Our series of Fantasy Christmas presents had principally been from the Expert’s team and contributors and have featured current or vintage products, in this article we feature a couple of non, or not yet, existent products as suggested by friends from well known brands in the industry - Matt Hill of Liquidsonics and Tom Griffin from Nugen Audio
Tom Griffin From Nugen Audio - An AI Based Guitar to Keyboard Plugin
My fantasy audio product, I’m going to go for something completely unrealistic and an item that we’d probably dream up in our teenage or college years. This could be a solution to a problem that is potentially quite specific to me, but I can imagine there’s a few producers and mixers who've encountered this.
One of the problems I’ve found as a guitar player over the years is that when writing and recording parts for electronic music, meaning writing for piano or synthesisers, I quite often have to re-teach myself the chords and arrangement I’d written on guitar and translate this to a keyboard, or even more time consuming, manually input this onto the piano roll in the DAW. This can often labour the process or creating a track and sometimes even dwindle the creative spark that can leave you as quickly as it arrives.
To help elevate some of the arduity from this process, my dream audio product would have to be an effects plug-in that can measure and transform audio into a variety classic keyboards, organs and vintage synthesisers presets/patches. In a dream world (which this is), you’d be abl to convert your recorded guitar part into the classic E. Piano preset you would get on a Yamaha DX7, or those classic chord stabs from a vintage polysynth.
With this dream product, you’ll be able to take a recording of any instrument, i.e flute, violin or even voice, and fully convert these into the full range of emulated sounds, allowing you to spend more time immersed in the creative process.
In order to do this, there’d probably have to be some AI involved, and a huge extensive database of recorded instruments in order to learn and replicate the characteristics of each, so likely a large download file, apologies.
Also I appreciate there are pedals and plug-ins out there already that have some of these capabilities where you can effect the guitar voicing such as the Boss SY-200 or Electro Harmonic Mono Synth, but these don’t have the specific ability to choose from a range of classic synthesisers and their signature patches. The technology we have available to us these days is more than capable of achieving this product but it’s unrealistic to suggest that the licenses would be made available for this.
Matt Hill From Liquidsonics - An Atmos Playback System From ‘Vertriloquist Audio’
My fantasy audio Christmas present would be the ultimate neat and tidy Dolby Atmos home theatre system. Instead of bouncing audio off the ceiling, or requiring high quality speakers to be installed around me, I’d have that 9.1.6 system from Ventriloquist Audio which can throw audio into the exact position in the room where it’s required whichever chair I decide to sit in.
The system works with a set of tiny phased array beam-forming speakers that can direct audio into the exact positions it needs to be. A set of visible spectrum cameras can identify each user in the room and customises audio per their exact preferences, and the family subscription plan means it can create deep nulls around each listener so multiple users can experience audio at the same time from the proper position.
The airborne room response modelling pack comes with a mini indoor drone fitted with a neutral mic so that thousands of IRs can be captured in different positions modelling the space precisely overnight. A LIDAR sensor maps the room so the exact dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the space can be taken into account and in combination with an advanced room modelling chip it ensuring perfect acoustics for the space resulting in surround reproduction just as it was heard on the dub stage!
No more cables, no more vibrating cones in big boxes, no more chunky amps, and no more arguments about unsightly audio installs - just wonderful audio coming from exactly where it should be placed, magically beamed into the perfect position from a neat and tidy unit sat in the corner of the room.
Of course, they couldn’t resist making some pretty dubious claims as well. The website says that their eARC implementation automatically compensates for lip-sync delays in the chain for every streaming and cable service around, but frankly I’m not stupid enough to believe everything I read on a spec sheet – we all know that getting basic audio timing right automatically is nigh-on impossible!
We love both of these. What product which doesn’t (yet) exist would you like to recieve?