Title: SHARM 4
Producer: Cyberteam Ltd.
Format: Audio Recording Software
Source: www.thesharm.com
Price: $229 (Pro Edition); $299 (Studio Edition)
Rating: Good (four stars out of five)
When I was a teenager, I learned to drive in my father's
ancient Cadillac. (Don't think we were rich. It was ancient when he bought it,
and I'd swear it spent more time in the shop than on the street.) It handled
like a boat and took up three-quarters of any road—though it was fun on dates.
Then I got my own car, an equally ancient VW Beetle held
together with chewing gum and bailing wire. Well, not literally, but there
really was a rubber-band attached to the engine; I'm not making that up. It
handled fairly well and could go from zero to sixty in half an hour with a downward
slope and a good tailwind.
On one of my college breaks, a buddy of mine pulled up to my
dad's house in a muscle car he'd borrowed from a rich cousin—and he asked if I
wanted to drive it.
What a thrill it was. I felt as though all the sluggishness
and boat-like handling had been a bad dream; now I was driving the real thing!
And that leads me to today's review. After years of using
Audacity to record and edit hypnosis sessions, using SHARM 4 feels like driving a
muscle car.
This software package is designed to handle all of a
hypnosis practitioner's audio needs. It has a fairly impressive list of
features:
Record
Live Record
Export to MP3 or CD
Sample Sessions and Suggestions
Pre-loaded Music and Nature Sounds
Import Your Own Music and Audio Files
Ambient Music Creator
Binaurals (and other BWE sounds)
Bilaterals
White/Pink Noise
Breath Patterns
Heartbeat Sounds
Sound Editing
Sound Effects
Print Transcript
Store Session Notes
SHARM is really designed to be used in two ways. The first
approach is for a hypnotist to carefully create a professional recording to
give to clients or sell to customers, and the second is to use it during a
session, not only to provide background music effects, but also to record so
that the client can take the session home for reinforcement.
My feeling is that I love it for the first purpose and am
not sold on the second one.
SHARM opens with a tutorial screen that is supplemented by
extensive online videos and prompt tech support when you need it. I especially
appreciated the way that the Help feature responds to anything I click. While
I'm pretty good at figuring out software, SHARM made the learning curve quick
and painless.
You can record directly into SHARM—it even has a
teleprompter—or easily import an mp3 of suggestions and visualizations you have
recorded elsewhere. For that matter, if you don't like your own voice or lack a
microphone, SHARM has a library of pre-recorded suggestions; you can choose
between a deep, male voice or an even more pleasant woman's voice. Though I'm
not fond of the declarative suggestion style ("Your muscles are
relaxing"), I can see how these could be useful for putting together a
quick session.
I tested the record function using the fairly cheap USB
headset I keep for Skype sessions. With a little bit of enhancement and a touch
of reverb, it sounded like the Voice of God. Even though Audacity has those
effects (and many more), hours of fiddling with Audacity never made my voice
sound as good as it did after thirty seconds of playing with SHARM. Sure, there
are only four effects—but honestly, you don't need more.
After laying down the suggestions, then I started looking at
possibilities for backgrounds. Again, there's just enough choices to give lots
of options without overwhelming. Need background music? SHARM has a library of
royalty-free music. Don't like that music? SHARM has an ambient music
generator. Don't like the generated music? You can import your own. Want nature
sounds? SHARM'S got 'em. Do you prefer white noise, or pink? SHARM not only
generates the noise but lets you edit to your liking. Would you like the sound
of a heartbeat or a breathing pattern, gradually slowing or increasing? You've
got it in just a few clicks. Looking for bells and whistles? SHARM literally
has bells—and gongs, Tibetan singing bowls, marimbas . . . (No shaman drums,
but nobody's perfect.)
Perhaps you're into brainwave entrainment—SHARM lets you
generate binaurals, monaurals, and isochronics and edit them in a number of
fascinating ways, changing not only the entrainment tones but the carrier
frequencies as well. In fact, every sound you put into SHARM can be edited in
several parameters, and each parameter can be edited in several ways. I
particularly like that virtually any parameter can be determined on a graph, so
that you can, for example, have an isochronic beat gradually slow down during
the induction, maintain a slow pace during the suggestions, and then accelerate
during the return. Best of all, you can cut and paste graphs between
parameters, so that several different sounds can follow the same pattern. It's
simple but powerful.
Perhaps my favorite cool effect is the bilateral function.
I'll talk more about bilateral stimulation and brainwave entrainment in an
upcoming article, but very briefly, bilateral stimulation is what's behind
EMDR, and I believe it's the overlooked element in the old pocket watch
inductions. However, it doesn't have to be visual; auditory bilateral
stimulation—basically switching a sound back and forth from one ear to the other—is
a trance-inducing enhancement that's very effective. And SHARM lets you apply a
bilateral filter to ANY sound: an entrainment tone, a babbling brook, bird
song, white noise, a heartbeat, music, your voice . . . And of course, that
filter is fully editable.
As a test project, I made a session for a friend of mine,
who commented, "I love the way that the river sound kept moving around me
. . . " I'm looking forward to creating a dual induction in which the two
voices switch sides. Heck, when playing around with the brainwave entrainment
and bilateral features, I tranced myself out several times. This is by far the
program's best feature.
Can I gripe about SHARM? Hey, as my father used to say, any
job worth doing is worth complaining about, and there are some little things
about SHARM I don't like. (And I'm not even counting how many times I've had to
use Caps Lock during this review.)
While the interface looks appealing, it occasionally can
become problematic. I found the playback overload meter to be a thoughtful
inclusion, but the lack of an absolute playback counter really bugged me, as
did the absence of one-click muting and soloing for tracks. I also want a
one-click "Delete All" in the Stage Editor. I very much want Ctrl-Z
to work the way it does in every other Windows-based program.
There are a few features I found too simplistic or
cumbersome to rely on. The audio editing feature, which is kind of a program
within a program, is one of them; I quickly went back to using Audacity to edit
individual elements, even though there are a few ways in which the SHARM audio
editor is superior.
Likewise, while the program is designed with the idea that a
hypnosis practitioner can use it during live sessions with a client, I don't
think I'll ever be doing that for several reasons. One is simple latency: When
I speak into the mic, the playback is delayed just enough to make it very hard
to concentrate. So without spending a lot of money on a really fast computer,
the latency is going to make that feature untenable. Sure, I could not wear
headphones or silence the playback, but then it's really hard to balance the
volume of my voice and the background sounds. (Admittedly, this is a problem
with every software package of this type, not just SHARM.)
Even so, the Live Record feature is such that as soon as you
start recording, you start a new track—with all of the default settings for
effects (i.e. no effects). Now, part of what I love about a program like this
is being able to apply and tweak the effects on my voice—but if I want to do
that, then I have to start the live recording, spend a couple of minutes
getting the effects to the Goldilocks point, and then start working with my
client. Can you say "awkward waste of my client's time"? Of course,
there's no way to cut out that initial goofing around stage in the recording
I'll be giving my client—not without having to mess with Audacity for a
while—nor is there any way to change the default settings for the live voice
recording.
Now, suppose I'm in the middle of a session, and I decide to
say, "Walk over to a waterfall." (I don't know about you, but I
improvise quite a bit during sessions.) It seems that a cool program like SHARM
would let me bring in a waterfall sound effect, right? Nope. Once you are
making a live recording, you can't add anything.
Now at the end of the live recording, you get your options
for rendering the final product: you can save it as an mp3 and/or burn it to a
CD. The CD burning process is fast and smooth, but that's about the only good
thing I can say about it. Even though SHARM creates a temporary WAV file in the
CD creation process, you don't have the option of saving the recording as a
WAV. But hey, at least you don't have to download a separate LAME encoder
plug-in so that you can make an mp3, nor do you have to use a separate program
to burn a CD. (By the way, when I say a "LAME encoder," I'm not
making an adolescent value judgment; that's what the encoder is called!)
And the program gives you the option of burning a second CD
immediately—but then the option is gone forever. In fact, your live SHARM
session is lost forever as soon as you click stop; it exists only as an mp3.
You have to import the mp3 and then export that session to burn another CD
later, for instance, if your client comes back the next week and says, "My
dog ate the CD you gave me." If your client says, "The background
music was a little too loud for me to follow your voice," then all you can
say is, "Too bad; there's no way to change that now."
Suffice it to say that I found the live recording function
to be a bit LAME. (That was an adolescent value judgment.)
So, where do I stand when it comes to SHARM?
If you're looking for a great way to record live sessions,
I'm not convinced that SHARM is it. (In all fairness, I haven't found a
software package that is. In later reviews, I'll talk about some hardware
solutions.)
However, if your goal is to easily create
professional-quality recordings with all the bells and whistles, SHARM is a
must-have program.
In fact, from now on, my process for creating professional
recordings is this: record my voice tracks on my ZOOM H2 Handy Digital Recorder
(review forthcoming), do a quick edit in Audacity, and then enjoy creating the
final product with all the cool sounds, effects, brainwave entrainment, and so
on in SHARM. I suppose if I had a good enough PC microphone, I would skip the
H2 and record my voice tracks directly into SHARM or Audacity.
(Another reason I choose SHARM for this purpose is it has a
reasonable licensing agreement that allows the professional to use recordings created
with the software in any way desired. Upcoming reviews will show that's not the
case for certain other software packages.)
Compared to a free program like Audacity, SHARM might seem
expensive, but compared to any other product on the market that has similar
features, SHARM is a sports car at an economy price. If you want to easily make
recordings that go beyond the basics, SHARM's functionality, ease of use,
excellent tech support, and reasonable licensing make it a good investment,
even for the bootstrapping hypnotist.
Full Disclosure: The makers of SHARM were kind enough to
provide a full copy of the software for review.
