They also cloned the Z80, the 8086, the Casio pocket computer, HP calculators, the Apple ][... it wasn't all big iron. Some of it went beyond cloning, to support the Cyrillic character set where it otherwise wouldn't. Aside from the fundamental mistake of using the "metric inch", thus making it impossible to mix and match parts with Western ones, they actually did a reasonably good job on most of it. Some of it still works.

Except for Big Iron (for which they aren't going to be using ARMs, real or clone), they aren't in need of breakthroughs to make usable hardware.

Look at it this way -- say for some strange reason, Apple stopped making new iPhone models, and Samsung and HTC got sued into not doing anything new. Three years from now you're stuck with the same one they make today. It still works. Would that really be so awful? Legally it would suck. Technologically, not so much.

The Russians have cloned foreign hardware before, with varying degrees of success. While it will always be one or two generations behind (because you can't reasonably clone something not yet released), their past history would indicate that these will actually work, if they are willing to commit the necessary resources. With there being less and less difference between generations lately, cloning now makes more sense than it did ten years ago. ARM processors themselves were originally cobbled together by a team with plenty of talent but little financial backing, so who's to say a clone can't be done under the same conditions?

This is not quite true. The larger formats come with larger acceptable circles of confusion as well, since it is expected they will be enlarged less. The basic premise is correct, but it's not straight linear. A 50 mm lens at f/1.4 has less effective depth of field on a 14 MP crop sensor than it does on a 14 MP full-frame sensor, just because the actual sensing elements are smaller.

The bass trombone stop has the range, but unfortunately, it has a very slow attack (which is somewhat realistic for larger bore trombones, mind you). To sound correct, the player should compensate for the slow attack and should play slightly ahead of the beat like a real trombone player does. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and as a result, in fast music, it ends up playing a quarter beat behind the rest of the ensemble, and it sounds like utter crap.

There are several parts to the answer for this. First, Garritan isn't particularly good, but other (better) sample sets are similarly limited at times. One workaround is to render the instrument to an audio file with a MIDI transposition (say, 4 semitones up) and then use a pitch shifter on the audio to take them back down. (Not a realtime pitch shifter, but an actual audio processor done on the captured audio.) This will tend to brighten the overall instrument a bit though.

You can also stack one or two Maximizer inserts on the bass trombone channel, which will greatly accelerate the A portion of the ADSR model. I do this with Garritan's string sounds, since they don't allow for hand-tweaking.

The last part is pretty easy -- set a negative time offset (or just less offset than everyone else) on the channel. I do this with baritone and bass saxophone parts when they get into lower dynamic levels, because of the exact same issue. (It's not a problem at higher dynamics.)

With a group of top-flight professional musicians, there are astonishingly few errors, and once they figure out what they want to do, the performances tend to close in on a repeatable target. The main advantages there are that (1) they can follow verbal instructions, or listen to something else and emulate it, and (2) they do a lot of thinking for themselves, when the composer is less than specific. Computers do neither of these things.

The trumpet style is called an EVI, the clarinet/soprano sax style is called an EWI. I have an EWI, though I've hacked it into a curved saxophone shape. Functionally it's exactly the same, it just puts the instrument and my hands in a more comfortable position. The EWI Brecker was using was rather primitive compared to what's available now, and the sounds are dependent on what you're willing to buy. It's totally disconnected from the hardware used to play in the MIDI data. I'm using "Mr. T Sax" (which has since been supplanted by "The Sax Brothers") and "The Trumpet", both by Sample Modeling, as my main instruments when I'm striving for critical realism.

A cimbasso sounds just like a bass trombone, except for the technique differences between slide and valves. It *is* a bass trombone, as far as acoustics go. What makes it not a typical "valve trombone" is that it often has six valves, one for each slide position, which completely sidesteps the usual issues with combining valve lengths in a brass instrument. They aren't terribly common instruments, so there's still little uniformity among them.

I tend to write for fairly minimal instrumentation myself, so every part is exposed. Things that get electronically processed anyhow (guitars and such) are the easiest to fake, because there comes a point where distorted signals sound alike no matter their origins. The question isn't whether the end results sounds better than an expert player, it's whether it sounds better than ME on that instrument.

Computers aren't musicians, they are merely instruments, and we've gotten to the point that for an awful lot of things, those instruments played (programmed) by actual people can produce quite good results.

In the case of a pit orchestra, this just means one player could cover an entire multi-instrument "book" with a single EWI/EVI and laptop rather than actually physically switching instruments, but it would do nothing to alter the actual number of people required. Each person could still only play one part at a time. Electronics such as vocal harmonizers can be used to get around this to a degree, but those can be used with ordinary acoustic instruments as well (as the fact that they are VOCAL harmonizers would tend to imply).

If you've got the budget and space for a two-piece horn section, but have the means to make it sound like a four or six-piece horn section, who is being harmed by doing so? The number of people who would be up there playing doesn't change in either case.

DISCLAIMER: There's an EWI sitting within arm's reach of me as I type this. I may have a vested interest in proving it worthy for certain applications that AREN'T supposed to sound synthy.

maybe to the people who have played them, even if they no longer do... but to the rest of the listening public, it is anything but obvious. If an unsophisticated listener can't tell the difference between a tuba and a cimbasso (same range, VERY different timbre), how can you possibly expect them to know the difference between a real tuba and a well-sampled synthesized one? They're not going to.

A recorded backup band, a click track and a handful of live musicians has been the norm in shows for a long time, I'm afraid. I've seen shows where the "band" was clearly a dozen or so people, but the majority were all on tape and all that were actually played were the lead trumpet, the drums, and the piano. If one of them was missing, they've got a scratch track for them too. (It's all multi-tracked on ADAT or something similar, so it's not a big problem.) If the performers on stage screw up -- and sometimes they do -- then tough titties for them. They have to figure it out on the fly and make the adjustments. Choreography is so dependent on timing anyhow that they'd rather have the singers step on their dicks than make the entire crew have to adjust to the mistake.

You haven't used the virtual instruments made by Sample Modeling then. I have. They're well worth the money.

Breath-based vibrato. Volume (and timbre) that tracks breath in real time. Pitch bends that alter timbre. Asymmetric (easy to bend down, hard to bend up) pitch bends if you desire. Attacks are based on three factors: initial velocity, breath data (or aftertouch) following note-on, and the space following the preceding note. It actually does quite a nice job -- it takes a bit of adjustment to know that sometimes you have to play EXTREMELY legato to get the effect you want, where it would come out as mush on a real instrument if you tried to do that, but that's just a matter of altering technique. Also, they'll do flutter tongue and growl. Singing through the horn is best done outside the synthesis software, since it's an acoustic interaction between two pitches. The only real problem is latency, but on any reasonably fast setup this can be kept under 22 milliseconds.

While it's true you can't easily control ALL parameters at once, it's highly unusual that you need growl, flutter-tongue, and multiphonics all within the span of an interval so short you can't step on a pedal to choose between them. For studio work, hand-editing said parameters after main recording is dead simple (I don't even attempt to do my pitch bends in real time for recordings, though obviously I do live). Brighter/darker is a matter of changing equalization or changing sample sets on the fly (which can be done with a single keystroke or MIDI command in any DAW I can think of). While emulating instruments accurately is a rather different skill set from actually playing them, it's quite a doable one. It does help if you know how they work, but it doesn't mean you have to be particularly good at them. For example I can play trumpet and horn, but low brass is completely beyond my abilities. That doesn't stop me from accurately emulating their actual response. If I do a rip across an octave, the notes in between are going to represent actual partials for at least one valid valve/slide position for the starting and ending notes, because at a fundamental level, all brass instruments behave the same. If you play one, you grasp them all.

You don't have to take my word for it. You can decide for yourself..

This is defamatory to all vegisexuals everywhere, and I demand a retraction and an apology, you insensitive clod!

What started out as an experiment in Progressive Rock turned into Jazz-Rock Fusion. If soft machines are the future, then the future is Out-Bloody-Rageous.

They had to announce this for their own safety. If they hadn't, nobody else would have looked at it and they'd be dead in a week.

This one stands, I had to deal with it as an insurance agent explaining why a company had vehicles in California with Arizona plates -- the reason being that they couldn't register them in California until they had 7500 miles on them.