Review / Video Demo: Elevation Software by Superscope

VIDEO REVIEW - Software for music practice, stereo recording, learning songs and transcribing songs.What a cool tool!

Superscope's Elevation software provides a slew of features to help musicians and students learn songs and practice them. It also helps music educators teach music to their students and record them. For example, this program lets you import a song from a CD or file, then slow it down without changing the pitch so that you can hear the chords and notes at a slow tempo. That makes Elevation great for learning songs.

Also, you can loop or repeat a section of music until you master it. Setting up a loop can be done by ear or by moving start/stop sliders over the song's audio waveform. What's more, Elevation can change the pitch or key of songs without changing their tempo. This lets you match a song's key to your vocal or instrumental range. These tempo and pitch changes are accomplished largely without artifacts. You don't hear a warbly effect except at extreme tempo or pitch changes.

Another major feature is vocal removal. Elevation can cancel out the lead vocal in most stereo recordings, leaving just the background instruments for you to sing along with, karaoke style. It's very effective. This tool can even work in reverse, emphasizing the recorded vocal while reducing the backing track.

A graphic equalizer lets you bring out or soften certain instruments in a mix. You can take a "snapshot" of all the control settings and save it for future recall.

All this and more occurs in a clean, attractive interface. It's well laid out in sections, making the operation intuitive. One small problem: when you click on a button to select a function, a tiny LED in the button lights up -- but it is so small you can't clearly see when a function is activated.

The Help files skilfully explain how to do things, making the program seem simple even though it has many features.

Elevation is not just for practicing; it's also a high-quality stereo recorder. You can record a mix of your vocal or solo along with the song backup. The program lets you adjust the balance between your part and the backup after recording them together. The software's processing latency causes a delay in your monitored vocal, so you might want to listen only to the accompaniment with a headphone over one ear.

You can record just yourself or your band live to stereo with very clean sound (16- or 24-bit). When the recording is done, burn it to a CD within Elevation.

To convert cassettes and LPs into WAV files or MP3s, plug a cassette player or an LP-record preamp into your sound card's line inputs and hit Record.  

Import music files (WAV, AIFF, MP3 and WMA) from any source, such your hard drive, SD card, USB stick or Compact Disc. You might import your music collection to the included Library where you can access it quickly. Songs can be labeled by genre, title, artist or album.

If you want to include scanned sheet music with any music file, drag and drop the graphics file into the audio file's information screen.

Whether you are a gigging musician, music student, transcriber or educator, you'll find a lot of practical tools for your work in Elevation.

An individual user license for Windows or Mac costs $179; a multi-user license for one computer costs $179, and a multi-user license for five computers costs $745 (saving $150).

Superscope Technologies, Inc. is at 1508 Batavia Ave., Geneva, IL 60134-3302. Phone: 630-232-8900  Fax: 630-232-8905.

You can download a 30-day free trial version at Superscope's online store. Go to http://www.superscopetechnologies.com/products/software/index.shtml