On 10/12/2017 10:32 PM, Trevor wrote:
I never denied the existence of the concept of "virtual multitrack."
Good, so what exactly were you complaining about in my original comment?
(that you have deleted)
I understood what you were talking about. What I objected to was your
use of the term "virtual multitrack" that you made up, as if it was
something really important and significant. I object, in general, to
terms that are made up and used for no good reason.
If you didn't make up the term, can you provide a reference that
legitimizes it, other than a post on the WWW?
People were recording time code on analog tape and adding virtual
tracks (as many as the available hardware would allow) by
synchronizing MIDI sequencers to time code.
Do you have a reference for anyone calling them "virtual tracks"? (other
than yourself) Never heard it myself.
This term has been around for so long I really can't remember when I
first heard it. If the rec.music.makers.synth newsgroup archive goes
back to the 1990s, you'll probably find it there. I can tell you that
there was, maybe still is, a magazine named "Virtual Instruments" that
was all about using computers to produce sounds used in musical
compositions. That magazine came along after the concept of virtual
tracks in a multitrack DAW were pretty well accepted - recording of
tracks that yield the sounds of virtual instruments. No need to invent a
name for it.
Just as when tape decks were
synchronised to give extra REAL tracks, NOT virtual.
I agree with that except for the "Just as" part. Real audio sounds, and
not sequences of commands that cause something else to produce
synthesized sounds, are what are recorded on the slave deck.
If there were analog tracks available, the synthesizers could be
recorded on them for convenience. Otherwise, the synthesizer outputs
went into more mixer channels - THOSE were the "virtual tracks."
Not IMO, they were simply hardware synced instruments.
And that, in a nutshell, is what a "virtual track" is. But I guess you
just don't get it. You had to have been there. It was something to
really get excited about, knowing that, given time, more processing
power, and better hardware designs, the virtual sounds would get closer
and closer to the sound of real instruments - or, alternatively, that
sounds that aren't made by any organic musical instrument could actually
be played and used in a musical composition.
You need to read a good book about the history of electronic music, and
no, I can't recommend one.
As I said all along, "virtual tracks" have little to do with MIDI,
Technically, that's true. The Grateful Dead had a DEC PDP-8 computer on
stage that played sequences on a voltage-controlled synthesizer to go
along with their performances. Though nobody thought to give it a name
at the time, that was certainly a virtual track that added to their
performance. And, I suppose, one could call the backing track that the
lounge lizard uses to augment his one man band could be a virtual track
as well. But nobody thought to put that name to it.
you can now have hundreds of virtual
tracks of purely acoustic recordings.
We're getting kind of slippery here. You can have a virtual track
playing recorded samples of an acoustic instrument. However, the
instrument that was used to create the samples never played the part
that comes out of the computer.
Basically what we had to do in
overdub with degraded sound quality every time a track was copied to add
something on top (and then could no longer be edited separately) can now
be done on a new track even if you only have a 2 channel interface.
Uhhhhh . . . this is what MULTITRACK _RECORDING_ is all about. The
exciting development was that you no longer had to mix a previously
recorded part with a new part, record the mix, and throw away the
original part. If you don't understand that, then there's no point to
continuing this discussion.
But, honestly, I've never heard anyone use the term "virtual
multitrack" until you came along in this discussion.
Amazing, but irrelevant. I would have thought the concept was obvious to
anyone in the industry, but there you go.
It's obvious in the sense that I understand what you meant when you
wrote it, but it's also an unnecessary term. Would you say you were
"chopsticking" when you were eating your kung pao chicken? No, you're
just "eating."
--
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http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com