Michael A.D.

I already own Scaler and am looking forward to Scaler 2. I had never heard of Chord Prism, so I downloaded a demo version after watching a few videos explaining it's features. The demo was full featured except that it timed out after 20 minutes. I played with it for a few days and came to the conclusion that it was not in the same league as Scaler. (Or Ripchord or Cthulhu). I'm not sure who the target audience is for Chord Prism, but it's "1 finger" chord system is very primitive compared to Ripchord or Cthulhu. After playing with it for a few days I have deleted it from my system. Anyone interested should download the demo and decide whether it's useful for them.

From USA Today: A 99% survival rate might sound promising. But when it’s scaled out to the rest of the country – all 329 million residents – a 1% survival rate takes on a different meaning. The attending physician for Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court predicted early in the pandemic that 70 million to 150 million U.S. residents would contract COVID-19. A 1% mortality rate at that scale of infection is between 700,000 and 1.5 million dead – roughly the population of Washington, D.C., on the low end or the entire population of Hawaii on the high end.

This deal has been offered countless times. I bought these years ago when they had a deal going, but I gave up on them a long time ago. They do sound good, but I found them very difficult to use. I moved onto the Ample guitars and never bothered with these again.

Matt was correct in that it appears to only allow you to input single track MIDI type 0 files. And it can only be block chords - single notes will not work. So, I don't think the MIDI import feature is of much use - you might as well just enter the chords directly on their keyboard. Besides, when you enter manually you can name the chord, plus you can enter individual notes. Also observe that you are free to enter a note that is not the note you are playing. So you might create a CMAJ7 chord and then put an individual E note that would normally be a C#. So you can create some interesting, easy to play progressions, for instance, alternating between chords and bass notes. And yes, they do need a manual. Older videos show some of the features not mentioned in the latest video with perhaps the most important feature being that you are not limited to one keypress. So you might set up basic chords that one finger plays and upper extensions that another finger could play. Finally, I've found that RipChord is great fun feeding into Chord Potion.

Wonderful! Someone should send that to Phil Schaap.

Did anyone listen to it? I doubt anyone is going to get too excited about hearing a bunch of ambient city sounds... hey what's next? Maybe an instrument with a different voice on each key... and each voice says the same thing - "This download does not work... this download does not work... this download does not work..." (Thinking about it - there probably is someone who is very excited about ambient city sounds...)

It's not actually allowing you to download the tabs... more like you can use them... check them out... and I presume they will disappear from your GP7 on June1st. I guess they want to tempt you to purchase their tabs, so it's not a bad deal if you just want to check the quality of a tab before you purchase it. Personally, I have never purchased a tab - I had just used GP7 to make some of my own guitar arrangements... and can't say I have really used it much the past few years. I did play with it much more when it was GP6, but kind of lost interest in it.

My high score with Sylenth is 89,765. Anyone ever beat that?

You might want to take this much more seriously. I am in New Jersey and hundreds are dying every day. This is a severe crisis.

Besides the almost instantaneous load time, besides the great sound, the Pianoteq pianos are the most responsive I have ever played. I also own many other pianos (including all the ones that come with Kontakt complete) that I had purchased before I got the Pianoteq, and I cannot use any of them after being spoiled by the responsiveness that the Pianoteq provides.

I can vouch for Amadeus - great sounds and easy to use. Don't know about VSCO (and it may be great!), but you would not be disappointed with Amadeus.

I use the XLN kits with Jamstix. The XLN midipacks are no match for Jamstix's features, but the XLN kits are (mostly) better than the kits in Jamstix.

Highly recommended! If you don't have anything from Hideaway Studios, I suggest Strings 1 and 2 as starting points.

The real question would seem to be what strain does it put on NI's resources to allow the re-installation of these legacy products? Isn't it merely the upkeep of a few servers? And wouldn't the demand for re-installing these legacy products be so minimal that virtually no strain would be put on their servers?

Yep - quite a few of the Lab instruments existed previously as Kontakt instruments. I guess they are trying to get folks to like their interface. Personally I prefer Kontakt over the Labs interface.

That VST Buzz Blakus cello may very well be excellent, (I've never tried it), but not to be confused with Embertone's Blakus cello for $99: https://www.embertone.com/instruments/blakuscello.php The VST Buzz cello is 70MB, while the Embertone version is 8GB (if you install both the 16bit and 24bit versions).

Since AlterEgo is free, I would suggest you download MarieOrk and Bones. I presume you wanted a human (not Ork) female vocalist, but you might find these voices of some use. (And besides, what other program is going to let you type a sentence or two and then have the words sung live as you play the notes?)

Unfortunately Daisy is no longer available. There was another female - Nata was her name (if I recall correctly), and she too is no longer available. Seems a shame that Plogue has pretty much given up development on AlterEgo - it's always been a favorite of mine.

I thought the original Ripchord freebie was damn good, but V2 is amazingly better! It's like Cthulu in that you can play a chord with one finger, but now you can play with 2 fingers or 3 or as many as you want with each triggering whatever you want - a chord, octaves, cluster, you name it. And they have added strumming (up/down/both with randomization) and velocity (accent the high part of a chord/low part of a chord, randomization). Entering chords is MUCH easier than Cthulu (which I always thought was awkward for chord entry). You can edit a chord by adding individual notes as you please, name it, play it, edit it some more, etc. You add the sounds you want to trigger, so you can use keyboards, or strings, or whatever. It's REAL NICE for a freebie! Check it out: https://trackbout.com/ripchord

It's about time someone has sampled a situation comedy show. I presume it has that snappy bass part from the start of the show.

Not sure about the side-chaining issue, but (and I might be wrong) I like that VST3 usually have scaling capabilities that VST2's lack. So, with a VST3 I can enlarge it to a size/view I like.

Funny you should bring up Mu:Zines as I had just put a Mu-Zines link to a old review of X-OR in the topic from yesterday called "Anyone Around Long Enough to Remember MIDI new".

Anyone remember a program called X-OR that was written by Bob Melvin in the late 80's? It was a cross-platform (IBM, Mac, Atari) program that was a generic editor for synths, so you could have all your patches for all your synths in one program. In 1991, when Roland released the SC-55 it was the first synth to use the General Midi spec. I already owned several MIDI synths but purchased the SC-55 as soon as it was available. Then using the X-OR program I wrote the first GM editor and put it up on Compuserve so others could download it and use it. I recall that it was very cumbersome to use - if I recall correctly you had to download 3 modules to use it. But folks downloaded it and liked it. And I recall Bob Melvin writing to me and complimenting me on it and making suggestions for further enhancements. You can get a taste of what X-OR was like via this article: http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/dr-ts-x-or/170

Very nice! Thanks Soundiron. (I had to do a Kontakt batch resave to make the new presets see the original samples... took about 5 minutes... just pointing it out in case someone gets the new presets and they do not automatically see the samples.)

Me: Composition --> Production --> Composition is refined --> Production is refined --> repeat till finished.