and you’ve also announced a LASS 2.0 at some date in the future. Looking into the Developer Crystal Ball, how big are you guessing these libraries might be?

ANDREW - Well, the upcoming 1.5 update will include a new ground-breaking performance feature allowing real-time capabilities that that have not yet been achieved with sampled strings. We should have videos posted about this in the next week or so. This is a script-based update and will not increase the sample footprint of LASS. And this will be a free upgrade to all LASS owners.

LASS Legato Sordinos will have a substantial footprint, I’m guessing 8-16Gigs. This depends on whether we include 16-bit and some other criteria. LASS 2 will also be quite a few Gigs… but it shouldn’t be over 40 GIgs. At least we’re going to try to keep it, “lean and mean”.

PA -With Kontakt 4 64-bit now out as a public beta for registered K4 users, in your view is a 7200RPM SATA drive sufficient provided the user’s system has enough RAM?

ANDREW - Absolutely. That’s what I use. That’s what almost people I know use, or FireWire drives, too.

PA -With an i7 Quad Core, do you see a value in spreading LASS across several drives within the same system?

ANDREW - That depends on your writing style and work methodology. I was given some good general Hard Disk advice by someone who said when putting your sample libraries on a drive, do not fill up your hard drive. Rather, use a large capacity drive (500+ Gigs at last 7200RPM and 16 meg cache) and only fill it up to 50% or maybe 66% capacity. This does two things:

1) Forces the files to be written to the outside portions of the HD platter providing faster data transfer.

2) Eliminates (or greatly reduces) fragmentation.

Also, distributing the libraries on different drives also increases performance. Also, Stevenson (from our forum) gave this advice:

“another tip with regards to drive efficiency is to partition the drive. the top most partition is the segment that is on the outside of the platter. therefore partition the drive and keep your samples on the first partition but you can use the other partition for backing up, or non-performance dependent data, thus not wasting the drive space but also preserving the performance.”

PA - What customer reports have you received back on running LASS on the same system as the Vienna Ensemble Pro?

ANDREW - Initially, VE Pro had issues running some heavily scripted libraries… but I must say that the Vienna people did a great job of fixing these issues and now it seems LASS runs great on VE Pro.

PA - For the person wanting to put LASS on a separate system, do they need a Vienna Ensemble Pro or can they use LASS with just MIDIoverLAN and an audio card?

ANDREW - I use MIDIOverLAN along with RME 9652 cards (on my PCs ) an the RME RayDAT card on my Mac. Others might use a hardware MIDI box if they have it lying around. Also, A lot of people are using Plogue Bidule to host their VIs since it’s so flexible and efficient. Others use VE Pro.

PA -At one point, you had written on the VI-Control forum your plan to provide alternate EQ settings to transform LASS into mimicking the string sound of other composers in a selected group of films. Is this still in the works?

ANDREW - Well, in keeping with my approach to a, “Living Library”, everything is always in the works. Currently, I set up a thread on our forum for people to contribute EQs. EQ is such a personal thing. Quite a few people use LASS without the preset EQs… they prefer it, “au naturale.”

PA - Since Kontakt only has a 3-band EQ, have you considered releasing alternative settings for 5-band EQs that come with many of the sequencing programs?

ANDREW - No, not really… since there has not been the demand for it.

PA - As a working composer with many film/TV credits on IMDB, would you consider sharing what some of the other string libraries are you use to supplement LASS?

ANDREW -Well, I’m a big believer in, “you can never have too many good sounds.” So, have something from everyone lying around on my drives ready to use in a pinch, but I use mostly LASS, a some custom libraries, Sonic Implants, and QLSO has some nice aleatoric rises.

PA - A number of months ago you announced the release of LASS Lite and First Chair solo strings. Is that still in the works for 2010?

ANDREW - Actually, they are finished. The reason they have not been released yet is they will be downloadable and we are putting te finishing touches on our new download delivery system. We’ve never done this before, and the infrastructure for this is more daunting than we though because we are doing it all in-house. We’ aren’t using a “service” to do it for us. This way, we’ll have more control in the future. The god news is that we are very ver very near completion of this downloadable infrastructure… and all future downloadable releases will be able to be released without delay.

PA - Any hot news we can publish first?

ANDREW - Well, I guess it’s OK if I tip my hand a bit. We are about to release LASS 1.5, and that release will feature Auto Arranger (AA)… a new scripted option which (among many other things) will be able to do auto divisi in real-time. No longer will you have to play 2, 3 or 4 passes of divisi strings to get chordal legato, port or glissando passages. You can now do it in 1 take in real time. It will also allow you to split up two-hand performances into violins, violas, cellos and basses in real time. Or with your right hand, you could play some nice chords and voice leading, and AA would voice the violas down an octave (for example) and make them divisi…. AND have them retain Real Legato perfromances. It will be easier to explain on a video… but it’s pretty cool… and Gabor (the programmer) worked very hard on it!!

PA - Andrew, thanks for your time.

ANDREW - You’re welcome.

SC - What’s your musical background? Instrument you play? Did you go to music school? Play in a band?
AS- I learned the Piano when I was four in a conservatory, but only for two years as, as I said it back then, “there was too many notes”… so I switched to the drums that I learned for like twelve years at the conservatory. Then I have been playing and practicing it on my own. I also have learned electric bass for six years and then Upright Bass for another two.

That was the music studies part, but I am also graduated in physics and have two masters, one in acoustics (at the IRCAM research institute in Paris), it’s called ATIAM (Acoustics, Signal Processing, and Computer Science Applied to Music), and the second one in Architectural Acoustics.

So I’ve been studying a lot, but I have also been playing music in various bands, mostly jazz and funk bands, and more recently in an acoustic drum’n bass band that I started where we played my compositions Now I am creating a new one with three friends of mine that are professional musicians, but as you maybe know, good musicians are pretty busy, so it takes some time

SC - When did you decide you wanted to sample sounds?
AS - I always have loved electronic music, some of them like Amon Tobin are sampling all kinds of old Jazz or Funk records, and I wanted to do the same. At first I sampled my CD’s, tapes or vinyl records, then I realized i could record stuff on my own with my brand new mini-disc and the various instruments I had. I began copy-pasting every wav file into my sequencer, and I realized that having like 20 snare samples in the same measure would be easier to deal with if I were using like… a sampler… and I made my first libraries.

Sampling was also a need. When I started that drum’n bass band, I had to show the people I wanted to play with, something to make them trust the project, this is where I started to make larger sample libraries of my own instruments. I thought about buying some libraries, but on one hand when I was listening to the demos, I wasn’t convinced and thought mine were not that bad compared to it, and on the other hand, of course they were too expensive for me at that time

SC - When did you realize you could turn it into a viable, money making business?
AS - At first I began selling stuff on a simple website and I only thought I could earn a little money with it as a side job, but with time I saw that people really liked my job and were encouraging me. At that time, I was a computer science engineer and I didn’t like it so as I saw that it was growing and that companies like Native Instruments and Mach Five [ed. note: Digital Performer] were interested in my products, I thought I would quit my job and give it a shot!

SC - Is your total focus on acoustic instruments?
AS - For now, yes. As I told you before, I studied acoustics and really loved the part about mechanical behavior of instruments, in fact I loved it so much that I almost began a luthier career. I even builded like 7 upright basses! They did not sound as good as I wanted them to, but I really enjoyed myself. In a way, sampling instruments is also trying to simulate its behavior, at least that’s how I see it.

I still may give it a try someday because I love electronic music and strange noises.

SC - Of all the instruments you’ve sampled so far, which did you find the most challenging and why?
AS - That really is a hard question. Every instrument has its own sampling difficulties. The pianos and keyboards are quite simple because they are supposed to be played with a keyboard too, all the MIDI standards are keyboard oriented, but the time and consistency you need to record them is really enormous. It takes a lot less time to record a bass or a guitar, but then the hard part is on the scripting and articulations.

So I guess that the hardest instruments would be the horns as I am working on a horn library right now and it really is harder that everything I’ve been sampling until now simply because the way it’s played is completely different from a keyboard.

SC - What for you is the challenge in sampling a piano?
AS - For me the challenge is to reach playability and the feeling that when you play it, it actually behaves as a real one. There is a huge debate on whether the sampled piano or modeled pianos are the best. I think it can be summarized as: the sound is a lot more realistic with sample libraries, but modeled pianos just feel like a real playing experience. So my part is to make the sample libraries act and feel real.

SC - With so many sampled pianos on the market, why did you feel another one could be commercially successful?
AS - Just because I think that this Kawai-EX does fell like a real piano when you play it

I’m also thinking that people have a lot of different piano libraries because they love to have different sounds, most people that compose music on their computers are sound lovers and collectors.

SC - In creating your sales plan for each new sampled instrument, what for you is your measure of success both artistically in your work and in your sales?
AS - In my work, it’s when I release a library and am fully satisfied with it, most of the time, it’s not the case, I have the feeling that I could have done better.

In the sales, it’s obviously when a lot of people buy it as it means that people like it and recommended it to other people. But the best reward is when people send me some messages or talk about it in the forums saying that they love it AND use it.

SC - As a developer, why do you see so few companies creating product for the EXS24 since you have an automatic built-in base of customers?
AS - I think it’s mostly because it’s Mac only. There is still more than half of the audio community that use PCs. Then you have use Logic, I love Logic and am using it for absolutely everything, but some people prefer Pro Tools, Digital Performer or Cubase and they can’t use EXS. In terms of the software itself, the disk streaming is really well implemented, but there are also some basic features that are missing like the time envelope for releases that cannot go over two seconds (unless you’re using Keymap) or a good legato function. Most of all, there are no scripts and that’s why Kontakt is used the most.

SC - For you, what are the advantages of working with Native Instruments’ Kontakt program? Is there also a downside?
AS - The scripting feature is really a must in Kontakt. First you can build a product that will have a dedicated interface and some user interface controls, not just a simple .nki file that you open and looks the same as the other libraries. Secondly, the scripting capabilities allows you to simulate an instrument behavior, as a simple example, you can play a pedal noise when you press or release the sustain pedal on a piano.

Until now i did not see any downside apart from the fact that people that want to use it need to own Kontakt.

SC - Do you use the same micing techniques for each acoustic piano you sample?
AS - No, absolutely not. I’ve learned a lot about instruments acoustic radiation, microphone positioning techniques and room acoustics and you always have to take those three factors in account. The sound esthetics you want to get is also really important. For example, a jazz piano will need to be recorded closer to the strings than a classical one.

SC - From the day you started recording to the day you finished editing, how long did it take you to sample the Kawai EX?
AS - Actually, on the Kawai EX, I’ve been working with Lance Herring and he has been recording the piano and cutting the samples. My part was more the script and patch building, but this piano was sampled like 10 month ago

SC - Which for you is the most demanding: recording or editing?
AS - Frankly, i don’t know. The recording takes a lot of time and is really tiring. You really have to stay in front of a piano playing it without breathing or making any noise and, of course, stay focused and consistent on what you play.The editing is even a longer process because you have to take care of every file making sure that there is no unwanted noise in it, or that you don’t trim it too much, but that’s when you begin to hear what the library will sound like and most of the time this is when I get excited.

SC - What’s next for AcousticsampleS?
AS - Ha, good question! I have a lot of projects going on for all kinds of instruments, but I guess the one I’m the most excited about is the horns library I was talking about earlier.

I also have another piano in mind that will feature everything I’ve been thinking of while doing the Kawai

Oh and maybe I will partner up with a sampler maker to make my libraries available as virtual instruments…

Direct-to-customer-only from independent developers. Their prime source of distribution is their web site with the sale being either a downloadable product, a boxed product, or a combination of the two. Advertising is first derived by word-of-mouth on forums, sometimes banner ads, and occasionally, small print ads in select music magazines whose focus is on electronic music production. These developers are found world wide, from China to the Netherlands. Consequently, outside of local geographic customers, they have no show room to demonstrate their products or to give customers a direct hands-on experience to play-and-hear. Thus, their web site must do it all from sales to customer service to tech support.

A majority of independent developers will house their product in a Kontakt player. While extremely costly to go this route, the benefit of being housed in a Kontakt player means that Native Instruments takes on the responsibility for system integration for both Mac and PC formats. Consequently, the system specs for the Native Instruments Kontakt player will also be their system specs.

Larger developers with multiple sales channels and who’ve R&D’ed their own proprietary player. East West, IK Multimedia, Spectrasonics, SONiVOX, and the Vienna Symphonic Library all have R&D’ed their own proprietary sample library player. Excluding Spectrasonics, all sell through retailers and direct-to-customer. However, Spectrasonics sells exclusively through distributors, who in turn sells to retail and direct-to-customer. Within this group are those developers who’ve amortized their distribution costs by sub-distributing other developer’s product. Companies that do this include Best Service, East West, ILIO, and SONiVOX.

With the exception of a few music technology software products in Best Buy, such as Notion 3 and Sonar, all retail distribution is accomplished through music stores and online merchants.

So for this group, they’ve spent R&D money to develop their own player and they sell through multiple distribution channels: to distributors, to retailers, and direct-to-customer.

THE CHALLENGE - WHAT’S IT SOUND LIKE?
What makes or break library sales from any company are audio demonstrations, especially if they’re released throughout the sales year so that demos of existing products keep the product name in front of the customer generating new word-of-mouth, while also showing versatility of use. An ongoing demo program has another side benefit when placed on non-company web sites - virtual free advertising for the developer, especially if a non-employee has created the demo.

The Vienna Symphonic Library is one developer who consistently releases new demos promoting their libraries and now MIR, their proprietary virtual sound stage for mixing and recording.

Demo Costs. Audio demonstrations are created by composers either for a small fee plus a copy of the library, or, more commonly, in exchange for a copy of the library. Here, sample library developers face a serious challenge: there are more libraries than there are composers who can afford to create great demos for free. Creating a great demo takes several days or longer. Some have taken two weeks, four weeks, and most recently for Vienna’s electronic realization of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, nine months. A professional composer grossing USD $100,000 annually has to generate $1923.10 weekly to meet expenses. Given the time required to learn the library and then to create a demo, few composers can “gift” a developer with two or three weeks worth of working for no pay to get a free library.

This may not be an issue for larger, well financed developers, but for smaller under capitalized developers, it’s a very big deal.

The historical sales pattern is this: without an ongoing PR plan, an independent will see an initial burst of sales, which will then fall, level out, and then drop to a trickle, or zero. So the more frequently a developer can release fresh demos into the market, the better for their sales in the long run.

Two types of audio demos. The first are those produced by the developer for the initial product launch. The second type of demos taking on increasing importance are those coming from the Innovators, representing 2.5% of the market, the first purchasers of a new library who produce their own demos which are shared in forums. The importance of these demos is that they show what the “average bloke” can accomplish in a few hours vs. spending days perfecting and ultra polishing a two-three minute work. User demos can be less than pristine because they’re both experimental and works in progress.

Nonetheless, both are needed for marketing and sales. What should be stressed about demos is that they now precede print publication reviews. Except through careful coordination, and usually only with major advertisers, most print reviews of a new product will not take place for 30-60 days or longer after the release of a major product. By then, the street reviews are out, in some cases, the same day as the product is received post-purchase.

CHANGING SPECS
New technology creates new specs. Even so, developers must be observant as to how backwards compatible their sample players will be. On the Mac, Power PCs are rapidly becoming obsolete as only Intel-based systems are now being supported. For operating systems, OS 10.5 is as far back as many are going. The new development wave is getting software operating for Snow Leopard. At this writing, not all programs or audio card drivers are Snow Leopard-ready. On the PC, Windows XP and Vista are being supported, and ultimately, Windows 7.

Customers buying Mac Pro Nehalems and PCs with the i7 Processor, will get the biggest bang for their buck - today, if they can afford it.

Because of lack of organized industry research, no developer or retailer can guess how many customers with older systems will be knocked out of buying the new computer hardware, and thus, the new sample libraries.

COMMODITY PRICING AND FLAGGING RETAIL SUPPORT
In the past 12 months, three major developers have done buy 1/get 1 free sales which they’ve offered both direct and through their dealer network. While such sales boost immediately the OEM/distributors sales, the net result, as many music retailers have expressed is that the big players are training their customers to wait for the sale pricing.

Another issue at retail is tech support. With so many sample library products on the market, few retailers can provide the tech support and customer training needed. Nearly $8,000 in hardware alone (computers, monitors, audio cards, MIDI keyboards) is needed to setup listening stations, one for each platform. And if the developer doesn’t provide free in-store evaluation copies, then the dealer must purchase the software either directly or by getting a review copy from buying in quantity.

Additionally, a retailer must also have employed an individual fluent on both platforms, knowledgable about software for both platforms, and able to tech support customers. An individual with this level of knowledge and applied skill is handily worth USD $50,000 annually, if not more. Few music retailers can afford such an individual. And none have yet formed the music industry’s response to Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

Thus, retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online, are in the awkward position of trying to maintain quality sales and service, while competing with other dealers who slash product pricing to the bone (”We beat any price!”), or with developers offering special direct-to-customer pricing dealers cannot compete with.

TREND LINES
What’s been happening in other retail segments and in other industries has now firmly planted itself in the music technology sector of the music industry. Developers selling direct-to-customers doesn’t necessarily translate to lower consumer prices for the simple reason that even with higher marketing costs for independents, developers keep more money, which enables and empowers them to continue the R&D required to create new products.

By taking this approach, independents can avoid commodity pricing of their products, but the trade off is that they’ll sell fewer of them. To avoid this, developers have to create alternative lower cost distribution channels along with having an aggressive PR plan.

However, once a developer begins selling through retail distribution, commodity pricing is automatic. Once a retailer begins cutting prices then the developer who’s also selling direct, now finds themselves competing with their distribution and having to sell at lower costs to maintain cash flow.

The only tool a developer has with retailers to avoid commodity pricing, is to create a reasonable price, and then give short discounts to insure that product value is upheld.

Part of product value is tech support, and tech support is labor intensive. Unless the developer is selling a one-off product, profits will be needed not just for personal income, but to build that organization called, a company.

Said the New York Times, “Joseph Wagner’s Rhapsody for Piano, Clarinet and Strings reflected the impressionistic idiom. But it was written with a fine feeling for form, and with gusto.”

Joseph Wagner was both a composer and a conductor. Following his release from the U.S. Army after World War I, he graduated from New England Conservatory with honors, finishing four years in two. In 1923, the year of his graduation, he was appointed an Assistant Director of Music and Supervisor of Orchestras and Bands in the Boston Public School System. In 1924, he founded the Boston Civic Symphony which he lead for 18 years. This year, the Boston Civic Symphony celebrates its 85th Anniversary.

Five years later, in 1929, Joseph Wagner was appointed to the music faculty of Boston University where he taught orchestration and band scoring. For the next 30 years, Wagner observed students and their learning issues in these two subject areas. The result in 1959 and 1960 was the publication of Orchestration: A Practical Handbook and Band Scoring.

The ‘30s and ‘40s found Wagner making guest conducting appearances, conducting, and studying. From 1934 - 1935, Wagner was in Paris studying composition with Nadia Boulanger and conducting with Pierre Monteux and Felix Weingartner. During that time, he wrote a number of works including two ballets, Dance Divertissement and Hudson River Legend.

1945, as Wagner wrote in an autobiographical sketch, “was the highest peak of his works.” That year his Symphony #2 debuted. Said the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, “…this new symphony, in spite of its Mahleresque length (35 minutes) has a great deal of meat in it — powerful pulsating use of instruments, skilled counterpoint, and an especially pleasant third movement. Restless drive and energy are its prime characteristics, and they hold the interest.”

That same year, Wagner was made Special Instructor at Hunter College and in 1946, became an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College.

In 1947, Wagner left New York to become the Musical Director of the Duluth Symphony. For the next 12 years, Wagner wrote and conducted literally around the globe. But in 1959, thanks to a grant from California’s Huntington Hartford Foundation, he moved to Los Angeles. In 1960, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music appointed him head of the Theory Department.

Then in 1963, he was appointed Composer-in-Residence at Pepperdine University where he stayed for the next decade.

Dr. Wagner passed away suddenly on Saturday afternoon, October 12, 1974. An avid baseball fan, he rescheduled a private composition appointment after the World Series game had been completed. When his student arrived, the student could hear the television, but Dr. Wagner didn’t respond to repeated knockings. Finding the landlord, the student asked him to open the door to Dr. Wagner’s apartment. They found him sitting on a sofa - lifeless.

Cause of death was reportedly was a ruptured aneurism on his artery. Dr. Wagner’s remains were returned to Rhode Island where he was buried next to his parents in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

In 1989 Alexander Pubishing took over the publication of Orchestration: A Practical Handbook and for the 50th Anniversary Edition, retitled it Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook and broke it down into three compact titles: From Piano to Strings, From Piano to Woodwinds, and From Piano to Orchestra.

Special thanks to Lance Bowling of Cambria Music for providing Dr. Wagner’s biographical information and photographs of Dr. Wagner.

Arthur was an educator and he wrote numerous books, including, for 1926, the definitive guide to dance band arranging called Arranging For the Modern Dance Orchestra. He taught at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music which later became Cal Arts.

But Arthur also created a unique booklet and matching colorized chart. And it’s that combination that merits our attention.

He titled the booklet/chart combination with a pseudo-scientific name that while sounding right for 1943, today sounds more like something you’d use to pick the right paint color for your home at Lowes. He called his colorized chart, the Spectrotone Chart. And the companion booklet, which is only a series of 8.5 x 11 sheets folded sideways and held together with two staples, he called The Spectrotone System of Orchestration.

Don’t be put off by the quaint name, because what Arthur created, which has daily practical use for both live and electronic scoring, and mixing, is nothing less than the Rosetta Stone of orchestration.

In his own words, the Spectrotone System of Orchestration is, “a colorgraphic exposition of tone-color combinations and balance as practiced in modern orchestration.”

The chart is organized by the 88 keys of the piano with each key numbered. The bottom A is 1, and the highest C is 88. Eight colors are used with the lowest pitches colored Purple and the highest, White. The simplistic view is that the chart follows the keys of the piano scale wise. But the real view is that the colors reflect not only the individual instrument’s range but also the intensity of the instrument’s sound as it’s played up the overtone series.

The color choices make a lot of sense enabling not only precision orchestral combinations, live and electronic, but also provides a gracious way to communicate with producers and directors in a language they’ll understand since each color has a single adjective to describe it.

White = Brilliant
Yellow = Bright
Green = Pleasant
Blue = Rich
Orange = Golden
Red = Glowing
Brown = Warm
Purple = Mellow
Shaded (Cross-hatched) = Dull
Black = Indefinite

Each tone color has an additional timbre description, here with multiple adjectives for greater definition.

Lange’s next step is showing how combinations are created. He has four: perfect, close, complementary and remote. As an exercise, I looked at the French horn in the Purple range to see what it blends best with. Working my way down the chart, I could easily see the zones where the French horn blends with the trumpet, tuba, the G-string of the violin, the C-string of the viola, and so on. When I compared my findings back to scores from Debussy to Mancini, it was a perfect match.

There’s more to it than what I just described, but you get the idea.

How I found it is the stuff of accident.

This past week we relaunched the 50th Anniversary edition of Joseph Wagner’s Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook. For the promotion, I kept looking for pictures and info on Dr. Wagner, all to no avail. Not even Oxford Online had a paragraph on him. On what must have been my 43rd search on Google, I found a monograph about Dr. Wagner written by Lance Bowling. So now I had to search for Lance Bowling. That search lead me to Cambria Recordings.

Ever the detective, I called the Cambria number on a Sunday afternoon expecting to leave a message. Mid-message this fellow picks up the phone, and identifies himself as Lance Bowling, the president of Cambria Recordings and a former student of Dr. Wagner when he taught at Pepperdine.

During our conversation, Lance casually mentioned the Spectratone Chart and gave me a thumbnail description of it. Hearing the interest in my voice, Lance sent it to me, along with two symphonies of Dr. Wagner’s on CD, both of which had been conducted by Howard Hanson.

Inside the FedEx box was the booklet, the chart and a small ingenious work showing how to work out string stops.

It only took a few seconds to recognize what I was reading. In the 1920s, a classmate of Maurice Ravel’s, Charles Koechlin, wrote the pre-eminent work on orchestration, detailing, unfortunately, in classical French, insights into Impressionistic scoring, especially volume, and intensity. I have those books. And every so often I type in a few pages trying to use various free French-to-English online translators to learn.

It is long dreary work especially if you don’t read or speak Classical French, which I don’t. I even had a native French person try reading it to me. It was too difficult, even for her, because Koechlin wrote in the older classical French. So the knowledge is locked away, and the publishers, aren’t too keen on the Yanks and the Brits getting a copy, which is one reason they never translated it into English.

But what Arthur Lange put in this 32-page booklet held together by two staples and accompanied by an 8-color chart is a visual key for understanding the kind of French coloristic writing that defines American film scoring.

And like so many wonderful things, they were just sitting in a box, actually several boxes, waiting to be rediscovered.

Now they have been.

Twelve bucks.

Now there was a time when companies would create a manual and pack it in the box. But this fading quick. That’s because getting the manuals written and designed to fit into the box, then get it printed timely, and packaged is a chore and a half. Then there’s the shipping, which is costly enough, but with a 1-2 pound manual, the shipping goes up.

Then there’s that catch-22 situation of creating the wonderful manual that no will read. So you’ve just spent a bundle on paper that may not even be used to light a fire on the beach for a little summer night barbecue.

However, there are times I’d like to burn the manual, barbecue or not.

And the reasons are:

1. clutter creating disorganization and confusion
2. poor design for effective online use
3. poor use of color that wastes ink

Clutter
Do a piece with Project SAM, EastWest, Addictive Drums and any Vienna Instrument, and right there, you’ve got nearly 200 pages of docs either online or on your desktop. To organize, you need to buy three-hole pre-punched paper,and of course, a three-ring binder or two, or five.

And some of these manuals are genuinely indispensable, especially the Vienna Instruments manuals because they contain the data needed to more effectively MIDI edit.

As you watch the paper print (is this a new soap opera in the making?), you have to make a decision that affects room organization - will you put the manual in its own binder or put it in a binder with several manuals?

However you do it in a binder, it’s 187 square inches of space taken up on your desktop. And the standard 3-ring binders don’t always fit bookcases neatly, either.

Poor Design For Effective Online Use
Using a PDF software manual could be a great thing if it’s designed well so that you can easily go back and forth between the program and the documentation. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this yet. You still have to scroll up and down to read.

Poor Use of Color That Wastes Ink
I’m thinking specifically of a drum manual that on the inside pages made pretty decent use of color, until you got to the cover, which was pitch black with some white lettering. My poor ink jet printer! When that cover came out, you could hold it by its page corner and just feel the weight of the ink.

Getting Organized
I tried printing out the manuals, putting them into a file folder, and then filing them. In theory, that should be a cozy solution, but in practice, you end up with folders and loose papers laying around. So in the end, I’ve opted for smaller white 3-ring binders, 1″ or smaller (when I can find them), with a plastic sheath on the front where I can slide in the cover and then on the spine, label it for quick grabbing.

However, I still end up with binders-o-rama.

Which leads me to conclude that the best way to handle things is to just learn the program so well you don’t need the manual (why create music when you can read a manual), or grow a third telescopic eye to slow down the need for bifocals (aka progressive lenses).

Oh the joys of the 21st Century composing life.

But where does this leave educators who want a computer lab but can’t afford the industry standard Mac Pro much less other heavyweight systems from the PC side?

I have a suggestion, and it’s one that will serve the school for several years, even if you never update the software.

After looking at both platforms, and reviewing what I find myself advising learners for Alexander University Online Classes, I’ve come to the belief that school funds are best spent with Apple, because that’s where the bang-for-the-buck is going to be.

The iMac
If Alexander University classes went from online to a building, I’d buy the 20″ iMac that comes with 2GB of RAM. If the budget allows, I’d get the 1 TB (terabyte) hard drive and 4GB of RAM. RAM can be expanded to 8GB, but I don’t think you need that much.

The iMac solves several problems. First, I get the computer and monitor as a single piece. I can bolt it down making it more difficult to steal. I don’t to need to buy separate audio cards for music applications. You can, of course, consider the Mac Mini, but even so, you still have to buy a separate monitor. It’s one more part to keep track of. The iMac is an elegant solution. Everything, literally, is in one place, and it gives the computer lab a modern sleek look that could also inspire donations, even in a tight economy.

Second, the students can buy their own headphones.

Third, students can also buy their own personal MIDI keyboards that connect via USB to the Mac. This eliminates the need for a MIDI interface and saves the school money for buying plastic keyboards that will wear out long before the iMac does. An E-MU Xboard 25 fits into a book bag. The advantage of this solution is that the Xboard 25 is small and allows for more stations in a room since you’re not providing the keyboard. If you want a keyboard, look at the Xboard 61.

Fourth, micro pocket USB drives are cheap! The iMac comes with multiple USB ports, so students can save their work to a pocket hard drive that only costs as much as a few trips to McDonald’s.

Logic Software
Logic is designed for the Mac. So you’re not going to encounter the XP, XP64, Vista stuff that we’re contending with on the PC side now.

If budgets are really tight, use GarageBand. But if the budget permits, take advantage of Apple’s educational discount and install Logic 8 on each machine. It takes 6 hours to fully install. So you’ll give up 1-2 days in doing so, but what you get is so worthwhile.

We use Logic for all our production at Alexander University, and that includes our online faculty members. You can get Logic Express, but the development money always goes to the flagship programs. For a little more, get the students using a professional level program so when they leave, they have skills ready to go.

As I’ve defined it in my book, The Street Smart Guide to Logic 8, Logic is a music business production suite. It comes with a notation program, sequencing, audio engine for recording, a pro quality effects rack, and quality software instruments. Also included, which has not been advertised, is a basic starting set of the Vienna Symphonic Library, including celeste and harp. Almost anything you or a student wants to produce can be done with the onboard sounds and synths that come with Logic. Translation - no extra library costs and no system integration issues.

Load and Teach.

Logic Training. Logic is blessed with excellent text and video training. On the text side, there’s my aforementioned book which is a starting guide.

There are two published Logic Certified Trainers that I highly recommend should you need further instruction or want to run a great clinic. Jay Asher is the author of Going Pro With Logic Pro 8. He works in Los Angeles and knows the ropes. Eli Krantzberg, out of Toronto, created the Logic 8 Explained video series.

I’ve worked with both men and they’re both crackerjack.

Additional Music Software
You honestly don’t need much with Logic because the internal programs and synths are so good. However, when you do add programs, don’t add any that require USB copy protection keys. This eliminates programs that I as a pro use. But in a school lab, let’s be honest, things can go wandering in the night, and you don’t want the responsibility of students logging USB keys in and out. It’s an invitation to a lot of unnecessary system integration issues that are just pure hassles.

Here are companies whose products I recommend and that I’ve either reviewed at this writing or am about to review. None of the products they develop require USB keys for copy protection.

Best Service - this is a German company distributed in the U.S. by Soundsonline and Time and Space in the UK. All of their products are done in the Kontakt player format which works easily with Logic and has no USB key. String Essentials 2, EthoWorld 4 and their piano collection are all first rate.

IK Multimedia - this is an Italian company with headquarters in Miami, FL. They have academic discounts. I’d strongly advise adding their Miroslav Philharmonic to Logic. Pros know you need two libraries to make MIDI mock-ups work. MP blends beautifully with the onboard Vienna sounds. Stunning music can be created with both combined. Also comes with a bonus choir feature. For pop music production I love their AmpliTube and Fender programs. Logic comes with a basic electric and acoustic guitar sound. Create the melodic line, then run it through either of these plug-ins. What a gas! Their SampleTank library is also quite good. For recording training, consider their T-Racks program and the Classik Studio Reverb.

L.A. Scoring Strings - Los Angeles company. One demo released. This is the first company to release a legitimate divisi strings library in Kontakt format. Price TBA. No academic pricing announced. No USB key needed. I have not reviewed this program.

SONiVOX - formerly Sonic Implants, located in Boston. SONiVOX has just released a series of value-priced virtual instruments that you can download one set per workstation. For PC and Intel Macs only. They also have SoundFonts that Logic’s EXS24 Sampler can read and load. No USB key needed.

Spectrasonics - Spectrasonics creates some of the most pre-eminent libraries used in music production. Their three main programs are Omnisphere, Stylus RMX and Trilogy. No USB key needed for copy protection.

XLNAudio - a Swedish company makes Addictive Drums. Logic comes with a drum machine called UltraBeat, so you can do a lot. There are also drum sounds for the EXS24. But Addictive Drums are deluxe. Between IK and XLNAudio, you can create templates for some pretty exciting pop band ensembles. Again, no USB key needed.

There are certainly other companies, but for a school music computer lab, any of these products can be ordered without a USB key for copy protection, and they certainly enhance what you can do in your instruction.

Now, if you don’t mind USB key copy protection for a school lab, then by all means review EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold and the Vienna Symphonic Library Special Edition. Re: Gold. At one time, this was an $1800 library. The price has come down drastically. You’re getting a pro product here, not a junior program. You can buy the Vienna Special Edition as a download, but you need one USB key per machine.

Other Software
The other software is from Apple and there are no system integration issues. For building your own training tools, iWork 09 is a must. What you can create with both Keynote and Pages is awesome. I use both all the time. For media production, iLife 09 with the enhanced iMovie is a great deal and one where students can begin learning media production and media scoring. Between Logic and iMovie 09, all the tools needed to produce basic music videos and other video instruction are right there.

The PC Argument
I know some teachers who say, “We’re a PC school.” My response to that for music, as harsh as it will read, is, “Get over it.” Or put differently, “It ain’t about you.”

For music and the PC, we now have too many system integration issues to contend with. With Apple and Apple products, there are no system integration issues. On the PC, you have over choice. I know, I deal with it all the time. But you don’t have time to deal with that in a school lab, and you can’t assume, as much as they would like you to, that the school’s computer science department guys are going to understand MIDI, digital audio and recording. I’ve seen it bring many a grown adult engineer to their knees in tears.

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have said this. But today for a school music lab, I have to.

Now, for your own personal use and production studio, my recommendations are totally different. But for your school, start here.

Peter Lawrence Alexander is the author of The Street Smart Guide to Logic 8, the Professional Orchestration Series, How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite, and The Instant Composer: Counterpoint by Fux. His most recent orchestration is Debussy’s Sarabande for string orchestra.

However, thanks to a chart published by The Wall Street Journal we can get some idea.

If the store is a discounter, sales are edging up, slightly. No one is booming. If you’re high end, sales are going down. Pawn shops, even in Beverly Hills, are doing big business right now.

Circuit City is on the verge of collapse. And the Borders Group has been given 30 days to get its stock up to $1 a share or the company will be delisted.

The Sonic Control Music Tech 21 tracking daily all U.S. Music publicly traded stocks tells us something about products sold at retail. Mackie (LTEC), is trading well below $1 a share. Harmon is down $100 per share. Apple is off over $90 per share. AMD, Primedia, Make Music (Finale), and Sonic Solutions are all trading below $4 per share.

Today, January 9, 2009, the U.S. Government announced that the jobless rate has now risen to 7.2%. Of course, the good side of that statistic is that 92.8% of Americans are employed.

Now that’s a number to cling to.

But latch to it a recent study, also reported in the Wall Street Journal, citing that in January 2009, 90% of American consumers refuse to buy anything at list price. And that figure is up from 75% in December 2008.

It should also be noted that Apple, while maintaining the price on its computers and software, devalued the work of songwriters and composers on iTunes a little more by dropping the price of some songs to a low of 69 cents.

Consequently, going to NAMM, retailers the world over are going to have answer some tough sales/marketing questions:

• Why should a customer buy from you?
• What makes you special over another company: brick and mortar or online?
• What is the role of music technology software in your product mix as more developers go direct-to-customer with digital download sales and prices at or below dealer cost?

If music retail owners think the answer to differentiating themselves from other dealers is, “We’ll beat any deal!” they should ponder the question, “Does anyone remember SoundChaser?”

They beat lots of deals. And they’re gone. And ultimately, so will many merchants disappear who maintain that stance because without profit margins and volume purchasing, retailers cannot sustain slashed pricing and make it. That’s as true for OEMs as it is for barbecue joints.

We don’t talk too much about chicken in music technology, but maybe we should since Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s second largest chicken provider, is in bankruptcy, and Tyson may not be far behind.

Everybody has to eat. And at $4 or less per chicken, you’d think Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride would be swimming in moolah. But they’re not, and they’re genuine mass merchandisers.

Almost nothing in a music store is a mass merchandised item unless they’re selling Holy Donuts on the side.

It’s all, nearly 100% of it, specialty retailing. Most everything in a music store, excluding t-shirts, possibly guitar picks, and items like that, requires instruction and training.

So where are the guitar lessons? Where are the keyboard lessons? Where’s the MIDI school? Where’s the recording school?

Where’s the service?

Now that the industry has successfully turned speciality retailing into a commodity marketing environment, where is it going?

IBM had to answer a similar question. When they decided to release IBM PCs to retailers, they were shocked to discover that retailers cut the prices so low that their machine was now being sold like pork chops. So the guys in the backroom who could work both a calculator and a spreadhseet began doing some serious financial analysis.

IBM discovered that once a product hits commodity pricing, you can’t make money on it any more.

So what did IBM do?

They stopped making the IBM PC. They closed their short-lived IBM stores (one of which was on Ventura Blvd in Encino, California). And today, the IBM Think-Pad is now made by Lenovo.

Then came Apple.

Apple learned from IBM. At retail, online, even at their own stores, Apple products are not commodity items because they control the discounting. And people pay. And Apple is debt free with plenty of cash in the bank.

How many music stores, software developers, manufacturers and retailers can say that?

Before the Internet, there was this thing called a sales territory where if a store took on a line exclusively, no other store in the area could get the line. The only hitch in that theory came when retailers were allowed to advertise in music publications citing, you guessed it, “we’ll beat any deal,” however they worded it. So you could have the exclusive dealership in Charlotte, NC, only to lose the sale to a store in Minneapolis or New York City who could sell lower because with bigger volume comes bigger discounts.

Some retailers responded to that problem by refusing to carry music magazines, ignoring the reality that customers could buy the same magazines at Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, news stands, and other book stores.

Now there’s the Internet. So what does line exclusivity mean today? How do you program a shopping cart to decline an order when it comes from outside a dealer’s sales territory? How much should a company pay an individual to specialize in “order declines” and deal with angry customers over the phone or by e-mail, or worse, on multiple forums with the customer complaining all along the way that the store refused to sell to them?

What retailer wants to respond on the Internet with posts like, “I’m sorry, but per our contract with Chicken Little Electronics and Alligator Nuggets, you’re outside our sales area and we can’t sell or ship to you.”

Imagine customer response to that online! It doesn’t bare thinking about.

Even with music technology software, you can’t maintain an exclusivity as now software developers are more aggressively selling direct, and as we saw at Christmas, and now post-Christmas, at or below dealer costs - and internationally at that.

This trend has been developing for years and now it’s really taking off. But even here, those selling direct mostly, or who are scroogingly meditating on selling 100% direct, are going to be in for a rude awakening when they discover how much more in advertising they’re going to be paying because dealers who supported them online, or in printed catalogs, may no longer feel obliged to.

Music technology software folks, especially those who make virtual instruments, forget that this is a much smaller marketplace than guitar sales. They forget that their products follow the sales of sequencing and notation programs, and that half of those sales are U.S. and the rest are The World. And the one really big thing they forget is that because they need sequencing and notation programs to operate their virtual instruments, (unless their products are virtual piano, guitar or bass amp emulations), all the legal customers are registered in the computers of Apple, Avid, Cakewalk (partially owned by Rolandcorp), DigiDesign/Sibelius (Avid), Make Music, Mark of The Unicorn, and Steinberg - and they’re not making their customer lists available for direct advertising because of privacy laws.

Nor are they reporting current installs. Think about it. How many times a year do you see news stories on how many iPods or iPhones Apple has sold vs. how many copies of Logic they’ve sold? Or how about Sonar? Or Cubase? Or Digital Performer?

How many customers are software developers actually developing for? Where’s that number?

This means that virtual instrument creators must spend advertising money looking for a needle in a haystack. As a result,  the advertising cost to find those existing buyers is going to be outrageously expensive. Companies who think Google Adwords is the solution will faint when they see their click thru charges angle upwards to $1 to $5 per click through. I know because I almost fainted.

While it’s not popular to say, I’m sorry, but NAMM itself is part of the problem. Every year, NAMM proudly, or is that foolishly, advertises that it’s closed to the public, except for hundreds of the public who get in via free passes because they’re good customers. So every year, products are getting more technically sophisticated, and every year, because these products rarely, if ever, make the evening news, the buying public gets left further and further behind.

Since so few retailers can afford to hire specialists who teach, train, tech support and explain, isn’t it wiser to open up NAMM for 1 or 2 days while the industry is there doing demonstrations and can meet potentially new customers and answer basic questions without insulting the same customers behind their backs at the retail level by calling them MIDI Idiots or some derivation thereof?

Maybe I’ve missed something, but where did the sales philosophy come from that states you can increase sales dramatically by calling your customers stupidos? Or the more politically nickname - newbie? And then make customers that you want to fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars for your products feel embarrassed because they need to ask questions about products, the computing power of which needed to operate, is literally, greater exponentially than the computers used to put 12 Americans on the moon in the Apollo program?

That observation didn’t come from me, it came from Tom Stafford who did walk on the moon.

Who in a retail store, or tele-sales line, can clearly and simply articulate the differences between a Core2Duo, a Quad Core, an Eight Core, or a comparable CPU from AMD and which will best run sequencing software programs 1-7 and virtual instrument programs 1 to 1285 with how much RAM and with which audio and MIDI drivers that operate flawlessly?

Norman Augustine, the past-president and CEO of Martin-Marietta wrote a terrific book called Augustine’s Laws. In it is a chart that’s both funny and tragic because it cross tabs declining college board scores (reading levels) with the increase of the number of pages of aircraft repair manuals.

So at a time where we’re having this explosion in music technology, from keyboards to digital recorders to USB Guitars, the reading comprehension levels of the proposed target audience, including the sales staff at many locations, are sinking or have sunk.

This is not a rant. These are the serious sales/marketing issues the industry doesn’t want to talk about.

So I restate the question: Where is the industry going?

Disclosure: Peter Alexander is CEO of Alexander University, Inc., and through Alexander Publishing, deals corporately with many of the same issues with book and music distribution.

Here’s how.

The alleged good news is that in v8, you just export the notation in an .sib file and move it into Sibelius for finessing. That’s a good start, but what the ad copy didn’t say, and this is key, is this: dare we assume that v8 can also import a Sibelius file, and if yes, which version of Sibelius can be imported into Pro Tools 8?

This is a serious sales question because if v8 imports .sib files, there are now tens of thousands of Sibelius users in Europe, the UK, Australia, and the U.S., available for upgrading into a Pro Tools package and a hefty percentage of those users are educators, needing to be trained in order to train a new generation of music producers.

What educators learn on, they teach. Just like in a music store, a salesman sells best what he knows best.

And those users, teachers and composers, have a particular work style. They do the notation first in Sibelius and then export a MIDI file to Logic or some other program.

Obviously, v8 has a MIDI import. So in light of what you now know about Sibelius user habits, how well does v8 import a MIDI file from Sibelius?

Another question. How much of a closed system will this be?

Back in August 2008, many of us in the industry received a letter from the new president of Avid, Gary Greenfield. In that letter he wrote: Over the last six months I have had the pleasure of visiting and talking with hundreds of customers and business partners around the world. I have learned a great deal in that short time, and heard one very clear theme: Avid needs to do a better job of listening to our customers and developing solutions that truly meet their needs.

So now the listening question, especially for teachers: How easily will Pro Tools 8 implement VSTi’s like the Vienna Instruments?

That’s also a big sales question for Avid because there are templates in place for Sibelius 5 and the Vienna Instruments Special Edition. Presumably, that’s a few more thousand units of sales potential right there (no one knows how many Special Edition users there are so I made a hopeful guess).

The other question is whose audio cards will work with Pro Tools 8? If a school has a computer lab, it’s unfortunate but true that little fingers walk off with audio cards that can’t be attached or built into the computer. For the PC, this is where the Creative Labs Fatal1ty Card was the winning ticket. Originally the Fatal1ty Card was the E-MU APS Card and its potential for music lab sales in mass quantities was unreal. Unfortunately, the APS Card was at 48K instead of 44.1. So every time a student (or composer) wanted to burn a CD of their music, it got transposed down a minor 3rd.

So the APS Card died and out came the Fatal1ty Card (bizarre kind of pun, isn’t it?) and music ed was displaced by a gamer.

Avid needs their own version of the APS/Fatal1ty card. “Oh M-Audio!”

And that’s what they should do. Go to M-Audio and get them to make something similar. Then bundle the software, an audio card and a keyboard. Make it a total solution package and get with system integrators to create DAWs for it.

There’s another market. Home Schooling.

Then bring in publishers (plural) who have curriculum. Liberate some units. Get them excited and talking about v8.

How could I forget. Churches. There are 350,000 in the U.S. alone. A solid statistical percentage will be open to this.

And then there are the tens of thousands of adult composers who went to music school and never made it as a pro who still have a heart to produce and hear their music.

That’s the sales secret. Not 71 plug-ins. There are people who hear beautiful music in their inner ear and they want to produce it to hear it. But these people need a genuine systemic approach that takes them from A to Z. And Pro Tools is dual platform. Avid to Apple: Where I’m going you cannot follow.

Yamaha could follow because of their purchase of Steinberg. Yamaha is a serious sleeping giant. They’ve got it all from pianos for the piano lab to Cubase. They’re dual platform with Cubase and Nuendo. They could make it happen in a grand way because Yamaha has a fabulous music education tradition behind it and in front of it. Avid doesn’t. They have to build a music education tradition at a lower grass roots level.

But my bet is that Yamaha won’t do it, because they’re not organized corporately to sell this way and because they lack the political will.

And that’s what it will take, political will. The Digi salesman who’s a kingmaker at NAMM will have to swallow hard and accept the new fact that he’s nothing but a serf in a professor’s office. It’s like Walmart in Bentonville. Even Jeffrey Katzenberg sits in the Walmart waiting room.

And Avid will have to accept that some professors make molasses look like Speed Racer. So there’s another toe hold. And an overwhelming majority of these potential customers won’t be spending $1200 for a Toolkit update to do SMPTE because SMPTE won’t be important to them - at least in the beginning.

I think the breakthrough is there for Digi. If they have the political will and the humility needed to effect sales breakthrough, it’s theirs. Quite literally.

But to achieve this breakthrough, they’re going to have model the Clintons’ when Hillary was running for the U.S. Senator of New York. There’s a state fair out there. A hand to be shaken. And a system requirements list that needs simple explanations.

When the industry only snobbily markets to pros, it misses the glint in the eye of the man or woman who always dreamed of recording their own music or being recorded as an artist, especially when city slicker tech salesmen snidely talk over their heads while talking down to them all at the same time.

That will have to change. New alliances will have to be formed. And that will take time. Probably five years or so, because years of snubbery will have to be overcome.

So how did Wall Street react with today’s news? (Check the chart below from Yahoo Finance by clicking twice to bring it to full size in another window.) To borrow from Jane Austen, nary a niggle in response. In fact, Avid’s stock when down a tad.  But then, Wall Street never did know anything about music.