Reid Rosefelt

He emailed me and asked me to let you all know. So yeah, maybe it happened shortly before my post.

Just so you all know, @Music Software Deals has been restricted from posting on this forum indefinitely. There is apparently a forum rule against publicizing your own website. I wonder why only he is penalized while companies like @VSTBuzz have been doing this for years. This is a "deals" forum and IMHO anything that helps the members get the best deals is very germane to what this forum is all about. What exactly happens here besides sending people to other websites? Everything from stores like Plugin Boutique and Audio Deluxe to small developers to helpful sites and YouTube channels like Sample Library Review. And isn't it a real benefit for people on this forum to be able to provide suggestions for features on Music Software Deals?

Hey! This is my brother's favorite video by me. No joke. He's watched it a dozen times. The other night he said he would watch it again, as he needed a cheer-up. His wife hates it. My wife's favorite song by me is something I can't post here because nobody would ever take me seriously again. I like this kind of humor.

I did consider that. Before I did spend the money, I decided to let go. This video was just a fun way of saying goodbye to everybody.

Since I made my peace with this, I've gotten very excited about my new channel. If I started this new channel on my existing one, I would be starting at zero subscribers anyway. The main difference is that they should be sending me $25 a month for my existing videos and they aren't. 😩 You can find a great deal on this forum every month in that price range! 😀

No. This was anything but clickbait. I am 99.99% sure that channel is over. And I am moving on based on that belief. I've already created a new channel. It's connected to my wife's Google Account. (There are no videos up on it yet.) This is totally legit within their rules. This will begin with one subscriber (me). I'll let you know when it's up, so that if anybody wants to help, they can subscribe. But it's not going to be music-related, and I can totally understand if you don't want to. As I now I know more about how to make videos and how YouTube works, I don't think this time it's going to take 14 years. Maybe only 13 years this time! 😀

There is a technical problem with YouTube accepting my tax documents, so that's about it. 😀 There is no customer service, just artificial intelligence. It's not a big deal, I only spent 14 years on this. Just for fun, I made this video to see if I could find one person at YouTube or Google or Adsense who could help me. Fat chance of that. It's a multi-billion dollar company and I'm nobody. Here it is, for your entertainment. If you'd be willing to share it, I'd appreciate it. Also, if you liked any of my videos, please comment.

There are a lot of nice and helpful people at VI:Control--that's why I go there. For the most part, people have been very kind in their reactions to my music. There are the usual types that feel it necessary to put me in my place. That kind of high pomposity can be funny. There has only been one person who was truly mean, and it was on two occasions. It was a well-known developer, and his attack was so nasty that some of the other people came to my defense. And this was despite the fact that I told him I had purchased every single thing he had released, and had regularly praised his products everywhere. I have never experienced any reaction to my music like that on this forum. We are a good community that helps each other, so I always feel safe putting it up. Thank you so much, Ric. I'll keep at it.

Yeah, I think the miracle of this technology is that we can all use the tools we like to make the music we want to make. I'm sure what works for me is not good for others. I also know from being on VI:Control that a lot of people think my music is crap, and that's fine. I know I'm not trained. I like my music. My main interest is melody. So I hum something and then I figure out how to play it and orchestrate it. I lean towards very simple arrangements with only a few instruments. In life I feel really sad that I can't play rhythm or fingerpick a guitar like I used to. It was one of the things I most loved to do. But I'm glad that I have the musical tools to keep going and express what I hear in my head. And I believe that all my years of playing guitar are an advantage with using virtual guitars. I didn't change the volume or vibrato on "The Cowboy Way.' You can change where it is played on the fretboard (voicing), so you can take the same chord and play it higher. And you can add accents, which is different from volume, I think. But I hope it gives it dynamism. I don't know if it "fools" a guitarist, but it's more musical and less canned. And very easy to do. Also, I created my own bass part on this using Modwheel's The Lowdown, an acoustic bass. It has a kind of percussive thwap to it that I like. Beginning by playing something that I heard, I achieved a result that I found more satisfying than searching something for a part on something like EZBass, which didn't exist then anyway. There's a collector part of me that would like to amass a lot of EZBass MIDI parts, but I suspect that I will mostly perform my own. (Although I have used EZBass on occasion) I don't go look for melodies to buy either. I have ten melodies in my head for every one that I find the time and focus to actually record. And then I get something new like an Indiginus instrument and it inspires me to write something just for that. But I'm very curious what the Session Guitars Bass will be like, as I enjoy the guitars so much. Have to wait for the summer sale... 😕

For those of you who aren't familiar with what Band-in-a-Box can do with a guitar part, here is this track, Guitar is 100% BIAB. Violin is Bohemian.

I got into the history of Peter Gorges in my bass video. You can hear me jamming with Picked Acoustic and ujam Dandy at the spot I've cued up here. In the original Strummed Acoustic, you can change the voicing with the modwheel and the accent with the Pitch Wheel. After I programmed in the part for this. (Again, sorry, I've posted this a lot), I played with the wheels while listening to the track.

Picked Acoustic. To totally contradict what I said, I sometimes just grab a preset and make a guitar track in less than an hour using a preset. I've put this piece up a lot before, but that's how this was done. Played it once. Adjusted MIDI a bit. Done. And then I moved on to the real job, which was the melody instruments. Frankly, most of the time I've used Picked Acoustic was in situations where I laid down a track in a few minutes and then improvised over it. No finished track resulted, but it was fun. I like the electrics and the picked nylon, but I haven't used them in a track yet.

I just want stuff to work. It is great to create software that works for 70% or 80% of users. But it might take you a lot longer to get to 100% of users. I think this is the natural way of software creation, which involves much Beta testing and finding the bugs and issues. I once came up with an idea for a website called SpeedCine back in 2010 that I thought was pretty exciting. The idea was you would type in the name of a movie and it would tell you where you could watch it (legally). Not just Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, etc, but more obscure sites at the time, like MUBI, National Film Board of Canada. It also was geo-located, so you would see different results depending on what country you were in (very complicated). I had a friend who was a programmer and he showed me over the weekend that it could work. Then it took about five months to make it pretty good--it worked 90% of the time. And then a it took a year and a half after that to make it work perfectly every time. The first five months of development was easy and even fun. The year and a half that followed, to get from 90% to 100%, was one of the most difficult things I've ever been through in my life. Thousands of problems to be solved, and frustrations that kept me up all night when I couldn't find the answers. Lots of money spent. But I never gave up. When I was finished, it was a thing of beauty. Everybody who saw my website when it was done thought it was amazing. But I had made a crucial mistake in marketing. I had let too many people, particularly journalists, try it before it was ready. I got bad reviews that stayed online. Nobody would come back and re-review. I thought that people would sign on to my dream that it would get better. But they didn't. They didn't go back. I should never have let anybody who wasn't a friend or a tester see the thing until it was perfect. I made a lot of other mistakes too. My website required too much maintenance--the best ones work by themselves. It would never have worked as a business for many reasons. I ended up abandoning something I worked on 7 days a week for years. I lost a lot of money. One of the many catastrophes of my life. I tell this sob story, not to say anything about MNTRA, just that it is very hard to create technology that works 100% of the time for everybody. And it's easy to get impressed by how relatively easy it is to get to 80%. This is the mistake I made as a neophyte.

I've been a guitarist for over 50 years, and I always used to record my own parts. But lately my arthritis had made that increasingly difficult. And now it is virtually impossible. So I now I have to do everything with VIs. I have never been impressed with the strumming and picking tech on the OTS and Ample Sound instruments. For me, they are the main weakness in otherwise superlative VIs. In fact I've never been happy with picking and strumming on ANY guitar VIs. BIAB can be very believable, but it's in a different category. Which is why I got so excited when the NI Session Guitars series came out. I think they are spectacular. Like any VI, you have to dig deep into them. Once you put the hours in, you can see the possibilities for alternate tunings, editing the patterns, using the modwheel to constantly change emphasis, varying articulations, etc. The presets, although they sound great, are just a starting point. I've created music where everybody assumed it was a real guitar. And this is because the intensity of the strumming varied through every second of the piece. I played the VI as if I was playing with a band, responding in real time with the music. If you know how to play guitar, you can use your intuitive feel to put that feel in. For picking and strumming, I think they are in a whole other category than other instruments and I love making music with them. For lead guitar, I go with Indiginus and OTS, and sometimes AmpleSound guitars. And the more I use my Indiginus guitars, the more I have been selling my OTS ones, as I have so many. It's interesting that ujam came on the market with a few guitars. That was it. They have become so much more. Today, my favorite products are the Beatmakers, the Drums, and the basses (particularly Mellow).

Thanks, Brian. I do have other issues with Cubase, so the problem could be on my end. I just found a workaround by loading up MNDALA in Unify. The original MNDALA works fine, but with 2.0, I can't see the full visual interface. It It works as an instrument, but I can only see a quarter of the UI, which is a shame because your visuals are so great. You could check it out with the free version of Unify to see if you also see the problem. https://www.pluginguru.com/products/unify-demo/ If there is an issue, it's worth fixing as a lot of people like to use Unify, and it would be a cool way to layer a bunch of Mntra instruments and save as presets. I'll make a Mntra template in Cubase and keep fooling around with this. As I said, I like your company a lot. You make very unique instruments and deserve our support.

I like the Mntra stuff a lot, but MNDALA keeps crashing Cubase for me. Even 2.0. This is a company I would love if they were Kontakt. I guess I'll keep collecting freebies and hope MNDALA becomes stable for me. It seems to work fine for other people.

I think Eastern Percussion Module is a great deal at $18.95. It comes with tons of MIDI patterns in a variety of middle eastern styles. https://zero-g.co.uk/collections/the-big-fall-sale/products/epm

It's not redundant and it's a good library, well worth this price.

Does this drop in price mean MK3 is coming?

I downloaded the demo and I really like this. I also have a demo of the voices and own the strings. I own the V8 but my favorite Arturia synths right now are Pigments and the Augmented series. There are some good things in the V Collection but these are more the kinds of thing I like to make finished pieces with. It's $99 for me now, but why buy when I can play with fully functional demos? Augmented Piano seems like a sure bet for V collection 10, so I will wait until that comes out and goes on sale.

It's a good pack of old (but still good) sample ibraries, but there are LOTS of folders to dig through and you have to go through PDFs to see what's there. So expect to spend some time organizing it all. I think I bought this for $15, but it might have been a slightly different package. My copy is all over the place in various country folders, so I can't really tell. And welcome back, Larry! You were missed!

I posted this in VI:Control. It's relevant to this forum too. 'm talking about companies like Indiginus. Most of the Indiginus libraries sell for $59 or $69 dollars or less. (Blue Street Brass sells for $79.) Are they "as good" as libraries that sell for twice as much or more? Definitely, but in my experience, many are better. For example, I started a YouTube video once, inspired by the release of Nylon Sky, where I took a MIDI file and played it with all the nylon guitar instruments i owned, both solo libraries and ones in larger collections like HALion, Kontakt, etc. I made adjustments to the MIDI when necessary, but Renaxxance (one of the oldest Indiginus libraries) just killed. It was head over heels more beautiful for this particular piece. We all know that's not a fair way to compare libraries, but I just want to say that it's a hell of a library, worth a lot more than $59 on sound alone. But then there is the user interface, which is so well-designed and easy to use. Most Indiginus libraries also include a harmony mode that I haven't found on any other libraries. This is great on guitars, but oh man it is great on things like The STEEL and The Fiddle. Arguably one of the main things that makes a Fiddle a Fiddle rather than a violin is the double-stopping. So do I think these libraries would sell at $150? Absolutely. They are top-level. And I think they are undervalued in a lot of people's minds because they are so reasonably priced. The reality is that most people place more emotional value on what is expensive, and then wait for sales to get "bargains." If the Indiginus libraries were priced like other companies, people would wait for BF when Indiginus libraries would be available for $59 or $69. What a deal!! I worry that so many people get their emotions fueled by sales that they don't buy Indiginus so much. There's no occasion like BF when you have to rush and buy them. I tend to buy the intro prices (just got The Banjo), but I have to remind myself to pick up one every year, because I know I'll enjoy them and use them. I've got a pretty good collection now, but more to come. Valhalla is another company like this. Are you sure that the reverbs you buy on sale are "better" than Valhalla reverbs? Do you have any companies like this you'd care to mention? I was planning on posting this in early November, before the tropical storm of Black Friday begins. I'd like people to consider patronizing companies like this before they spend all their money. But because the intro price on The Banjo ends this month, I'm doing it now.

deleted

The only thing I remember is when Tracy released The Jangle. It was available free if you purchased any one of a selected Indiginus Libraries (pretty much all of them). So that kind of was a way of getting a "discount" on a previously released library--you bought one and got a library that now sells for $45 along with it. I don't think Tracy has ever reduced a price on one of his libraries, but it wouldn't surprise me if another deal came up someday.

Great performance of "What'd I Say," Simeon!