Craig N

https://www.bestservice.com/deals/tone2_sale_40_off_3730.html Same prices but you can earn a few bestcoins

Makes you wonder if it's been ready for years but because of improvements from the competition, Steven wouldn't let them release it. With him out the way... send it!

Hahaha I was coming here to joke about the possibility of the upgrade to 2 being more expensive than the Shimmer Shake 1 price last Black Friday, AND IT IS!!!! The comedy doesn't end there though What a bargain, customers! They could have charged extra for this incredible bonus but act fast and you'll get it for free with your purchase.

Whoa, finally! Thanks for the heads up!

There's a big difference in tone between EP145B and the E Instruments W. The Skybox is much warmer, a very pleasing warmth. The W sounds almost anemic by comparison and adjusting the Bass knob doesn't get anywhere near the tone of the EP145B. I've heard people say Wurlitzers are meant to sound nasally, and the W has that kind of tone, so maybe that's accurate for the 200, but I remember seeing Simeon's demonstration of the EP145B and thinking it sounded amazing, and I still think that. OK I've just had more of a dig into the Skybox settings. The simple appearance at first makes it look like there's not much you can tweak. Wow, talk about the wrong impression. Elegant simplicity but there's a lot to play with under the hood! There's a bunch of different amps and cabs and effects. I'm really glad I got the two Skybox libraries now. I'm not interested in any of the sound design stuff, and I wish they had a bunch of bread and butter presets from famous songs like some of the other Wurlie libraries do, but if you're happy tweaking, there's some great sound to be had here. But coming back to the raw samples, the EP145B definitely has an unmistakably unique warm sound that I really dig. I can't get a tone anything like it using the E Instruments W. I managed to get fairly close with VReeds briefly but then lost whatever unicorn combination of settings was responsible and now I'm way off again.

The Denise reverbs are really high latency. Wonder if they'll fix that one day?

I picked up Skybox Electric + Skybox EP145B yesterday and they're both really good, not necessarily any better than e-Instruments W, but different flavours I guess. Perhaps slightly more consistent tonally thanks to their robotic recording although I noticed a little bit more noise in some of their samples even after turning the noise setting down to nothing. Not necessarily a problem, it's a sampling of a real instrument after all. I then picked up Acoustic Samples VTines and VReeds and had so much fun exploring the range of sounds that can be made with these instruments. I'd read that it was possible to get a variety of different tones out of VReeds and that was spot on. I could pretty much match the tone of the Skybox EPs using VReeds, and I got pretty close to matching the tones of the Famous E and the Scarbee EP-88s with VTines. The thing I really like about each of these is they have nice big UIs in UVI Workstation (for some reason they don't look as good at 150% scale in Falcon), load super fast since they're so lightweight, and play with very low latency compared to sampled instruments, the way Pianoteq is. But with Pianoteq you always know you're using a modelled instrument, it's like the idealistic way such an instrument should sound to the point of uncanny valley. Whereas with VReeds and VTines you would swear you were listening to a sampled instrument until you paid attention to the consistency of the tone across the keyboard. Anyway I'm pretty chuffed with these purchases in case that's not already obvious haha. Where with a sampled instrument you're just getting those samples with whatever effects can be applied on top, with these you can get under the hood and tweak the setup like a technician can with a real instrument to really change the tone. It's quite interesting to go into those settings for some of the presets and watch how the settings change as you play across the keyboard - they're not set the same way for every key, eg the Pickup Angle on the VReeds and the Tine Height on the VTines increase key by key for certain key ranges. Fascinating stuff that I assume mirrors the setup of these instruments in the real world. So they seem like far more flexible musical instruments rather than just a snapshots of an instrument.

Doesn't work on Streichfett unfortunately (33 euro intro price). That would have been a crazy deal haha

If you have a VPN with a US-based offramp you can avail yourself of the $0.99 deal. I have a lifetime one that's really slow but comes in handy from time to time when shopping. From $2.26 to $0.99, huzzah!

Yep that's the right price. It's listed as #1 on their black friday offers page. https://www.airmusictech.com/black-friday It's the first time we've seen a $1 AIR instrument for a while! I've never had the opportunity to buy any at $1 before.

Not sure the specific model but I know it's a Rhodes. I have it, and I noticed the dynamics are great when I was comparing it to some other Rhodes libraries the other day.

I was quite excited when I first got that one during the big group buy, but sadly it's the least convincing Wurlitzer I've heard so far. It sounds more like a weird dirty synth imitation of a Wurlitzer to my ears. The 1974 Wurly Electric Piano in Sampletank 4 has a serviceable enough tone that would probably work well in a mix. At 323 mb it has its limitations; you can hear there aren't many velocity layers to it, although it does have a nice bark at high velocity levels. The higher regions sound less convincing with less noticeable release sounds. I start getting the sense of it sounding like a synth.

You don't even need the full Version of Kontakt as they're Kontakt Player libraries. I noticed last night when looking at this expansion, it says "No previous skybox instruments required" Whereas the other one (Ether) is 10 extra presets for each of the 10 instruments so it very much requires the other instruments to get any value out of Ether.

It seems to me that ANA2's main claim to fame is that it was included in the Slate bundle, so it had the industry's leading hype man talking it up at every opportunity before he cashed out and moved onto exclusively hyping up his headphones. The fancy genre-themed skins and presets were a nice touch, but they are exclusive to the Slate bundle I think.

How's THAT for oversharing? Hahaha

Thanks for taking the time to write this up (and the "overshare" part) I didn't necessarily get the impression you didn't like VReeds btw, although I can see how it might look that way given that I asked you if I was making a mistake hehe. I just thought that since you were mentioning the Wurlie library as the bees knees, and I was thinking of buying the VReeds library instead, it was worth asking the question because it's no small amount of money to spend on a couple of libraries that nominally do the same thing as libraries we already have (hahaha). I'm coming at this hobby from what I might term the other way around, interestingly enough. No musical training or background really, apart from a love of music and stuffing around coming up with 4 channel "Mod" tunes on an Amiga 500 and then a 486 when I was in my late teens. I intentionally put all of my creative energy into a non-musical pursuit for 23 odd years prior to COVID arising and bringing about a shift in priorities. I had achieved what I was seeking to achieve in that non-musical pursuit, so I am now in a wonderful position with the space to pursue music free from judgement or expectations. It might take me 20 years to release an album, and that is totally OK by me (although I would like to release an album one day). I'm just enjoying the ride and coming at music from first principles like I seem to do with everything. As a result, there's not really any sense that there's such a thing as too much money to spend on what I love... even though it might all be rather mad when looked at objectively 🙂

$111 via Thomann (for those who don't need to pay VAT) https://www.thomannmusic.com/synapse_audio_dune_3.htm

Even though I acknowledge by my own logic I need to get both to ensure I have the best one lol Credit card groans further

Two questions for you Peter if I may impose 1. By the end of Black Friday are you going to own it??? As I've heard someone famous say, "Come on, man!" hahaha 2. I'm personally more inclined to buy the VReeds modelled instrument... Am I making a mistake?

Cherry Audio made their name with these bargain priced plugins, and my experience so far has been that the quality is commensurate with their pricing at the low end. Lots of people are evidently happy with the motto "close enough is good enough" when the price is right. Their DCO 106 synth is a cheap and cheerful clone. I bought it for $29ish and enjoyed using it until I started comparing the sound quality with Softube and TAL. I happily paid much more for Softube and TAL's Juno clones. The great irony is that I use them less than I did the Cherry Audio DCO 106 because they're not as cheerful to use. I hope one day I will be convinced that the sound quality of Cherry Audio's synths competes with the best of the best. Until that time, I'll wait for a good bargain before throwing them any more money 😊

I'll probably grab it when it comes down to $29 in 6 months.

These are also sold on dontcrack, bestservice jrr shop, audiodeluxe, pluginfox but the pricing varies a bit and none have this 30% off listed yet.

https://www.acousticsamples.net/ 30% off until Monday Group discounts apply if you buy more than one item in a custom bundle Paging @PavlovsCat

Seems weird that they offered the Studio Grands bundle for less than this only a couple of weeks ago. Guess they mustn't be starving for business.

Ain't that the truth