DP: What about BANDS? Market to POP/ROCK please!

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Fri May 29, 2015 12:26 pm

Okay... I just have to pipe up here about something that's been bothering me for a while now. Why can't MOTU market more to bands and songwriter guys? It's nice they made all those stompbox emulations, but more should be done.

What triggered my post? Well today, I get another notification email that MOTU has posted a new video to their YouTube channel profiling... wait... can you guess... YET ANOTHER FILM/TV/GAME COMPOSER! Why have I yet to see a video showing a hip rock, alternative band cutting songs for an album on DP? Certainly MOTU could find one, couldn't they? I know of a couple fairly high profile rock guys that use DP. Why no profile on them?

Granted, DP is far and away in front for people who compose for film. Is MOTU satisfied with that being their niche? Would it hurt them to release a video profiling something besides a film composer, but maybe a BAND, that might appeal to the twenty-something young musician crowd, or is this demographic to be ceded to Logic or Pro Tools?

Just saying that I wish for once I'd see a YouTube video posted featuring a rock band in a studio cutting a song on DP. I know it happens.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri May 29, 2015 12:58 pm

I'm guessing here, but it would seem that composers tend to be kind of "jack of all trades" and do a lot of different activities in DP. Scoring, mixing, mastering, stems, etc. Bands tend to work in studios that don't necessarily use DP. Band members might be using DP, but most studios are still using Pro Tools.

Not that I disagree with you. I also think DP could stand a little more "diversity" in their ad campaigns. Well, make that their YouTube posts. I haven't seen an ad campaign from MOTU in quite a while. Even their placement catalogues from Sweetwater and Musician's Friend, et al, tend to approach the apologies. Fifteen pages devoted to Pro Tools and maybe half a page to DP.

It's doubly surprising given the propensity of guitar plug-ins that DP now includes. Clearly, those are not aimed at film and TV composers as much as they are for rock oriented guitarists. You'd expect more YouTube stuff highlighting that.

And then there is the aspect of trying to attract a broad market. Again, I'm speculating here, but given the box office and other widespread media attention movies get (vs the more narrow rock market) perhaps the marketing geniuses at MOTU are trying to tap into that marketshare of attention?

Regardless of all that, a more diverse approach couldn't hurt, and it's a win-win situation. YouTube is essentially free. Producing the video wouldn't be all that difficult, and I'm sure the bands would love the additional PR.

So yeah, bring it MOTU!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri May 29, 2015 12:59 pm

Double post edited out.

bayswater · Post by **bayswater** » Fri May 29, 2015 4:57 pm

Following the money?

I did watch the video that was posted today, and he talked about the guitar plugins.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Fri May 29, 2015 6:12 pm

I know. Just seems that EVERYONE that is recording bands is using Pro Tools. I really don't see a reason for it either other than the name recognition. Oh well.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri May 29, 2015 7:04 pm

It's the "Pro" part. Proformer was taken by an Emu piano module, otherwise MOTU'd have an option...

billf · Post by **billf** » Fri May 29, 2015 8:30 pm

James Steele wrote:I know. Just seems that EVERYONE that is recording bands is using Pro Tools. I really don't see a reason for it either other than the name recognition. Oh well.

I don't know if it is indicative of a larger trend, but I've seen a number of people looking to move away from Pro Tools because of their new subscription model. Hopefully it is a trend and MOTU can capitalize on it.

Michael Canavan · Post by **Michael Canavan** » Fri May 29, 2015 11:04 pm

I agree 100%, DP hasn't done enough interviews with composers who work in bands and performance in general. I know of producer/DJs, rock musicians and electronic musicians who use DP, but not from MOTU. There is very much an effort to maintain the film/tv jingle composer crowd, but what seems like zero effort to market to rock bands and electronic musicians etc.

Robert Randolph · Post by **Robert Randolph** » Sat May 30, 2015 3:59 am

James Steele wrote:I know. Just seems that EVERYONE that is recording bands is using Pro Tools. I really don't see a reason for it either other than the name recognition. Oh well.

I know I harp on it, but a large part of the answer is the lack of an absolute grid in DP.

I 'record bands', and it's most of what I do. Almost every time I show DP to someone and they see me mess with the quantize dialog, they ask about it and are subsequently put off almost immediately when I explain why I have to use it. It comes up frequently in discussions on other forums too. Not everyone records to a click, but if you do... this is a really annoying thing to deal with. (This is largely a genre thing, and I certainly don't think it's always necessary. Where I am though, the primary genres I encounter expect a lot of micro-arrangement and super-ultra tight rhythm sections. This means a lot of editing to a grid).

The lack of decent time-stretching also is a bit of an annoyance sometimes as well. DP's time-stretch is abysmal compared to the newer options in other DAWs like Elastique v3. I do spend time working in 2 other DAWs due to collaboration I do, and I love to mess around in other softwares for fun (I own nearly every DAW except Sonar). Once you see how good sounding a good time stretching algorithm can be, it becomes rather frustrating to be left without it.

A minor thing that's pretty big for some people is that editing multiple tracks at the same time is much nicer in PT. Working with large drum sessions in PT is quite simple to edit, correct, arrange, etc.. In DP it's not only non-obvious how to do it efficiently, and it's slower than working in PT.

There's also the obvious reason of how popular PT is, but the other huge reason that's maybe less obvious: education. There are so many education sources for PT (and Logic) out there. You can damn near get a college degree in using PT. Thousands of videos online for learning. Training courses with fancy sheets of paper you can frame. PT community is huge. Lots of ways for people who aren't 'self-starters' to get recording music with PT. DP has relatively little. This is a big deal for a lot of people.

The flipside is that DP has amazing features that really speed up workflow when working with recording musicians. Chunks are awesome. DP's huge number of editing commands make it very easy to get a workflow almost like PT's keyboard focus mode. DP's project navigation capabilities are only (barely) second to Logic's. I/O management is very good. Large project management in DP is unparalleled, which allows you to be more more logical and organized with your track layout. Managing multiple mixes with DP can't be beat, and makes complex tracking/editing/mixing setups a breeze to manage.... man this saves so much time to have different mixes for tracking, listening and a few 'working mixes'. There's so many other things!

One thing that I've found unusually useful is the custom consoles and their sysex/nrpn abilities. So many bands these days have analog synths or various high-end synths that have sysex or nrpn parameter control. Being able to just hook in and actually exercise some control is surprisingly useful.

edit: I came directly to DP from PTHD due to Avid's recent idiocy. I'm happier in DP, but there are definitely days where I wish I was back using PT. Particularly editing drums... it's so painful in DP. I've recently started exporting tracks to another DAW just to get things done quicker. When all that trouble is faster than working native, there's something major wrong IMO.

Robert Randolph · Post by **Robert Randolph** » Sat May 30, 2015 4:29 am

Despite that post, I neglected to agree that I think they really need to do some rock/pop/rap/hip-hop/country/etc.. artist and band videos.

The ones that Propellerheads do for Reason are amazing. Check them out here. Wish MOTU had something like that earlier when I was getting annoyed with PT. It probably would have made me more serious about leaving it earlier.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sat May 30, 2015 7:42 pm

Robert Randolph wrote:I know I harp on it, but a large part of the answer is the lack of an absolute grid in DP.

[...]

The lack of decent time-stretching also is a bit of an annoyance sometimes as well. DP's time-stretch is abysmal compared to the newer options in other DAWs...

These are the two areas I'd vote for all of us getting behind MOTU and giving them a not-so-gentle shove. I've never particularly wanted a grid, because it reminds me too much of beginner DAWs where things are so constrained that you can't do anything without enormous effort and tedious dragging, that is... other than metrically precise, fully-quantized stuff. I probably don't have to tell you that the Quantize dialog is one of my least-used dialogs these days. I let things fall where they may, because I'm generally recording people who want things that way, including myself. I mean, there are performers whose sense of time is, well, better than a grid. Most people understand what that means, and I won't elaborate on it, but for those who don't, go listen to Jascha Heifetz or Martha Argerich and beat time. That's not to say I haven't ever wished just for a moment that i had an absolute grid to drag a big selection to. Quantizing doesn't work on that. SO... I concede 100% that DP needs an absolute grid option, where an entire selection can be treated as a single event and dragged to a zero crossing, so to speak. Just don't make it a default that we have to click our way out of every time we use DP.

Now, the time stretching stuff; I think DP has GOT to have that. There is no excuse not to put that in DP. Back in 1997, the PureDSP™ feature was amazing. It's kind of gotten lost. You cannot look up "time stretching" in the index. If you don't know the word "PureDSP™", then you will not find it. In some indexes, such as DP6, it wasn't in the index at all, under any name! Does that mean they aren't proud of it anymore? Probably just an oversight, but even if PureDSP™ gave pristine results at any interval of stretching, pitchwise or timewise, it's just not as easy to use as some other DAWs' similar features. I think MOTU needs to rework this, and it's time to license IRCAM's algorithms for DP. It's in Mach Five; isn't it a natural "stretch" to presume it could be similarly worked into DP? It needs to be as easy as using the Scale Time, Scale Tempo, or Transpose dialogs.

Shooshie

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Sun May 31, 2015 7:00 am

A BIG PLUS 1 on quality time stretching within DP!

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