RiffWorks T4 for Recording & Practicing

RiffWorks T4 is a free 'lite' version of Sonoma Wire Works program Sonoma Wire Works RiffWorks Guitar Recording Software. RiffWorks is a 'riff based' multitrack recording program, which at first seems a little odd, most people who are used to recording think about laying down a whole track for a song at once. Instead RiffWorks lets you define 'riffs' that have multiple layers (the T4 version allows 4 layers and the paid version, 24) and an 'InstantDrummer' track. Then once each of your riffs is done, you arrange them into a song. 


Setup:


One requirement is an ASIO compliant input source. If you are running most types of audio interfaces, they should work, One case you might run into trouble is the line input on your sound card. If it doesn't show up, you may need to use a program called ASIO4ALL which emulates ASIO compatibility for your non ASIO sound card. For my setup, I am using an old Echo Layla PCI that seems to run well enough. ( I would like to upgrade to something like Echo AudioFire4 which is a Firewire interface, but that is beside the point.)


Effects:


There  is an 'amp' section where you can choose an amp VST plugin that will get recorded with your layer, there are 2 amp models included with T4, IK Multimedia AmpliTube® Duo LE & Studio Devil's BVC. If you have a VST based amp plugin already (or other VST effect) you could add it here. 


There are also real time effects you can add: filter, shaper, EQ section, compressor, modulation effects, delay and reverb.


InstantDrummer:


The InstantDrummer tracks are like an intelligent drum loop, that you can adjust drumming intensity and select various 'parts' to go with each of your riffs. There are over 150 InstantDrummer packs available for download from the Sonoma online store (for $9.99 each) in various styles, base tempos and time signatures. They all have a preview audio so you can check them out before you buy.


T4 as a Digital Audio Scratchpad


One of the things that I like to do when practicing a scale, or solo is to play it against changes. With T4, it is very easy to choose a drum track,a time signature,a tempo and a number of measures, then record a set of changes. After you stop recording and press play, your looping changes are ready to play against.



Other times I've used the InstantDrummer as a more tolerable metronome when my click click click becomes to annoying. You don't need to record to use it, just pick a drum part and press play. 

When it comes to recording though, to be honest, I have not attempted to record a full song with RiffWorks. For me it seems to work much better as a digital sound scratchpad. Great for demoing ideas for parts of song. Then taking them to something more full featured (like Cubase or Nuendo).

One area where I do plan on using more is in generating play along tracks for my guitar students.  Creating a riff, having it repeat 16 or 32 times, exporting it and sending my students an mp3 would be a pretty painless process.

So check it out and let me know if you are using T4.

Musescore Music Notation

If there is one area where computers and music can really work together, it is musical typesetting. My handwriting is terrible and when I try to write out music, either practice scales for my students, or charts for the band, it is much better when it is typeset. I have been looking for something to use for a while and have been avoiding laying out the money for Finale or Sibelius. That being said, I am a big fan of open source software. So when I found Musescore, still in a beta form, but already very usable, I was very interested.

Musescore is now in it's 1.0 version and is coming along fast! It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It currently works well for typesetting standard notation, with support for unlimited staves, 4 voices per stave. It allows for MIDI input and playback. There is great chord name support with chord names that can be transposed with your music. Of course it contains menus full of barline types, note head types, text options,  fingerings, articulations, dynamics, etc. Here is something silly I whipped up for this post in a matter of a couple minutes.
This was a 'save as png'. It was exported at 300 dpi (I resized it) with a transparent background which is nice.The dpi  is selectable in the options menu. Other export types include: PDF, png, svg, postscript, lilypond, MIDI, wav, ogg, flac and MusicXML. So it is pretty versatile in output formats.

Keyboard shortcuts are user definable (which could be handy if you are coming from other software).

Musescore also has a plugin engine that I have not even looked at yet. It has several included plugins for doing various tasks, but since the plugins are written in Javascript, it should be pretty easy to mess with.

There are a few UI issues that are still being hashed out by the developers, but I have found the forums on their site to be extremely friendly and Bug reports are actually looked at and when possible fixed in the source code.

Future Features:


One thing that the current stable version lacks is support for guitar TAB and guitar block chord symbols, but since it is open source, I download and compile a development 'snapshot' daily and support for these features has already been coded and the bugs are being worked out. Not only for guitar, but TAB support for any amount of strings and tunings, with many built in and user definable TAB staffs as well.  I expect we will see these in a stable version soon. It seems like they try to release a new version every 3-4 months, so since 1.0 came out last month, a new updated version shouldn't be too far away.

Overall, I am very glad I found Musescore. It has a great future ahead of it.

You can download Musescore for free at http://musescore.org

Are you using Musescore? What are you doing with it? Let us know, we would love to hear.