PavlovsCat

It's wild how heavy and honest this thread turned about careers. Off to take my son of UIUC this morning to tour their engineering school.

I jumped on my computer for a bit. Here's a screenshot of the list of presets.

Greg did say that there's a YouTube review that should be out soon. It's his birthday weekend, so he's probably with his family right now, otherwise, I know he'd get something out. Hopefully, one of the folks who posted in this thread who have bought it can help out. I'm going to be away from my PC most of this weekend, otherwise, I'd make an audio demonstration for you, as I love the library and have been using it a lot since I got it. If no one has a preset run through by Monday, I'll try to do one.

Intellectual property concerns aside for a moment (regarding "Dylan Drums" "Queen Drums" and your other trademark infringing names for your libraries), you did a really good job on the tone of this library. Which, based on some of the libraries I've picked up that you've done under AnyDayLong and Past To Future, you're very good at getting vintage tones. As a sample buyer and someone who's consulted to around two dozen developers over those years who sees your talent, I wish you were more transparent and would just communicate openly when you post in social media as you'd build a lot more business by building relationships with sample buyers. You clearly know how to make good sounding libraries. I seriously wish your libraries had more detail though and more sophisticated user interfaces/mixing capabilities. But for their price, they tend to be a good value and I think you could easily grow your brand by not engaging in trademark infringements like "Beatle Drums" or "The Jackson 4." While your business is small enough it probably won't get on the radar of the law firms for these artists estates, it does delegitimize your brand to the vast majority of the market your trying to sell to; that is, many sample buyers will see these names and write off your work as fly by night, a hack, when you clearly have talent. Instead consider related names that communicate what a library is about without infringing on someone else's intellectual property rights. Consider what East West did with their "Fab Four" library package. The name does a good job of conveying what it is without making the developer look fly by night by engaging in trademark infringement. EastWest was careful not to infringe on trademarks by calling it "The Beatles Libraries " or something like that. Just some advice for you to take or leave intended to be helpful.

I never considered piano libraries heavily scripted like a string or guitar library needs to be to sound authentic in real time (btw, don't misinterpret that as me challenging your knowledge, because I'm not, I dont know how to script, you do, Im just saying that was my assumption and while I've advised a bunch of developers, I don't think I've ever had a dialogue on piano library scripting, so that's just been my assumption, that is, I realize I could be wrong). I do own the UVI Model D library and really like it. I also own UVIs Mellotron library, which is modest, but very nice.

If anyone is reading my above comment and also into Wurlis like I am -- which is pretty evident if anyone has noticed my posts and original and cover songs I share -- AS' Wurlie library just went to the top of my must buy list. i recently picked up the SoundPaint Wurli for $20USD, which is great for $20, just for some of the cool presets, but this Acoustic Samples library is on a whole other level and reminds me of the Wurlitzer 200A electric piano (AS sampled the student model, but the tone is basically identical except that the student model lacks a tremolo function) I grew up with in our home and was absolutely in love with since my early childhood. I was planning to buy e-Instruments Wurli the next time it went on sale, but after hearing AS' Wurlie, I am in love. I have never heard a demo for a Wurli library I love as much as this one. I have several UVI instruments and definitely don't find it as user friendly as KONTAKT, but the tone of this library in those demos is exactly what I've been searching for. They better have a sale soon! I may not be able to hold out until Black Friday. @Audio Plugin Deals. please work with Acoustic Samples to have a sale on their Wurlie library! It sounds amazing. I am seriously a superfan. I'm not sure I can make it through an entire week without buying this and I have a son who will soon be starting college, so I need you guys to put this on sale! https://www.acousticsamples.net/keys/wurlie

@PhonoBrainer I can't believe I forgot about this preset video that came out at the beginning of the month. When I remembered it to grab a link it even had my like on it. Sad. But then, I couldn't even tell you what I had for lunch yesterday. You especially want to check out the tips for customizing the library. It saves me so much time to learn this stuff in the videos and makes your playing so much more realistic. I was using MODO for the Hofner bass before this, but there's really no comparison to the depth of the tone of this library to MODO. This library feels authentic when you play it and when it's exposed in the mix. If you listen to my demo, I actually dropped the drums out specifically to let the bass stand out (during a string part near the end of the song). There's no way the bass, exposed to that degree, would have sounded so real, with that level of depth to the tone using MODO. Don't get me wrong, I totally love the modelling of instruments, and it's fun to play around with, but in the final production, it's not even close. That's also true with the palm mutes I play at the beginning of my demo. The modeled notes just miss the depth, the richness of the samples. The run through of the presets begins at 6 minutes into the video.

Working for a paper company? I'll refrain from Dunder Miflin references, as I'm sure others in your life haven't. While I did stay in marketing -- and now I'm a business owner -- I completely relate to what you're saying. At most small and mid size companies, the marketing department really doesn't engage in marketing, they're doing the 4th P of marketing, promotion (i.e., Product, Place, Price and Promotion). Most people have enormous misunderstanding about the function of marketing strategy vs marketing communications. The former is the one that would make strategy decisions, for example, when we discussed BCG's metaphor "cash cow." That actually pertains to a product marketing strategy. But the majority of small and mid-size companies mislabel promotions teams -- they handle advertising, sales support collateral, websites and PR -- as marketing, when they're actually doing marketing communications. The filed can absolutely be very filled with large egos and narcissists, like sales and the c-suite cultures are famous for being. I developed a reputation as kind of a geeky, anti-typical marketing director from writing and speaking. But yeah, going to events, even ones I've keynoted, I've often felt more at home with my friends from other departments. I have a business of my own now and the closest friends I've had from my corporate days were from IT, analysis, electrical engineering and finance. The classes I found in school I enjoyed the most were actually philosophy and religion classes. My niece, after she received a graduate degree in communications visited me and inquired about a job at the company I worked at at the time. I had a very good relationship with the head of the communications (PR) department and could have gotten her a well paying job, But I had a long talk with her about the reality of ethics in the business world. After that, she told me not to help her get in at the company I worked at (a very well known brand) and went back to school to pursue a PhD. Over a decade later, she is a college professor and loves her work. For me, I always took the marketing communications side of my skillset -- because I have held positions in business strategy, marketing strategy and marketing communications -- and have advised a lot of charities that help people. But frankly, part of me has done it because I always wished I did something more significant to make the world a better place to make up for what I wasn't doing in my career. I try to do that with my business today and I did my best to do that when I was a director, by promoting diversity and ethics by developing strategies that pushed companies to behave more ethically -- never making the case based on ethics, but instead, making cases on what business people care about, the bottom line, money. But the reality is, if you're not the CEO, you only have so much control over what the business does, and my experience is, the more senior you get in any corporation, the more you see things that, if you have strong ethics, will present concerns. I see that in my son. Very much like a young version of me. So, while I have a bunch of former colleagues who are now CMOs who can help him if he pursued the same field as me, I think he's better off in a field that's more cerebral and less ethically challenging on a regular basis. It was more than a decade ago when I closed out my publication on marketing that received accolades from every ivy league school except one. And, of course, no longer an employee and over a decade old, those accolades mean nothing professionally anymore. But one actually still means something to me. The head of Wharton's ethics department wrote that every business student at Wharton should be reading my writing because of my "profound understanding of business ethics." It blew me away because I never actually wrote about ethics. Why? Because I knew, in a business career, when you move into senior roles, companies see managers obsessed with ethics as potential whistleblowers. So while I would have loved writing about ethics, I deliberately avoided it. But somehow, this professor saw that drive in me. In the last ten years I've stopped doing public speaking, except for talks at some colleges, funny enough to marketing graduate students at UChicago and Northwestern and now my son is a senior in HS deciding on a college major and knowing how similar we are in terms of ethics, I have told him that I think he might find the ethics challenges of a career in marketing and the superficial nature of many of the personalities in the field to not be a great fit with his values. That said, as big data and data analytics have become increasingly important in the field, it's less of a Mad Man mentality than it was in my early career. All of that said, my son is contemplating engineering, architecture, science/meteorology/astronomy and physical therapy, I want him to do whatever makes him happy, but I am guessing science/meterology/astronomy, archeology or physical therapy would be the most fulfilling fields for him.

I was checking out their Wurli demo and it sounded great. I wasn't even aware of it until now.

As usual, it sounds really good. Nice work!

Wow, I love everything about your cover, the playing, the singing, the feel. Great job.

Thanks! I already have set up one email alert and I'll be sure to set up another for that too.

I will check with @Greg Schlaepfer tomorrow to see if he can do a preset video. Like you, I find preset videos super important when researching sample libraries. But today is the birthday of Orange Tree Samples founder/CEO, Greg Schlaepfer. so if anyone wants to wish Greg a happy birthday, please do. Besides, being an innovator for guitar and bass sample libraries, Greg's one of the kindest and most decent people I've ever met. Happy birthday, Greg!

Thanks. I don't do an scripting, so I definitely defer to you on the topic as well as the devs I know. I was just wondering if maybe UVI had taken some leaps in that regard since I last thought about them. I also have some HALion libraries that I like a lot and I'm not a developer, but I think Halion is actually pretty decent sampler (from a user perspective) and probably is worthy of more attention than it gets in the various forums. (I only use the player, but I like it.)

I'm waiting for the Sonixinema Solo Cello to go on sale. Can you add Sonixinema to your site?

That's interesting. I have some UVI libraries but nothing with sophisticated scripting like my KONTAKT guitar, bass and string libraries. I've kind of thought of KONTAKT as the only sampler for heavily scripted, highly detailed sample libraries of acoustic instruments and thought of UVI as less sophisticated in that regard, so I've never given the string libraries in that format a serious look (this does have a basis in a sample developer I've advised who has some UVI libraries, but that was several years ago and things may be different today). I'm especially interested because I'm looking for a really nice string/cello library and would definitely be happy to expand my consideration set. Are there some UVI libraries you find very well scripted you'd recommend?

I got into marketing because I was a musician and didn't prioritize school. I grew up in a working class neighborhood. The son and grandson of police officers, I contemplated becoming a cop. I was an honor roll student in HS. but I wanted to be a musician and songwriter. At 18, I started playing in bands in nightclubs. My mother was a pro musician and music teacher and she thought I had the talent to make it. My father, like most cops, thought being a musician was stupid. So marketing became my fall back if music didn't work out. I actually didn't go back to college to study marketing until I was 26. In fact through college I was traveling the Midwest as a drummer in a rock band and was recruited by the co leader of a band that just got signed who wanted me to play drums her band to support their (Veruca Salt) debut major label album, but I thought, as a devout Christian at the time, it wasn't right for me. (I was stupidly idealistic, little did I realize how unethical the business world is). So, I got my degree in marketing at 29 and started out in project management on some of the world's largest direct mail campaigns before getting into marketing management. While I've done a bunch of writing and speaking in the field since, I can't say, looking back, that I would do it over again. I think I should have taken that drumming gig with Veruca Salt and if I went back to college after that fell apart, I think technology would have been a better choice. I worked closely with Padmasree Warrior (former CTO at Motorola, Cisco, etc) and she offered me a role as a Technology Director when I was already very well established and had a global reputation in marketing, largely due to my writing and the public speaking that came as a result of my writing. But looking back, I think it would have been a good fit. I stayed in marketing, largely because I love the strategy side and how technology transformed the field. Having a son looking at colleges and trying to decide on a major right now, definitely has me reflecting on things to provide him with good advice. I've been setting up calls for him with my friends in engineering, architecture, technology, meteorology/nanotechnology/science, but not marketing. I told him, "If you struggle in college, don't worry, you can always switch to a marketing major as a fall back plan. "

On the positive side of our discussion on XLN, one of the signs, of course, a company's strategic direction and if they're growing, maintaining or holding their position is found in whether or not they're hiring and how aggressively they're hiring. Of course, XLN is a small business with less than 20 employees, so there's not much going on with regard to hiring. But it appears that they have two roles that are currently open. One is for a Machine Learning Engineer and the other is a Data Engineer (for e-commerce). So the former is focused on products, the latter is focused on online sales. I have no idea if they're adding staff or replacing staff that has exited the organization. Both roles appear to be seeking fairly junior level staff. But considering the lack of recent product releases from XLN, even if they're merely replacing staff, it's still positive, IMO, a sign that they're continuing the operation. Of course, that doesn't tell us much about the Addictive Drums, which has been the topic of a good degree of discussion in this and past threads in this forum. https://careers.xlnaudio.com/jobs/1789960-machine-learning-engineer

Years ago, I worked with Greg to get people at KVR to share the music they make with OTS libraries. As this community is much smaller and we've all gotten to know each other, I'd love to hear what others are doing. As I shared my demo-- and frankly, until last year, I never shared any music I made beyond a handful of musicians I played with and knew and an instrumental fusion band I had at 18 that onoly played maybe 3 or 4 minor gigs. I was a drummer when I was playing professionally. I tried to put together my own band, but it never got off the ground, so this is the first time any music I've written has ever been shared publicly, so it's exciting. But I'd love to hear your music @Fleer and others. If anyone is open to posting it, please do. If not I'd be happy to hear music via PM.

Okay, even though I was just kidding when I made that post, I do enjoy talking strategy (I used to have a publication that was my outlet to write on strategy years ago, but shut it down; even with accolades from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wharton, UChicago, Northwestern and a major book deal and it had a nice impact on my career, it was too much work to keep it going and I actually started the business I now run out of that publication). So here goes.... If you dive into the Bandlab app and social media platform, you'll see that it's an ecosystem built around musicians and their fan basses. It's a social media platform for musicians and their fans -- kind of like a modern era version of MySpace in some senses, and a lot more. Bandlab presently has more than 30 million users, and at the moment, I believe everything is free for musicians except for sending their music to streaming services, there is a small fee for that. It seems rather apparent that Bandlab is trying to build their community to some certain level. After they hit that milestone, it's conceivable that they will review their revenue model and may make adjustments and they may even have planned that long ago. They may put costs all on fans or they may put some fees on artists. Either way, it is pretty interesting.

23 years after I stopped playing music professionally due to a repetitive stress injury, last year, inspired by the pandemic, I attempted to play and record music again just as a hobbyist in my home studio. Due to tendonitis, I can only play for very short periods at a time -- basically, I record on track for several minutes, break and wait an hour or the next day to record another track. Playing complex arpeggios or even fast cymbal patterns cause pain really quickly, so I've learned how to creatively avoid anything complex or not allow pain to destroy my timing (although, if there are any physical therapists or doctors reading this who are cringing, I do stop playing after I finish a part if I am experiencing pain). So, in the past year and a half since I started trying to play again, I started by using covers of Beatles, Zeppelin and other old songs I love to practice playing again. Greg Schlaepfer, Orange Tree Samples' CEO, who started as a consulting client of mine and has since become a dear friend, asked me to do a demo for the new Orange Tree Samples' Vintage Violin Bass library, a sampled Hofner 500/a bass -- my favorite rock bass guitar of all. I thought, wait, your demos are done my very talented musicians -- including Greg himself -- and I'm clearly not in their league. I'm just a guy who used to play a long time ago trying to play again, but due to limitations, I'm never going to be a good player again. But I suppose, I can pull off simple songs. And Greg just encouraged me and told me that he'd really like me to do a demo. I made probably a dozen starts on demo songs and ended up with four demo songs. I sent over the best one to Greg to see if he thought it was good enough. He gave it the green light and i started to finish it. But I was getting bored with the song. So I started playing around with a 4 chord progression from a cover I recently did of Paul McCartney's "Dear Boy" and put my own melody over it. I thought, wait, the Hofner 500/1 is so incredibly connected with McCartney, I love McCartney's music and the tone and playing he's done and this bass library nails that and is great to play, and before you know it, while I'm playing the lead guitar part, I recall a song I wrote when I was around 13 years old that sounded very McCartney-ish and I go straight into it with the idea that I'll create a medley of the chords from "Dear Boy" with the very McCartney-esque song I wrote as a boy as a tribute to McCartney. So the first 16 bars are me vamping over the "Dear Boy" progression with my melody on top on guitar and then I go into the song I wrote as a kid that I thought sounded so McCartney-ish, I shelved it, until now. I consider it my tribute to McCartney and the beautiful tone of the Hofner 500/1 bass. Greg added in some additional guitar harmonies and arpeggios to my parts and did the mixing and mastering. I used the Timeless Tone preset on the bass and every guitar you hear is an Evolution guitar. If anyone wants any additional info on the recording, just ask and I'll look at the original file. I recorded this in Cakewalk. I think I'm one of the few deals forum users still using Cakewalk. https://www.orangetreesamples.com/audio/PeterDeLegge-DearPaul.mp3 I also put it up on SoundCloud:

23 years after I stopped playing music professionally due to a repetitive stress injury, last year, inspired by the pandemic, I attempted to play and record music again just as a hobbyist in my home studio. Due to tendonitis, I can only play for very short periods at a time -- basically, I record on track for several minutes, break and wait an hour or the next day to record another track. Playing complex arpeggios or even fast cymbal patterns cause pain really quickly, so I've learned how to creatively avoid anything complex or not allow pain to destroy my timing (although, if there are any physical therapists or doctors reading this who are cringing, I do stop playing after I finish a part if I am experiencing pain). So, in the past year and a half since I started trying to play again, I started by using covers of Beatles, Zeppelin and other old songs I love to practice playing again. Greg Schlaepfer, Orange Tree Samples' CEO, who started as a consulting client of mine and has since become a dear friend, asked me to do a demo for this library. I thought, wait, your demos are done by very talented musicians -- including Greg himself -- and I'm clearly not in their league. I'm just a guy who used to play a long time ago trying to play again, but due to limitations, I'm never going to be a good player again. But I suppose, I can pull off simple songs. And Greg just encouraged me and told me that he'd really like me to do a demo. I made probably a dozen starts on demo songs and ended up with four demo songs. I sent over the best one to Greg to see if he thought it was good enough. He gave it the green light and i started to finish it. But I was getting bored with the song. So I started playing around with a 4 chord progression from a cover I recently did of Paul McCartney's "Dear Boy" and put my own melody over it. I thought, wait, the Hofner 500/1 is so incredibly connected with McCartney, I love McCartney's music and the tone and playing he's done and this bass library nails that and is great to play, and before you know it, while I'm playing the lead guitar part, I recall a song I wrote when I was around 13 years old that sounded very McCartney-ish and I go straight into it with the idea that I'll create a medley of the chords from "Dear Boy" with the very McCartney-esque song I wrote as a boy as a tribute to McCartney. So the first 16 bars are me vamping over the "Dear Boy" progression with my melody on top on guitar and then I go into the song I wrote as a kid that I thought sounded so McCartney-ish, I shelved it, until now. I consider it my tribute to McCartney and the beautiful tone of the Hofner 500/1 bass. Greg added in some additional guitar harmonies and arpeggios to my parts and did the mixing and mastering. I used the Timeless Tone preset on the bass and every guitar you hear is an Evolution guitar. If anyone wants any additional info on the recording, just ask and I'll look at the original file. I recorded this in Cakewalk. I think I'm one of the few deals forum users still using Cakewalk. https://www.orangetreesamples.com/audio/PeterDeLegge-DearPaul.mp3

Now should we look at BFD next?

Next up, NI's and Izotope's potential future strategies.

Awww, what a kind way of saying old! Hahaha!