daveiv

That was actually my workflow up until recently. I'm familiar with keyboard more than any other instrument. I made acoustic-sounding tracks by recording MIDI live from left to right, usually in one take, once I have a rough idea about a song. I bought AcousticSamples guitars and bass for that purpose. I managed to play them on keyboard realistic enough to make real guitarists believe they're genuine. I hit the wall once I wanted to have something like a stoner/grunge rock sound with Drop D tuned guitar. AS guitars are all E Standard. Now I could buy another guitar VI library made for that purpose. But ultimately, a real guitar with humbuckers and fixed bridge for drop tuning cost me more or less the same. Playing power chords on Drop D is not rocket science, but I can tell you it's really inconvenient for me to play and record a guitar front of a DAW compared to just hitting keys. However, it's one less set of VI plugins to worry about, and holding a guitar will look cooler than a keytar on the stage, if I ever do a gig in the future. Writing songs by typing notes into Guitar Pro instead of recording MIDI feels weird as well. I haven't decided on that part yet. I like the way how Guitar Pro holds all the song data, including the lyrics and guitar articulations, in one small file. That's a net productivity gain compared to dealing with DAW project folders, having correct VIs and effects installed properly. With guitar tabs written on a page, I started thinking in riffs, instead of MIDI. Plus, guitarists understand guitar tabs, if I ever hire one to record my tracks. On the other hand, it's a slow process compared to just keyboarding the virtual guitars, bass, drums. I don't know what to do to write songs right now, to be honest. I feel I should insist on Guitar Pro for a while to see where it goes. Me very confuse. SoundPaint 1975, I kinda agree with you. I really enjoy it as a responsive instrument, maybe the way I'd enjoy an electric piano. Yet, it obviously lacks guitar articulations and all the other realism tricks that other guitar VIs employ. I wasn't aware when I bought 1975 guitar that SoundPaint was oriented towards film soundtrack scoring.

FYI, I added the second half of my post while you're typing this. Ugritone drums are my current favorite because they're small, they work on Linux (if I ever switch), and they doesn't require online activation. Default presets are mostly metal/punk oriented, but newer libraries (Assault Drums, and the new Tight Studio Drums) are suitable for soft rock and pop out of the box. However, their samples are raw, that gives you great flexibility to mix them to fit any genre IMHO.

I hear ya. I should have started with Kontakt in the beginning. That would save me time and money. For drums & percussion: DrumForge (big lib for rock/metal) + AIR [Strike 2 (virtual drummer), Transfuser (groovebox), Boom (simple drum machine), Structure (has a good library of percussion and drums), Xpand (quick n dirty drums/perc.)] + Sonivox [Tony Coleman (inexpensive yet detailed sampling), Big Bang Universal Drums (same), Silk Road, Atsia], Ugritone (raw samples as if you have a real drum recorded, my current favorite). Strings & brass: Miroslav 2 fits the bill. Piano & Keyboard: Sonivox [Essential Keyboard Collection (good enough piano and e-piano sounds in the mix), Eighty Eight (kinda deeply sampled)] + AIR Mini Grand (works), Velvet (I like it for Wurli & Rhodes), DB-33 (nice Hammond emulation), Structure (has nice Mellotron)] + SoundPaint [Rhodes (pretty good so far)] Guitar & Bass: AcousticSamples Guitar Collection and JBass (great for writing/demoing, but I might switch to Guitar Pro for that purpose in the near future, SoundPaint 1975 Soulful Guitar (sounds just great) It's difficult for me to justify buying any Kontakt library with all these in my arsenal.

Good idea. I heard Windows is a popular operating system.

Wherever I see the word FREE, I click!

I've collected non-Kontakt libs here and there, I can't seem to find anything useful anymore. Maybe more percussion, I should look for.

Rock with real guitars & bass, plus MIDI drums, keyboards, strings, everything else.

I bought Kontakt 6 two years ago after avoiding it for years. I have yet to find any use for it.

https://www.acousticsamples.net/bass https://www.acousticsamples.net/bundles/as-bass-collection What problems did you have with their guitar VIs?

Does it still bundle spyware?

Which one's MIDI editor you prefer the most?

Because Cakewalk is subscription-based, costing $0/month for now. PreSonus Sphere is also getting constant updates for a few bucks more.

That's what I'm afraid of. I have UJAM VD's grandfather AIR Strike 2. It has a nice selection of drum kits, grooves, and all the mixing FX. But it's kinda painful to evaluate those MIDI grooves to find something that fits into your music. So I learned playing drums live on keyboard, but I can't do interesting drum fills yet. I'm going to try manual drum programming on Guitar Pro, and see where it goes. I will hear your track ASAP.

https://www.kvraudio.com/marketplace/transfuser-by-air-music-technology Ends October 5th.

Toontrack EZkeys comes to my mind for a heavily scripted piano library. Not my thing, but many people seem to enjoy its groove functionality. AIR Music's Velvet electric piano emulates key action, mechanics noise, velocity curve, and such for four electric pianos. It also has a nice FX chain. It does a great job in such a small package, combining samples and physical modeling, but that's mostly DSP programming, not UI scripting. I agree that most piano VI scripts only deal with microphone levels, and maybe some FX like reverberation.

Have fun! 🥶

Looks like a scam.

Have you had any chance to work on the song structure, or write drums, etc. in GP yet?

S1 Artist vs Cakewalk for MIDI-heavy tracks?

Trespasser was the last dinosaur game I played. Anything new in dinosaur gaming since then?

I love Vital's design language. Modest yet lovely visuals here and there.

Yes, sir. I'm entering a new phase of my songwriting journey with this tool. I'll start with writing drums and bass lines!

Purchased! Albeit not at discount. Waiting for the license...

I've been using Lua for the past ten years on and off. It's usually embedded into larger software, which might be video games or a set of programs running inside a device to control a factory. It's very optimized: runs very fast with minimal memory footprint. In our use case, a sample library vendor can develop algorithms in Lua to implement an AI drummer, and it would operate as smoothly as if it's a VST plugin programmed in C++. I've just skimmed through UVI scripting documentary, and it looks pretty good. But $300 UVI Falcon is difficult for me to justify, and it doesn't seem to allow distributing 3rd party sample libraries without a prior agreement with UVI. Kontakt with Lua would be a real game changer, though. Maybe in Kontakt 8, who knows? Kontakt Creator Tools has Lua scripting, but that program is used only to manage the creation of a Kontakt instrument, those scripts aren't running in the instrument itself. By the way, if you're interested in trying out programming, LÖVE is a nice little game engine that uses Lua. It also has plenty of tutorials and a very active community helpful for beginners. There are successful indie games made with LÖVE.

Which VD is your favorite, if I might to ask?