Since it’s now April 2, the music technology April Foolishness has been revealed for what it is.
Composer/educator Steve Horelick provided a sneak glimpse of future functionality in an “unreleased” version of Apple’s Logic Pro:
… although I wouldn’t be surprised to see Region Animation in a future version of FL “Fruity Loops” Studio.
Moog Music claimed to introduce a Moog guitar in a video teaser segment — that video appears to still be up. Personally, I thought this wasn’t as classic as the Moogerfooger MF-433‘s “pure analog silence” — but some people did think it was real. (Hmmm… a guitar with built-in Moogerfooger effects, perhaps?) Don’t miss the MF-433 reviews, though.
Update: Okay, one slight correction on the Moog story. Did I say April Fool’s joke? That may be April Fool’s actual real product announcement. Then again, what’s real? Maybe Moog Music isn’t real, either. Ummm…
The best Moog gag of the day, though, was the Minimalmoog, as seen on Matrixsynth. I love “THE OSCILLATOR.” Ubercoolische, my friend.
Not to be outdone, Clavia introduced the Clavia Left Lead, for left-handed people.
Most amusing of all: Sweetwater’s faux vocalist plug-in, as released to CDM, was criticized for being too feasible. Yes, folks, technology has progressed to the point that readers fully expect to see a plug-in that replaces your vocalist. Well, or maybe that says something about the opinion you have of your vocalist. Point taken.
Updated: from comments, MusicRadar came up with the MusicMask, which reads facial expressions. Again, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did something real along the same lines. (I was just fiddling with a new facial recognition library for Processing. Okay, I’ll stop…)
Thanks to Matrixsynth for being on top of all the 4/1 stuff. And yes, I will commit here and now: at some point during 2008, CDM will slip fake news into RSS on a day that isn’t April Fool’s, just to see who’s paying attention. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Updated again: This is my favorite yet: multi-sampled, multi-mic ReFill for Reason, “Reason Accordions.” Thanks to Wax in comments.
Introducing Reason Accordions – the hassle free, creativity sparking way of adding studio-grade accordion sounds to your mix. With Propellerhead Software’s ground breaking Hypersampling technique, we have captured these fine accordions in painstaking detail using state of the art equipment and instruments.
Too bad. Ernie Rideout would have been all over the Keyboard review, seriously. See, it used to be hard telling which 4/1 announcements were fake. Now it’s just hard keeping up. I think there were more product announcements yesterday (with a handful of real ones, for extra confusion) than on the first day of winter NAMM.
Then again, music tech announcements are often surreal as it is, so 4/1’s faux releases just seem like another average day.
