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Guitar Workshop
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Version 1.0 reviewed by Darrin Koltow - 03/06/00 MAGIX Guitar Workshop is a suite of multimedia presentations and applications written for guitarists, including a song player and a basic multi-track studio. Guitarists new to recording and sequencing songs should find MAGIX Guitar Workshop useful. More experienced users may feel limited by the available applications. Music MakerThe main application is called Music Maker (also called "Jam Room"), which is essentially a multi-track recording studio. There is a basic and deluxe version; the basic version is what you get with Guitar Workshop. User InterfaceTaken as a whole, the graphics and windows that Music Maker presents are flashy, but initially confusing. For example, the file manager at screen left, instead of the usual Windows scroll bars, you'll find a segmented, almost reptilian control. However, once embraced, this weird-looking control allows you to navigate through wav, midi, avi, and even bmp files pretty easily.
On top of the file manager windows are two buttons: Scan-CD and Wizard. Scan-CD simply sets the current directory to the CD drive. The futuristic looking transport box provides the usual play, loop-play, seek to the start and end, fast-forward, rewind, pause, stop and record functions. Also available are controls that let you set the beats per minute and scale the pictorial representation of an arrangement -- ½ bar, 1 bar, ¼ triplet, for example. The trouble with setting BPM is that you have to do it incrementally; you can't just type in a number and hit Enter. Mute and solo buttons provide easy control over what tracks you hear. Another reptilian slider at far right lets you zoom in and out on your arrangement; using this you can, for example, view all ten minutes of your arrangement at once, or choose to have a single bar fill up the window. The slider at the bottom moves you from start to finish through your arrangement pretty easily. Tiny slider buttons marked "s" and "e" let you set the start and finish play points of the tracks. The entire arranging window is resizable and movable, as a normal window should be; except you may want to avoid doing anything that requires the window to be refreshed: it's unusually slow. On a Pentium 166 with 24 MB RAM, window resizing took several disconcerting seconds, which is far longer than the norm for Windows. Putting It To WorkAfter listening to the sample arrangements that come on the CD (in the .vip files) for awhile, you'll want to start recording your own stuff. Click on the Record button on the Transport control to start recording sounds in a WAV format. Before you begin recording, however, you can monitor the volume level. Through a button click, Music Maker brings up graphic representations of VU meters to gauge your volume by; it will also tell you when the volume is too high. The Record dialog has options allowing you to save your work to either the hard drive or RAM, but saving to hard drive is available only on the deluxe version of Music Maker. Music Maker shows you exactly how long your wav can be, based on the capacity of your hard drive, which would be handy in the deluxe version. Note that Music Maker offers the option of recording new material while listening to existing material, if you have a full duplex sound card.
Once you make a new wav file, Music Maker makes it pretty easy to slide your samples around pictorially, as competing multi-track programs do. You can "lasso" select many samples at once, as well as group them and delete them. Each sample has handles that you can drag to increase the volume, duplicate the sample, and perform a linear fade. You can make all of these changes as an arrangement is playing, and do so in a way that's intuitive, even for those new to mixing. EffectsYou can add effects to your samples, too. If you want Music Maker to transform, for example, a sample of acoustic guitar into something less mellow, you have three levels of distortion to choose from. These preset distortion levels make it easy for beginning users to apply effects, instead of having to fool around with complex parameters, or needing to know anything about the physics of sound. Other transformations you can apply to samples include those for volume, reverb, echo, normalizing, and pitch-and-time-shifting. These are conveniently available as menu icons, as well as context-menu selections. Deluxe VersionIf after using the "basic" version of Music Maker, included with Guitar Workshop, you want some more power, you can step-up to the "deluxe" version, which adds the following features:
Song PlayerSong Player is another app that comes bundled with guitar workshop. You can also download it for free from the MAGIX web site. The application advertising claims that Song Player is a unique way of learning popular songs on guitar. Instead of reading traditional sheet music, you download a file from the MAGIX web site, put the song you want to learn into your CD-ROM drive, and listen to the tune while playing along with chord diagrams. There are some problems with this process. First, the installation has some snafus. During the installation, Song Player needs to connect to the Web. The way it does this is search for a browser in your file system. The system it was reviewed on used AOL to link to the Internet, and Music Maker couldn't find the AOL software, and thus couldn't do an automatic connect. This flaw is minor in itself, but it smacks of a lack of professionalism, and raises doubts about the quality of Music Maker as a whole. Song Player only works with your existing music CDs; you can't download just any song file from their site, and try to access its chord diagrams. You need to have a music CD with the same version of the tune that the MAGIX Web site has written chord diagrams for. Another hitch is that, at least as of this writing, the quantity of tunes for which MAGIX has created song files for is seriously lacking. For example, performing a search of the popular rock group the Black Crows brought zero results. A search for Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, and Journey returned the same thing. So, just how many songs do they have on-site? A song search using the wildcard "*" returned about 2,700 listings; also, MAGIX apparently creates new song files on a regular basis. Once you do actually manage to find and download a song file, you have to pay a royalty fee. Typically one song costs about $3.00. Is it worth it? If you feel that this is the best way to learn how to play a song, then maybe. But the Song Player system seems no better than downloading a tablature file, and learning chords to your favorite tunes that way. It seems Song Player is much more helpful to those collecting the royalty fees, than to those paying them. Multimedia PresentationsGuitar Workshop tries to be a kind of visual encyclopedia of information for guitarists. The CD contains the following multimedia presentations: Your Guitar, Open Chords, Essential Rhythm, and Barchords and Powerchords. Using these features can get to be a chore: each time you want to use the CD, you have to go through the same introductory presentation, of a young fella wailing away on his guitar. Once you endure this, however, you'll get a variety of guitar topics explored and explained with video and audio clips, as well as with text, which you can print out. The beginning guitarist will definitely find the Your Guitar presentation useful. The Subtopics here are Guitar (types), Features, Posture, String Names, Tuning, Tab[lature], and Picking. Essential Rhythm includes subtopics describing basic strumming patterns. Barchords and Powerchords does a decent job of introducing you to musical tools vital to the guitarist. The Open Chords topic contains some helpful diagrams and text on this essential topic, but only covers a few major and minor chords; missing are basic chords such as A7, G7, and E7. ConclusionOverall, Guitar Workshop achieves mixed results in providing a set of tools for guitarists "of all abilities," to quote the cover marketing copy. The multimedia presentations on the CD will give beginners a boost up, using content that's presented in a friendly, sympathetic manner. But advanced guitarists may feel frustrated upon seeing only glimpses, through the "basic" version, of a more powerful multi-track audio app. Pros
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The Song Wizard creates songs from scratch. This might be useful if you're a complete beginner to creating arrangements. To have Song Wizard make a song for you, you essentially select a set of wav files, indicate how many loops you want, how many bars per loop there are, and then let Song Wizard do the rest. There's a Random button that lets you introduce -- or lets you let Song Wizard introduce -- some variation into the small number of wav files used for the new arrangement. The net result is a feature that you might use initially to see how to construct arrangements; what Song Player produces does resemble music in a vague way.