Reid Rosefelt

For me there is more than a hint of a rasp, and that's my main issue with Palette--and I'm not the only one. It is about as bone-dry a library as I have ever played. For me, the sound of instruments include the rooms they are performed in. This is why I love Orchestral Tools and the Cinematic Studio series. They sound beautiful to me out-of-the-box, without adding any reverb or any other effects. When I add a good reverb like Spaces II and a bit of EQ to Palette, I like it. And you get a lot more articulations in Palette than in other "sketching" libraries like the Inspires, which have practically none. There's a lot more bang for the buck as far as sketching libraries go in Palette, particularly if you own Melodics. But I would recommend Palette more not as a sketching library, but to people who want to use it to combine with other libraries, because it's dry quality makes that easier to do than a library with baked-in ambiance. When I load up the Inspires, I'm happy to start sketching immediately. The sound makes me want to play. I also think Kirk Hunter's Virtuoso ensemble is incredibly inspiring. It sounds good too and it has a very brilliant interface. As soon as I got Palette, I asked Red Room Audio to add effects presets. I wanted them to set up the reverb, EQ and all the other stuff that comes with it to give you a variety of out-of-the-box sounds. A variety of aural presets as soooo many libraries, from NI to Sonuscore to 8dio offer, from natural to sound-designy. And the guy didn't sign on to that but he did say they were thinking about doing something with the samples. Anyway, I was very excited to see this update, and was disappointed that there is nothing like that in it. If they'd done that, I would heartily recommend it to everybody. That said, I'm excited to try out the legato in Melodics.

About 10,000 emails ago, I started to get annoyed. 🤬 But I just let them go on and on, even though I usually delete them without reading them. Sometimes they are written by unfamilar names, like Fred Faderble and Agnes Patoot, and that distracts me and causes me to open them before I delete. Whoever handles their spam strategy is sly. But I thought about it, and decided I had enough, so today I cut them loose, despite the fact that Musician's Friend is still my favorite place to buy hardware. I suppose I'll still find out about the best deals here. 😀

You're better off not getting it if you are less El-Broke-O by BF and can afford a few more bucks. Ancient Persian ERA (which includes Desert Winds) is one of Tarilonte's very best libraries and sells for about $150 during the Best Service 40% off sale, depending on where you buy it. 28 playable instruments, including some of his very best, like the Oud and Duduk. And some really great middle eastern percussion, like Bendir, Daf, and Riq. It costs a little more than that to upgrade Desert Winds to Ancient Persian ERA, And I've never seen them discount the upgrades. That said, the winds are really great.

Studio Sopranos is one of my very favorite 8dio libraries, but it's been cheaper than this.

The demo video was really enticing. I'm often asked to score extreme modern dance performances like this one, with sudden violent shifts of tone. It convinced me that I'd be using this all the time. A real insta-buy no-brainer! 🙄 And game-changer.

For the record, so far the Sonokinetic freebies include 2013 & 2014 - Sleighbells iOS 2015 Berimbau and Cuica (they don't sell them anymore, but they're included in Percussao do Brasil) 2016 - Ostinato Strings and EMP Mark II 2017 - Ostinato Brass 2018 - Ostinato Woodwinds 2019 - Modal Runs & Ostinato Noir It used to be really easy to get them. You could take your time and hours later the deal would still be there. But now you have to make sure you know the exact time the deal goes up and set an alarm. For me (in Brooklyn, NY) it's 11 am, but I know that for some people it's the middle of the night. If you do that every single day during the "12 Days" sale, you should be okay. That said, they gave away Ostinato strings, brass, and woodwinds and Modal Runs on the second day. Not a bad day to check in. Also, they really telegraphed the "Ostinato Noir" deal on VI:Control the night before. They couldn't have been more clear. They did practically everything except for shouting, "ANOTHER FREEBIE TOMORROW!!!" Still these freebies are so good and so many people don't want to miss out that it wouldn't surprise me that the day will come that if you wait even a few minutes you'll miss them.

FYI, this update adds drag-and-drop MIDI to all 4 libraries.

I got the East West VD Special once and it made my orchestral tool spit fire. 😧 I also hear there's a VD special going round from ujam. Don't like the sound of that either.

Kind of a "Thrill" for vocals. Wow! Only $299! Such a deal. Better to wait for Komplete in the fall, as I doubt it will go on sale this summer. More info HERE

I got Seurat when it came out. Very beautiful granular sounds. Great presets. This is a lot less than I paid and you get a lot more. Since I bought it they have added a lot of new snapshots and features. 1.5 added a randomize feature--just click the "Seurat" logo. 1.6 is called "Seurat R" because it allows you to reverse the samples. 1.61 adds 100 snapshots. All these updates have been free for original purchasers. Learning how to program Seurat is a little complicated, but it's easy to just hit the randomize button and get a lot of great results. 😀 I've had 1.6 for quite a while. This new version is just 1.62 and is just a minor thing -- "fixed some tuning issues." Anybody who is curious should try the free demo on this page.

I glanced at this headline and thought it was about a Vocal Sample Pack of a McDonald's Hamburger. I imagined it was burger eating samples. Maybe some phrases like "You want fries with that?" "Can I have more ketchup?" "Where's the can?" etc. Probably a few belches. No doubt BOOM will have a library like this eventually. Anyway, I figured there would be a post on VI:Control where people would argue about what was the best Burger library.

When I composed music in the 80s with Voyetra's Sequencer Plus, I plugged in my 5.25" floppy (360K) and loaded up the software into RAM. Then I took it out and put in another 360K floppy to save my data. Of course Sequencer Plus was MIDI only. All sound came from my synths and modules and effects came from hardware. But apparently, it still works today! I remember when I got my first computer with a 20 Mb hard drive. Wow! As my programs were kilobytes in size, and could be loaded in RAM, I didn't know what I could possibly do with all that data!

I told you 8dio would have 8OntheHouse!

Get it HERE Retrowave $24 ($78) Indie Voices $5 ($47) Epic Percussion $29 ($99) Old School Keys $9 ($43) Gentle Keys $12 ($58) They also have 4 freebies, including sample versions of Retrowave and Epic Percussion and a Xylophone and a Vibraphone.

First, did any of you notice that JRRShop posted a price of $106.99 yesterday? People on VI-Control got very upset. But it was a mistake. I spent all Sunday afternoon playing this and I have some new thoughts. VOCALS - I no longer think the solo vocal is the highlight. I still think the legato is perfect, but not all of the notes sound realistic to my ears when you take down the heavy reverb. It works fine for ethereal stuff, but I would take my rating down slightly from what I wrote above. On the other hand, the vocal phrases, with two voices going at the same time, are extraordinary. I NEVER use vocal phrases, but these have inspired me to start working on a piece of music. MEDITATION PADS - I spent a lot of time checking out the Meditation Pads. As with a lot of this library, you almost have to use the Engine browser to explore these because there are so many of them. I rarely use the browser, because I usually pick an instrument and then play it. But with NADA, you have literally hundreds of instruments, hidden within trees of directories. This is particularly true with the Meditation Pads and percussion. Anyway, the Meditation Pads include a directory called "Moving Dreams," which has a directory of arps and a directory of pulses. Some of these would work very well for a dark cinematic underscore. "Endless Reflections" is piano and glass sounds with long echoes. "Nature Meditations" mix in nature soundscapes with the presets and "Placid Winds" has literal wind sounds. "Serene Strings" is string sounds, with slow, evolving attacks. Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of saying that I think there is a lot to explore and use in the Meditation Pads section. PIANOS - I dismissed these in my first review, but the White Piano is actually quite nice. More interestingly, within the "Digital Pianos" section there is a whole set of "Piano Harmonics" instruments, including some chords, which are like quick harp strums. I like this a lot and am using it in my new piece. WINDS - I think what I wrote is accurate, but there are also some ornaments in a few of the winds (Bansuri, Dizi, Hulusi, Shakuhachi) that can be triggered by velocity. Up to 11 ornaments for each note. As I think you're getting the picture, this is a deep instrument, that you could spend a long time exploring. I usually can get a grounding in an ERA library in a day or so. I'll know what all the instruments are. I'll pop my favorites into my template. This is going to take a week just to find out what's in there. There is a lot in this library that is not in any library I own. Another thing I've been doing it matching it up with other libraries I own. You wouldn't necessarily think it would work because it is really intended to work best with itself. But the instruments blend beautifully. I just turned off the reverb and put it in Spaces II with the other instrument.

I've been playing it for three hours now. I really love it . My favorite things are the vocals, winds, and percussion. But be prepared, this is very different from the ERA libraries. For example, the duduk in Ancient ERA Persia gives you a full set of articulations so you can try to play it with all the options a native player has. It's a typical world instrument. The duduk in NADA has two articulations: regular and legato. It plays without legato unless you push a key to do a legato transition. Let go of the key and you are playing without legato. Vibrato is usually premapped to the modwheel and expression to the pedal. This makes it immediately easy to play. There is also a pad that you can turn off if you want (but not adjust the volume). The default setting is swimming in reverb that you can turn down or off. It's a dreamy duduk. Most of the solo instruments work like this. They are about giving the pure sound of an instrument in an easy to use way--not giving you every sound that the real instrument can use. But something reverb saturated with a pad, ready to go for new age, ambient or worship. But that doesn't mean you can't turn off the pad, turn down the reverb and have instruments you can use in any kind of music. It's no shocker that any wind instrument sampled by Tarilonte is going to sound beautiful. The strings are good too, but personally with plucked and bowed stuff, I do like more articulations. The Koto is the exception, it's got a set of articulations Tari style. The standouts for me were the vocals. I am obsessive about realistic legato in vocal libraries. I have many of them and I am almost never satisfied. They range from pretty bad to close, but not good enough. Before this, my two favorites were Organic Samples' Solo Opera Legato and Audio Imperia's Jaeger, which I considered the gold standards for state-of-the-art legato today. Well I just added a third to the list with Voice of Silence (Ana Duble) It's absolutely perfect and it's so beautiful. But that's not everything in the vocal section. There are Voices of Silence phases, and get this--there are two voices singing at the same time. I've never seen anything like this in a vocal library. And the choirs in the synth voices? Amazing. Tarilonte is going to sell a lot of this to people who do worship music. Honestly I think the library is worth it for the vocals alone. But the percussion section is insane, both pitched and unpitched. I thought, I've got a lot of this stuff--tibetan bells, bowls, finger cymbals, rain sticks, wind chimes, etc. Boy was I wrong. So many more options than everything I own, that it actually makes me want to make music like this just to use it. Check out the variety of cymbal rolls. The pianos didn't immediately knock me out like the other stuff did, but I'm curious to see how they sound when I start trying them in tracks. They are meant to be quiet. He's known for his pads/soundscapes and this is no exception. I just don't use that stuff, but if you like what he does, you won't be disappointed. EDIT: I need to actually play this stuff before making any comment. Pads are important for this kind of thing, and he always does stuff his own way.

It's really easy to activate Best Service stuff as long as you know to get the Best Service site going in English. Just follow the instructions. I did my first noobie activation in German and that was a little ticklish. 😬 People complain all the time about Engine, but it doesn't bother me. Once I got used to it, it worked fine for me. I ordered NADA from Time+Space right after I posted this so I could take advantage of my Loyalty Points. Still waiting for my serial code so I do have nada so far. 😟

There's no intro price. It's $199 and it will always be this, so there's no rush to buy it. Based on the past, it won't go on sale until BF 2021. It's at Best Service, Time+Space, JRRShop, and probably other stores. I may use my T+S Loyalty Points on this. Based on the demos, it is absolutely one of the best Tarilonte libraries ever. Certainly one of the biggest: 440 sounds built from over 9,000 samples. Can't wait to get it.

If you want a pure digital connection without Studiomux, then the best method I know is to get an iConnectivity interface. There's a discussion of the quality of the output from an iPad headphone jack HERE.

Again I agree with @ZincT about the Luis Martinez apps. If you're looking for a really high quality iOs drum program, check out DrumPerfect. But not a lot of MIDI patterns. For a really different approach, where you can "play" the MIDI patterns live, check out DrumJam.

Vegas used to handle all formats, but in the latest version it seems to only handle more pro formats. I bet there's a way to add some of the old ones back.

Use code COLDMGX20 Good until February 26th.

It turns out that Finisher started out as one of the features of Carbon. It's exactly the same thing, except of course it only works with the Carbon guitar sound. People liked it so much that they asked ujam to bring it out as a separate plugin. I fooled around with the Carbon Finisher a bit last night. My impression is that it has more presets than Micro but I think less than Neo. While Carbon isn't NKS like the other ujam guitars, the knobs and parameter assignments do work, and so I was able to change presets from my NI controller while fooling around with this. I think what makes Finisher great is that the Finisher level is tied to the mod wheel. I've got my eye on this and may pick it up on sale someday. It's quite useful for a lot of things.

Masala and Journeys are two of my favorite AAS expansions because they have "world" instruments that don't exist. Very glad they did a sequel.

If you get deep into working with both the world of iOS and desktop music, you should consider an interface from iConnectivity. @Marshall I spent a few years going to the Audiobus Forum a few times a day, and I found it to be an excellent resource. Each one of the hundreds of apps released during those years was discussed and debated at great length. And if it was a big one like Gadget, you could see many discussions going on for 80 pages. But I think that the summary by @ZincT is excellent. For me, doing anything but sketching on the iPad was frustrating, because you quickly run into RAM limitations for any kind of big projects unless you freeze a lot of tracks. But others have much better luck. Nowadays, I work within the limitations of Gadget over full DAWS like Auria and Cubasis, because Korg has worked out the memory thing by keeping the gadgets all pretty simple. The touch interface of the iPad makes it possible to have mind-blowing instruments like TC-11, Borderlands, Gestrument, and Geoshred, that have no equal on the desktop. ROLI MPE is a lot easier to work with wirelessly on my iPad than on my computer, where I have to hook my ROLI devices up with USB. As @ZincT mentioned there are all kinds of "pattern experimentation/generative" apps. There is stuff like this for the desktop, but I don't think they are as good as the ones currently on the iPad. I agree that the best of all worlds is to finish your work on your computer, but there are things on the iPad you won't find anywhere else.