Berna
Berna 1.0 (MAC OSX)
Vintage Electronic Studio
10.69€
TRY BEFORE YOU BUY
Between the 1950s and the mid 1960s, long before
Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos injected electronics into pop-music (with a few exceptions like the Barrons and Raymond Scott), electroacoustic music was pioneered by european radio laboratories and US universities. Composing with tapes and electronics was a serious painstaking and expensive affair, prerogative of a restricted elite of contemporary music composers and adventurous sound engineers. At that time there wasn’t any electronic musical instruments market, as a matter of fact, most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes the equipment was built from scratch cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes and pots, more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium and the Theremin. Contrarily to what happens today, electronic music then was everything but fast and easy to create. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than one year of work. Everything was handmade, from complex timbres with multiple sine oscillators bounces to tape editing with scissors and scotch-tape. Even sound envelopes were manually built by cutting tapes’ edgdes at different degrees of inclination. Ussachevsky’s ADSR was yet to be invented!
Berna is a software simulation of a late 1950s electroacoustic music studio. Oscillators, filters, modulators, tape recorders, mixers, are all packed in a easy-to-use interface with historical accuracy.
Explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music.
Are you ready to meet the grandfather of the synthesizer?
REQUIREMENTS: PPC or INTEL running 10.4 or later
REVIEWS:
There is no doubt that Gleetchplug is aiming for a very niche market here. This isn't, to say the least, a piece of software that most musicians are going to find themselves using on a daily basis. However, Gleetchplug very smartly kept the price of this very low, perhaps to encourage those who wouldn't ordinarily get into something so fiddly to check it out. This is clearly a labor of love, and has been born out of a desire to educate and share with modern musicians the techniques that eventually gave way to the ones we all use today. As such, I think this would be an invaluable tool for educators. Think about it... not only can students read about these techniques, now they can actually have some hands-on experience with them, thus gaining a much greater understanding and appreciation for the difficulty these early electronic composers faced.
Experimental musicians will also find a lot to like here. The flexibility of the matrix and the vast array of unusual sound manipulators will be a breath of fresh air to those burned out on the virtual analog trance machines that seem to get released every week. The limitations present here are faithful to what the original studios were limited to, and sometimes having those kinds of restrictions can lead you down very interesting paths you might not otherwise travel.
For sure, this isn't the most useful piece of software in the world (to most of us), but it's really hard to find fault anywhere with the program. The sound quality is great, the tools are weird and fun to play with (it drove my cats NUTS), and you can learn a bit about the history of your craft in the process. If nothing else, it'll certainly give you an appreciation for how easy modern electronic composers have it. So if you'd like a break from the norm and feel up to making some crazy 1950's sci-fi soundtrack fodder, it's hard to go wrong for a mere 10 Euros. [9/10]
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