Reid Rosefelt

IMO without the PAKS BIAB isn't very interesting. It's the quantity of styles that makes it valuable. Put in your chords and try out numerous arrangements quickly. Quick experiments in genres and instrumentation. And the more of the PAKs you have it just gets exponentially better. Once I'm happy with something, I then drag it into my DAW and play my music around it. Sometimes I even leave in a track or two, but mostly not. They have some really nice backup vocals. It doesn't work for all my songwriting, but often it works great. I'm getting PAK 9. Not so sure about these loopy things. I haven't decided about that. It's also really great as accompaniment for improvisation.

Here's Loops with Style PAK 2 And here's Loops with Style PAK 1 . This is discounted from $29 to $19 until June 1st.

Get it HERE The styles are divided into four categories. Each category has 50 styles, for a total of 200 styles, over 30 more styles than any of the other Xtra Style PAKs Rock/Pop 9 Jazz 9 Country 9 Folk & Beyond 2 This goes for $29 There is also a $48 bundle that includes the above, plus Loops-with-Style 2 with 100 more loops and 50 more styles You can also get all the Xtra Styles PAKs PG Music has ever released (1-9) for $199. Note: These Xtra Styles require Band-in-a-Box® version 2020 or higher and use RealTracks from the UltraPAK, UltraPAK+, or Audiophile Edition. I'm not sure exactly what "Loops-With-Style 2 with 100 more loops and 50 more styles" actually is. I don't see any demos, but it adds $19 to the cost. I'm going to write them.

This is the first time I know of that Maxime Luft of Organic Samples (now based at OT) has ever done an instrument with a full articulation feature set. His previous stuff was legato only, like Solo Opera, Ethnic Inspiration, or Majestic Horn (still only 2 euros) None of these instruments even have any shorts, let alone other stuff. The Bosendorfer is only shorts. This is a bad month for spending money, but I have been an Organic Samples guy from the beginning. I know this will be good, as he pays tremendous attention to the tiniest details. And this adds Teldex, so these instruments are going to sound so great and blend well with the Inspires, and the the Time series.

It's not up on the site yet, but you can check it out on Best Service HERE I can't find it on the English language version, though. Probably the sale will officially kick off in the US tomorrow.

I believe that Silk is the only ujam Guitar that allows you to play different bass notes. Maybe they'll add that to Amber for Version 2. IMO the best time to get ujam is to buy the bundles during their BF sale. It was 50% off last year. This is a great deal, but Matthew is on the money. There is a 100% chance of a Version 2 and probably soon, as the V1s have been around for awhile. Which means there will soon be a surcharge on this not long after purchase. In fact, if you think about it, they've done some giveaways and flash sales to get more ujam owners, who will pay for upgrades and be interested in their other products. I remember getting a beatmaker for cheap at Christmas, and soon after that they introduced V2.

Fooled around with this for a few hours last night. I didn't own Scaler 1 so I don't know what is new. I put in simple chord progressions and then did different voicings. I have never seen anything that provides so many options. Not just simple inversions, like EZKeys. Different voicings is my favorite thing about the NI picked series, but this has so much more and this will allow me to do it with any library. One of the coolest is that it can take all your chords and put a single bass note underneath each one. That's a new one for me. This changes all of them into very complex chords. And you don't just put a C under a progression in the key of C--you can put an E under it and it gets reeally weird. It's amazing how much you can do with this just by putting in a few chords and then experimenting. Maybe too amazing, as I could get lost in it. The onboard instruments are remarkably good. I highly recommend downloading them as they help you get the most out of it. For example, the guitars are the best way to test the strumming options. But seriously there are a diverse set of sounds, from synth pads to orchestral that quickly show you how these musical progressions can work. Then I tried all the auto-player stuff. There's so many greato-soundingoptions and a lot of them are terrific. At its heart, this is very similar to the kind of tech in EZKeys and ujam instruments. You also don't need to put chords on the pads (like ujam, not like toontrack) You can just play chords and it will auto-play them. The only thing I found weird was their naming system, which is classical music-oriented. Maybe not the most intuitive language for the punters? I would rather have teir phrases be genre based. Scaler 2 offers you a bunch of bossa nova chord progressions. It would be cool to put a guitar on them and then play them with bossa nova phrases. But I don't want to complain about something that is really great and adds to all the other innovations in arps out there from Sonuscore and others. But it is a beast. I have a lot to learn. All of you who had Scaler 1 are way ahead of me, I'm sure. I think I will continue to make music and writing songs the way I always have. But once I am far along in a piece, I will put my existing chord progression in here and see if I can get some new ideas for accompaniment or voicing. Same thing with EZBass. These are two purchases that I don't think were just GAS. I really can see me using them all the time.

Believe me, I understand completely. I have everything I need to make music for the rest of my life, but they keep coming out with shiny new things I want to own. This month it's EZBass and Scaler 2. Next month it will be something I haven't heard about yet. A lot of us on this forum have this malady, and we don't want to be cured. 🙂

How do you manage with only 1861 plugins? 🤔

Out early, right? It was supposed to come out tomorrow.

I'm going to wait a week or so before installing this to see if there are any issues. If any of you install it now and have issues, please post them here. Thanks!

Well.. it comes out Wednesday. This month sure went fast.

No latin bass parts?

Upgrading Editor from 4 to 5 on everyplugin would be $89. Have to read up on the new features to see whether it's worth it.

All you Jeff Bezos types can go right ahead. I'm waiting for the sale. 🤔

I decided to get this but forgot all about it because of EZBass. On Saturday, I went, "oh no, I missed it again. " But they extended the deal until today. I've spent a few hours with the ADSR sample manager checking it out. For me it is well worth the money. Lots of great world percussion, for one thing. Many, many instruments I don't have, and I have a lot. Of course the one-shots don't compete with multi-sampled instruments, but they still are very usable. I could see myself using one of the loops or redoing something similar with a drum replacement instrument. Having spent a lot of time in Brazil, I think the samba school Carnival stuff is pretty great. It has a real energy to it that you can only find in the Cinesamples Brazil library. There are also "instruments," samples that you can stretch on your keyboard with a sampler. Some pretty unusual stuff. I'm definitely going to take a few minutes to throw some of these together. It will be interesting to have a conch shell instrument and maybe layer it with something else.in Falcon. I discovered that I already had some of it, because I had their Ethnic Flavours library, which I got free with another purchase. They didn't bother to mention that. The only thing is that it will take quite awhile for me to sort it out into usable folders, that go with the filing system I've been building for all my world samples. It's really a mess, because they just through all these separate libraries together and called it a "world pack." It would be nice if they just took a few hours put it together into a sensible package rather than have all their customers have to drive themselves nuts doing it one by one. If you don't organize these samples, they're not really worth anything. This is an Ikea library, only it doesn't come with any instructions. 🤬 Here you go, everybody! Have fun figuring it out! But I don't want to complain. It is a really amazing deal, even by typical Zero-G sales pricing standards.

I see Finisher the same way as I see the Randomizer button on a synth. You don't go to it if you have a precise idea of what you want, as you do with your go-to EQ, Compressor, reverb, etc. You go to when it's kind of "why the hell not roll the dice and see what you get?" If it sucks, just move on. It makes sense that it first showed up in Carbon, the weirdest product ujam has ever brought out. It's supposedly a "guitar" or a "cinematic" instrument or whatever, but it's something else. And when you found your weird sound in Carbon, you'd maybe spread a little Finisher on it and make it even more strange and unexpected. People loved this one feature in Carbon and they asked ujam to make it into an effect. And me too. Plus I love the ujam videos where their instruments and effects make their head-bobbing customers's heads explode or they set fire to them. It shows a certain pride in their products.

I haven't seen anybody mention how stretchable the interface can be.

I just found out that this IS tempo-synched. It’s Vocalise One that isn’t. I’ve been a fount of misinformation on this thread. 🙁

Oh, I forgot that. Haven't used it in a while.

At least as far as the phrases go, yes. Unless you use software like Melodyne to repitch them. A bigger problem for me with this library and with Vocalise is that the phrases are not tempo-synched to the DAW. There was enough complaining about this that Scoring Guitars 2 and Vocalise 2 are tempo-synched. If I was starting out I'd go with them. Half price sales happen pretty often with Heavyocity. But this is a really beautiful library. I'm glad I have it.

The trick is to remember to use it now and then. I have a button on my Streamdeck and an icon on the front of my iPad. It's helped me learn about a lot of advanced features I never used on programs like Band-In-A-Box. It's boring to go through an entire manual, but a few quick lessons on special topics have really helped me a lot. Lately I've been taking some Cubase clasess. I used to take classes from MacProVideo (which I think is the same as AskAudio) and I like these a LOT more. Krantzberg gets right to the point.

This year there won't be a "Wish List" sale at Spitfire. They are just putting up all the sale prices between 5/25 and 5/31. I'm assuming most libraries will be 40% off as usual, and new libraries won't be discounted. But... if you have spent over £1000 with them and have also placed an order within the last year, you have access to the sale right now. Everybody else has to wait until Monday.

They talk a lot in the videos about bringing in audio and generating bass parts, but you can also drag in bass midi to the timeline. Here are two bass track freebies I got from Groove Monkee. It even puts the chords in. And then you can edit the MIDI and add all the articulations. Because of EZBass, I wasn't planning on getting the upgrades to the ujam basses, but now I am. That is a LOT of bass MIDI content that can easily be dragged into EZBass and improved. Thousands of phrases in the three of them.

Interesting that Finisher is a series, not a thing. No doubt there will be a third one, and a package deal, at some point. I love Finisher. I am happy with my setup for basic effects like EQ, compression, reverb, spatial, limiter, etc., but I have a thing for multi-effects, and I love how Finisher is set up. I expect I will spring for the three Finishers when there is the next 50% off sale. Probably Black Friday. Plenty of time to check out the demos before then. ujam is such a great company.