Craig N

6 minutes ago, Yan Filiatrault said:

You didn’t mention Avenger. I have a long list of synths as well, but this one rise to the top for me.

Important proviso though. New version incoming and its going to be an $80ish upgrade price. 

Dune 3 is really good. 

The new string synth by Waldorf is pretty organic sounding! You can try the demo, the sounds are the opposite of static. 

A few Xils synths could be described as organic too. Might be worth a demo. 

4 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Such are the ones I have and love: Omnisphere, Falcon, Pigments, PhasePlant, V Collection, Moog and Korg collections, Applied Acoustics, Novum, Abyss, Massive, MSoundFactory, both SynthMasters, and I don’t want to forget Forbidden Planet. 

Is that it?!?!? 

Maybe the trademark troll threatened them too

I am pretty sure I know which ones are which, but I'm finding it a tough one to judge, because the second seems to have too much reverb for my liking (sorry) and the third has more tremolo which always imparts a lovely quality, and the first one is a little louder in the bitey parts 🙂

Even sharper pricing via Thomann

https://www.thomannmusic.com/soniccouture.html

29 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

Man, there are so many sales going on for sample libraries of my beloved Wurli and I just bought the e-Instruments one and then spent time realizing that I like SonicCouture's Wurli even more, and then this library is dirt cheap.... It's a good time for Wurli fans. The biggest challenge is not buying all of these libraries. 

Well, if you think about it, the only guaranteed way to know you have the best Wurli library is to buy all of them 🙂

I do like the fact there's a 140b in this Purgatory Creek collection, as I don't have one of those yet. 

I spent a fair bit of time comparing my Wurli libraries yesterday and realised what I don't like about the Broken Wurli is the mechanical noises so when I turn those down, it actually can end up sounding pretty good and surprisingly close to the e-Instruments one.

But I still currently prefer the e-Instruments, mainly after watching an interesting comparison of some virtual Wurli's against an actual Wurli yesterday and then comparing those tones to the ones coming out of the libraries I already own.  

When I get the Broken Wurli closer to the tone of the Wurli in that video (by giving it some bass boost in the EQ), it readily distorts at high velocities. Whereas the e-Instruments one takes a bass boost more in its stride. 

I was testing them with some midi files, in particular Steely Dan's "Do It Again". Broken Wurli has a preset for Steely Dan's "Do It Again" and it doesn't really sound much like the tone used in the song to me. It took a lot of tweaking to get to a serviceable sound. I'm not really that interested in the sound design type presets in the e-instruments one either but it least the bread and butter stuff is totally serviceable without the need for tweaking. The default e-Instruments preset worked perfectly for Do It Again. 

I'm definitely going to be buying all of these Purgatory Creek libraries, and the VReeds and VTines from Acoustic Samples too. What I'm not sure about currently is whether I should try to get the sampled AcousticSamples libraries first, because at one point owners of the Wurlie library got 50% off VReeds and if that discount is still in place and stacks with BF pricing then it might be worth the extra expense. 

I obviously also need to get Keyscape. 🙂 

Keyboard libraries for Kontakt, Kronos/Nautilus, Kurzweil Forte, Montage/Modx

https://www.purgatorycreek.com/

Note, 40% discount applied at checkout / in the store which is after you hit the Buy Now button on the product pages. 

Here are the details for the Kontakt library bundles, but they're available individually if you're only after a single one eg at $11.97 down from $19.95 originally.

Tine Collection for Kontakt

$39.95 $23.97

Four tine-based electro-mechanical pianos.

The Collection includes all of the instruments shown below:

Mark I (1975)

Mark V (1984)

Mark II (1980)

Sparkletop (1965)

Please note: This library requires the full version of Native Instruments Kontakt.  It will only run in demo mode when using the Kontakt Player.

Reed Collection for Kontakt

$39.95 $23.97

The collection includes all of the instruments shown below:

Reed RP 200a

Reed EP 140b

Pianet N

Pianet T

Please note: This library requires the full version of Native Instruments Kontakt.  It will only run in demo mode when using the Kontakt Player.

Clavinet Collection – Kontakt

$24.95 $14.97

The collection includes all of the instruments shown below:

Clavinet D6

Clavinet C

In all, you have two deeply sampled clavinets in a single collection at a very reasonable price.

Please note: This library requires the full version of Native Instruments Kontakt.  It will only run in demo mode when using the Kontakt Player.

I took your advice @PavlovsCat and emailed the developer to see what they say. 

41 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

@Craig N Did you end up buying e-instrument's W (Wurli)? If so, I'd love your thoughts. 

Yeah I ended up buying it and the Acoustic S just moments before Pianoteq 8 came out haha. 

It's surpassed Broken Wurli and Scarbee A200 for tonality in my book. I don't have a ton of other Wurlitzers to compare it to, I just know what sounds musical to me. 

The only niggle I have is that there's one note, D2, that has a peculiarity to it, a bit of a flat crystal undertone that stands out at lower velocities (at higher velocity the bark that comes in obscures this undertone). It's a little bit like the sound you get when you lick your finger and run it along the rim of a glass. I'm a perfectionist so I tend to get hung up on things like this. 

Anyway, it mustn't be the end of the world, because I'm seriously considering buying their other Acoustic and Electric Pianos while they're on sale. They just strike me as high quality Kontakt libraries / instruments. Eg they are fast to load even off HDD, and once loaded, there's no further pauses while loading when switching between Studio and Live samples. Whereas some Kontakt libraries are so slow to load the samples its clear the developers have no idea how to optimise their libraries at all. 

I bit the bullet and picked up the Studio bundle! 

I wonder if we'll see this Pianoteq sale on any distributors like JRR Shop or PluginFox who might allow for further discounts. I have my eye on the Studio bundle but my credit card is groaning at the thought of it. 

37 minutes ago, abacab said:

Does it crash running standalone? ST4 is a very heavy resource user and eats CPU, RAM, and Disk throughput like nobody's business. Browsing/loading presets is going to stress all of those. But it really shouldn't crash when just browsing presets. IMO the software is stable now, so probably best to get with IK support to narrow it down.

I haven't had any crash issues since the initial product release 3 years ago. It was a CPU hog on the desktop PC I had at the time, and I've been running a seriously upgraded PC since then and it runs very smooth now.

Desktop PC: Core i5-9600K, 6-cores 3.7 GHz turbo to 4.6 GHz, 32 GB RAM, OS on 500GB M.2 SSD, samples on 2GB SATA internal drive. Audio on Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 with stable ASIO driver and Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU.

 

I haven't tried running it standalone recently, I'll check that out. It's while loading a new sound that it frequently crashes. 

Just out of curiosity, Sampletank 4 has never been stable for me, and I know I'm meant to go via IK support but no other high quality software on my Pc requires extensive interactions with support to get working. 

Does anyone else find Sampletank to work flawlessly, or are crashes while browsing presets par for the course? 

I was demoing piano sounds yesterday and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. Bitwig handles it like a champ thankfully.

Admittedly it was expensive but it included a ridiculous amount of libraries. 

I dunno I thought the NI sale was the best. I'm waiting for another one of them 😊

Technically this is a dupe of Larry's post and I apologise for that, but I felt it needed to be called out in a post of its own because it's so good. 

The best pedal emulation bundle bargain is back. I paid $55.20 for these and thought I was getting a bargain. They sound great!

https://shop.audified.com/products/multidrive-pedal-pro

Check out how close they are to some of the pedals being emulated... this is in another league compared to what most companies try to pass off for pedals ITB. 

Just try a demo from Audiority (Deleight is a great sounding delay), AudioThing (perhaps the hand clapper), and Audified (MultiDrive Pedal Pro are some really great pedal emulations) and you'll be able to keep them soon enough. 

I haven't tried anything from Audiofier, Audiomodern, Audionamix yet but because I have the above three clear, that seems to be enough to keep all these Audio* plugins straight.

I have to confess I'm somewhat inclined to make a Wurlitzer library comparison video for YouTube featuring great electric piano tunes that were originally played on a Rhodes, to see if anyone notices the discrepancy and is bothered enough to comment on it. Do you think that would get much of a reaction? 🙂

17 hours ago, Fleer said:

42

39

56

 

Whole Lotta Rosie!

First time hearing this one too! Gosh now I'm feeling like I've been living under a rock. But quite a catchy song even during the first listen! I just put it on and half way through found my head bopping along to it. Good stuff!

On 11/12/2022 at 4:34 PM, PavlovsCat said:

Okay, thanks  for coming with me on this new tangent. When my daughter was in elementary she used to take forever to eat her breakfast before school. And I'm kind of an unconventional guy with a big sense of humor. So take this with that understanding. So to get her to move faster I put on Metallica while she ate. She hated it,  so she ate faster, but complained. I was using an FBI technique. I'm not a Metallica fan, BTW, it was just my sense of humor. So years later, last month,  her and I are in the car and "Master of Puppets" comes on and I politely go to change the station,  she says, "Nooooo!!! I love this song!!!! It reminds me of Eddie!" It was surreal. All of those techniques,  I was pretty sure she would hate Metallica for life. Nope! At least it's rock, so I love that she loves a rock song.  Although my kids don't like Zeppelin!

I'm an old rocker. That was my genre. Although I am the son of a classical pianist and also love Chopin, Mozart,  Bach, Beethoven. Rachmaninoff... Back in the day (the mid 90s )Jimmy Chamberlain (Smashing Pumpkins) stated I was one of his favorite rock drummers -- in front of witnesses!!!! And now I have two kids who barely even like rock music except for my daughter liking that song (and mellow stuff like Coldplay,  which I love too). 

Hey, I love a good tangent 🙂

I was a Metallica fan from about the age of 14 through 16 so it was pretty cool to see Eddie as a crowd favourite in Stranger Things. Yesterday I acted on a hunch and asked my daughter what she thought of Metallica, and she said they're cool, and then I asked if she'd ever heard any of their music, and she said no. Hahaha. 

Well it sounds like rock music is in their blood. Give them time, 13 is still young. Def Leppard sounded too heavy to my ears at 13, before I discovered AC/DC and then Metallica a year later.  I liked Queen from a fairly young age, but that was all over the radio back then. Nowadays you don't hear much rock music on the radio... or should I say streaming charts? Hopefully it's not going to become a lost art. 

One property at Juno Beach, another in Jupiter. I'm sensing a theme here. 

I wonder whether he's considered doing one last push for a Black Friday goodbye sale? 

26 minutes ago, Greg said:

I have gotten a couple of emails about PA bundles offer expiring 11/14 but there is not indication of what is changing. Anyone know?

The $9.99 a month/$99 a year one, that includes access to all their plugins and three free plugins per year, is going up significantly in price. Much more so than the $29 Forever club, this one is one that people may regret not getting later. I haven't gotten it, but now that I'm thinking about it, it's hard to think of any downsides other than that it might be possible to get three plugins for less than $29 if you are very lucky and don't end up buying any that you don't really need (which seems inevitable). 

If Roland Cloud was priced like this, it'd be a no-brainer haha.