June 8, 2007
The Producers Conference, Rome, ItalyOrganized by Midiware
Midiware, the Italian distributors of Propellerhead Software, organized a fantastic Producers Conference in Rome that welcomed 50 people to the Saint Louis College of Music.
The school started primarily as a private institute offering courses in jazz to musicians. It has grown since it's establishment in 1976 and now has several facilities in the area around central Rome and now offers courses in production and music technology. A rather cozy room was completely packed for the afternoon event.
The guest speakers included the acclaimed DJ Coccoluto, Maurizio Martusciello (Martux), and Francesco Bruni (Frankie Hi-NRG). Included on the schedule were presentations in English from DJ Babu, Propellerhead Software Product Specialist, James Bernard, and Kurt Kurasaki, author of Power Tools for Reason 3.0.
Hip-Hop legend, DJ Babu, demonstrated his techniques of using ReCycle as a sample editing utility with music loops. After processing the samples, the REX files are imported into Reason's NN-XT sampler which is triggered from a keyboard controller. With a heavy hip-hop beat running in Reason, Babu deftly tapped out new riffs to reconstruct the groove based on segments of the original track showing the Italians how they "Reason" out on the west coast.
As one of country's Top DJ artists, Claudio Coccoluto's appearance was highly anticipated by the everyone. Coccoluto primarily spoke about his experience with the music industry and nature of the music business in Italy. An interesting discussion ensued on the state of the industry where Italian music charts have revised the gold and platinum standards. He was quite candid about his bias towards hardware, noting that he preferred the spontaneous feel of production and spinning records in a live set.
Maurizio Martusciello, otherwise known as Martux, delivered a thorough lecture, citing his collaboration with Pasquale Rimieri and other artistic endeavors. Martux encouraged the audience to experiment, explaining that creating new sounds often inspires new songs. Martuxs associate, Rodolfo Calandrelli, then played a dance track produced exclusively in Reason that relied heavily on Redrum Drum Machines and Matrix Pattern Sequencers triggering samplers and synthesizers.
The audience was treated to an impressive presentation from Francesco Bruni (Frankie Hi-NRG). As a guitarist and bass player, Francesco is an excellent musician and played a jazzy ballad created in Reason. He proceeded to explain his production process with various audio routing techniques, including tips on compression and equalization using the MClass devices. The tutorial went a bit deeper as Francesco demonstrated a variety of control voltage modulation routings to create tremolo effects for the Electromechanal Rhodes combi, and drum gating effects using the Matrix Pattern Sequencer.
The last two presentations were delivered in condensed versions to keep up with schedule. James Bernard showed his Multiband processing system using BV512 Vocoders and Mclass Stereo Imagers to split up frequency bands. James also explained the process of using parallel compression or "NYC Compression" to boost a mix.
Kurt Kurasaki demonstrated a variety of techniques to create performance combinators that allow the user to play reason like a live set. He started with a demonstration of assigning controllers knobs to different device parameters in a Reason track, then performed an impromptu performance that manipulated various ReCycle Loops through a stack of Combinator effects devices.
What is a weekend in Rome without soaking up some of its history. Not even with Coloseum at their feet, James and Tom Graber could stop themselves from a bit battling.
