PavlovsCat

Okay, five bucks just for MNTRA's Orakle has my attention. I don't know if I have any use for that sound library, but there is something fascinating about MNTRA's libraries and for that price, I'll get it just to hit keys and be fascinated by the sound. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Larry.

I'm very sorry to hear that, Doug. I'm very familiar with experiencing the first Christmas and birthday where a parent or sibling is gone. It's really difficult. When I was a kid, our mother was a classically trained pianist and music teacher, and my three siblings -- all of us multi-instrumentalists -- played in a family band and would perform around town especially around Christmastime, where we'd do a whole show of Christmas music. But tragedy struck and I lost all three siblings far too young, so Christmas music has an extra-special sentimental aspect to it, and I had all of that in mind when I wrote my little Christmas song. Loss is an awful teacher to have, but it has taught me to not take those in my life for granted. Thanks for sharing so openly. I'll probably delete my Christmas song in a bit to lessen my embarrassment.

Okay @Doug Rintoul I wrote this song in 15 minutes. A long time ago I was a working musician (a drummer, whose first instrument is piano) for 12 years and had a seriously bad repetitive stress injury that caused lifelong tendinitis that stopped me from playing. I can only play for a short time before I get pain. But early this year, after 21 years of not playing, I decided to start playing again (of course, as a hobbyist). I know extremely little about mixing, so keep the expectations low. And of course, my playing, after years of not practicing and not being able to spend much time playing, isn't very good and I was never a lead vocalist. Okay, those are the caveats. Here's my Christmas during a pandemic song written on Monday -- I actually wrote it following a FB post by a friend of a friend whose father just died from COVID-19, but it's about cherishing those in your life, not about her loss.

I wish what you just wrote wasn't so filled with irony. I was a director at the company with the second highest number of losses in the WTC on 9/11 and those horrific events brought people together. But we're in the midst of a pandemic where the daily death total has far exceeded 9/11 casualties and I am very sorry to say that we're not seeing people coming together. The pandemic has been incredibly politicized to the point where people are refusing to take basic safety measures like masking or vaccination. It would be wonderful if it were always the case. I have two school age kids. In a Facebook group for parents of kids in our school district, a teacher posted that her husband just died of COVID-19 and urged people to get vaccinated and wear a mask. She was immediately attacked. I hope that we can become a more united people in the US. Granted, I realize there's similar divides globally, but it's incredibly strong here. I wish this tragedy brought people together. I thought at the beginning of the pandemic it would, but that's not what's happening.

While on one hand, you're correct about religious discussion being against forum rules, this thread -- the original post -- is explicitly about a religious holiday that excludes those who don't observe the holiday. (I do, FTR). Granted, the holiday is incredibly secularized and actually was never a true religious celebration. The head of the religion taught to celebrate numerous holidays --- none of which are followed by the majority of Protestant and Catholics today -- but never Christmas or Easter, those were invented holidays. The Christmas holiday was invented by the Romans in the 300s and became popular in the US largely due to the popularity of Dicken's A Christmas Carol in the late 1800s. Initially, devout Christians in the US actually created laws banning the celebration as offensive. But it is a bastardized kind of religious-secular blended holiday. So, admonishing someone not to discuss religion in a thread that is explicitly using a religion-related greeting is a bit ironic. I would cut him some slack and heck, I wrote a Christmas song this week.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it and happy holidays to everyone. (I come from a family that was Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, athiest, etc. and have friends of all backgrounds, so we want to make sure to include everybody!)

Is the MFreeformAnalogEq good? And is it easy to use? I've noticed that on reviews and in posts people write that Melda plugins have a steep learning curve. I'd love to get some insights from someone here who uses it.

You should do it and post your new epic in this thread. It would be 14x more HEY power.

You could always just buy it 14x, for more of the wow factor in your songs.

"This VST3 plugin delivers you a set of 106 realistic sounding 'HEY' shouts." Wow, this will be great to replace those unrealistic sounding hey shouts I put in each and every one of my songs. PRO TIP: They really liven up Christmas songs. Just imagine: "Christ the savior is born -- HEY!!! Christ the savoir is born -- HEY!!! HEY!!! HEY!!!" Or "Silent night, holy night -- HEY!!!" It really gets the audience's attention. Completely unexpected. Definitely brings the wow factor to every song you use it in.

They make nice libraries, but their user experience looks like it was designed by a lawyer with a multitude of check boxes in order to download their libraries. I think they need to add one where they make you promise not to sue for carpal tunnel syndrome acquired from checking all of those boxes. Hopefully the developer isn't reading this, otherwise, I would bet that his takeaway wouldn't be to eliminate all of those checkboxes and boil it down to one, but to add another checkbox intended to protect him from litigation related to users having a repetitive stress injury from checking all of those boxes.

Do they still accept first born children who can code for WUP?

This is what I appreciate about Plugin Boutique's shopping cart system -- it tells you if you've already bought something before. Well, okay, it only tells you if you bought it from them. But it's saved me from buying the same thing twice on more than a few occasions. Sad. I know.

I wonder if we did a poll, how many users of the deal forum are still using Cakewalk. I, like a lot of long time Cakewalk users, bought Studio One before Bandlab bought Cakewalk. But I never used it and today I find myself fairly satisfied with Cakewalk and the price is ideal.

When does anyone here have time to work on songs? For every song you work on, I hope you realize that you're missing like a dozen deals. I'm just sayin'...

I actually did say the name to my wife this morning and she thought it sounded rather close to a female body part -- which is what I thought. Oh well, I guess that dev is one cunning linguist.

I did buy it and already own Izotope's Vocal Synth.

And Arturia just put up a tutorial on Mello-Fi. I'm totally looking forward to using this effect. I just bought Wave's Retro-Fi yesterday -- I'm not sure I would have if I knew this was coming. Oh well:

Here's a YouTube video promoting it -- I'm interested -- I do love Trons and lo-fi overall:

Wait, did I just get this first? Here goes: https://www.arturia.com/products/software-effects/tape-mello-fi/overview?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=product+video&utm_campaign=free+gift

Nice job, Bill.

After I posted that, I realized that I did post a song there earlier this year. As my 16 year old son was taking driving lessons, I thought a cover of Gary Numan's Cars would be appropriate. I got two different people posting. Which, considering that I'm only starting to really play again after decades since I stopped playing professionally or even as a hobbyist due to tendonitis and my playing reflects that I no longer have any chops, I thought two people with positive comments -- outside of my personal friends -- is probably the biggest audience I'm going to get. Plus the fact, that I really don't know anything about mixing or EQing -- which I intend to learn at some point. Another caveat, I was trained on piano, organ and drums and was never a lead vocalist, as is rather apparent when I sing, I only did background vocals when I was a working musician. I actually wrote a lot of music, but I was doing covers to try and see if I can get some practice in. My cover of John Lennon's Isolation features Greg Schlaepfer (Orange Tree Samples) on bass (physical bass, Greg is an excellent musician) -- although I transposed the song since he sent me his audio file and when I transposed his part, the timing gets a little strange. His playing was superb. Someday I'll fix it). I took a lot of artistic liberties with the song, as I always thought the loud part would sound better if changed to a minor key, so I tried it. It mashes up Isolation with Kashmir, as the feature the same main progression. Here's are the links: (Sorry for the off-topic post, Cookie. We should all meet in the music forum sharing section soon)

There's a section of the forum specifically for sharing music, you should post it there. I was actually contemplating sharing some of my own music there.

Sounds really nice. I picked up the taster a while ago and he seems to produce very high quality libraries that have a cool vibe to them. For my fellow Midwesterners, I noticed he's out of the Chicago burbs. Has anyone here purchased his full libraries?

Well, all of my music naturally becomes scary when I lay down the vocal tracks. It's a gift, really.