Music Creation Software by Studio Master
When I was handed a CD called “Skip to my Loops”, I was delighted that I had received the CD full of scratchy, funky loops sourced by Norman Ball-Cook himself (very popular amongst samplists circa. 1994).
I was wrong; this is another piece of ‘Music Creation Software’ for the PC, which goes by the same name, from Studio Master. If you already own ‘Mixman Studio’, which comes free with SoundBlaster sound cards, you may have guessed what it is already.
So what is it?
Well it claims that you can create a professional dance track in minutes, and even send it off to DanceSoft, Studio Master’s home, to be turned into vinyl or CD.
It is a 20 track audio sequencer, wave editor and virtual drum machine. The CD also contains around 1000 samples that have been sourced by Norman Cook, DJ Dougal, DJ Brisk, Tim Farriss and Coldcut. Of course to anybody with any sampling experience this equates to 100 that you may consider using and 10 samples that you love .
The software itself comes with a simple clear tutorial in the form of .avi video and even a biography of Norman himself. The CD booklet is actually a 16-page manual, which is good to see in our decreasingly documentation-less techno world.
Installation is quick and easy, I had no problems running it on a PIII 450 or my more challenged P166. It suggests having 16Mb or more RAM; personally I would make this figure more like 64Mb if you are going to use all 20 tracks.
Recording your killer hit is simply a matter of selecting a tempo, loading sounds (most audio formats are supported) into each track and then hitting record whilst you mute and un-mute tracks as they play. A nice feature here is that there are keyboard shortcuts to switch tracks on and off, so you can switch multiple tracks on & off simultaneously, this would be a serious limitation if a mouse were the only option. There are 20 sliders for each track so that you can fade loops in and out. There are even pan-pots so that you can pan sounds in a mad 60’s Pink Floyd style or just create a good stereo image. When you are happy you hit stop and the audio sequencer has recorded all your knob twiddles, warts and all.
Now to make sense of what you just did, you change to the ‘Pro 2000’ interface, where you can see what you have just done in a Cubase style piano-roll editor here you can chop away all the messy bits and move stuff around – this is where the comparison with Cubase stops - this editor is very, very basic.
When you have finished you can save the song, as it’s own proprietary .b2 format – so you could perform further edits or the more generic .wav format, which you could burn onto a CD or even use some shareware to turn it into an MP3 and e-mail it to your mates!
At this point it is worth saying that “Skip to my Loops” does nothing clever, it relies on all the samples working together anyway i.e. being the same tempo, key etc. This is of course no problem if you use all the sounds from the CD (which incidentally are really quite good), because this is how they are grouped, for instance all the Norman Cook ones are 125bpm.
The only way I can see someone being really creative with this is to source and edit your own samples and then spend a lot of time in the Pro2000 edit mode. Using the built in wave editor, this would be a long, slow boring process – which sort of defeats the purpose of this software.
This is not an expensive product (around £30) so in a way should not be compared with anything more professional. I see it as a stepping-stone for a PC enthusiast who may or may not develop an interest in making dance music. If you were to develop an interest you would be progressing to professional products like Cubase or Logic Audio within a couple of months - you would not stay with this as a serious tool.
As a piece of software there are a few niggles, you cannot resize any windows, there is no undo/control-z function, and on my version, V1.00, F1 merely brought up a “cannot find the help file” message, this is poor, very poor. Also there is absolutely no support for MIDI, so if you want to start your studio off with your sister’s Yamaha PortaSound Keyboard and “Skip to my Loops” forget it, get Cubasis (a stripped down version of Cubase) for £90.
All in all this is a good fun piece of software, which really shouldn’t be taken too seriously. My nephew will love it…and with his luck, he will release his sonic montage and become the next Norman Cook!
Overall rating 5/10
Rick Lomas
May 1999