PavlovsCat

I'm Facebook friends with several developers that I've given advice to over the years and one of them is Facebook friends with the founder of Baby Audio . Subsequently, I've seen some of his personal account posts in my feed and the guy is super funny. I own a few of his plugins and he's obviously very talented as a developer, but I think he could have a second career in comedy.

Oh man, that sounds awesome! I love it. I grew up on R&B, gospel and blues on Southside of Chicago and absolutely love stuff like that. Real players with chops and soul. When I was a kid, I would hang out at the music studio where my mother taught and there was a guitar shop and a bunch of gospel musicians would regularly jam there and at the Guitar Center up the street. From around 9-12 my mother played in a band that did R&B and rock and used to have me work out keyboard parts from songs by Al Greene, Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers... But I later got deep into Black gospel and collaborated with an amazing gospel singer out of Chicago for a while. I was mainly a rock drummer, but I'm definitely a melting pot of genres, but greatly R&B, blues and gospel and even played some jazz shows. Thanks for the share!

@huskerThat's a great thread idea! What's on your Christmas/Chanukah/etc list? You should do it! It would be fun.

Wow, you're right. I've been aware of the developer for maybe 15 years, but only really looked into his libraries recently after stumbling across his Wurlie, which sounds great, but until your link I never checked out his B5 and that also sounds great. Man, that dev has impeccable taste when it comes to tone and other characteristics. My budget is already committed for this year, but eventually, I'm going to picking these libraries up. And I've had a bunch of PMs with him on VI Control and he's pretty cool.

I don't recall listening to the Keyscape and Pianoteq ones, maybe I didn't because they were out of my budget. But I think it'd be cool if everyone shared their favorites lists. I've become more knowledgeable on the various Wurli models because of this thread. I'm still not completely certain, but I may be picking up the 145B from Skybox. But the more I've played with the e-Instruments W the more I like it. I love that I was able to put more clunk into the notes and created my own presets I'm really happy with. I realize some of us don't love that clunk, but that is a huge part of what I love about the AcousticSamples Wurlie that I don't hear as much in their VReeds -- which also sounds great, BTW. There are a wealth of high quality Wurli libraries to choose from.

Back to Wurlis (I still haven't settled on how I want to spell it). My current take on the best sounding Wurli libraries (I only own e-instruments W, the rest are purely based on listening to demos): (1) AcousticSamples Wurlie (2) Skybox 200A and 145B / SonicCouture Broken Wurli (3) e-instruments W

You just inspired yet another overshare from me. I took piano lessons from my music teacher mother and she sent me too this nightmare literally physically abusive organ teacher at Wurlitzer Music Studio that reminds me of Kathy Bates in "Misery" in her level of twisted sadistic venom. I would hear the student before me screaming before my lesson. If you hit a wrong note, she would slam her hand down on yours against the organ keys and she wore rings on each finger that made it super painful. To make it even more Stephen King-like-- her name was Mrs. Flowers. You can't make that stuff up. Pat Flowers. I regret to say, while I practiced hard, I got hit many times; it was truly terrifying to hit a wrong note. My drum lessons with four different instructors went much better. In fact, I'm still connected to my first drum teacher who was (and I'm sure still is) a really good drummer -- and a super nice person-- who played in a band with my brother, then a fusion band and a famous band that earned him some gold records. Let's see if anyone remembers their biggest hit. The guys from the band are still friends and we've all had music related chats on my former drum teacher's Facebook page.

When I was in my teens through early 20s I played in several working bands and one of them was formed by these three school music directors who played together in their college jazz band. It was the first time playing with a horn section and I loved it (I played drums professionally, but piano is my first instrument). We primarily played Chicago covers. It was a blast. I think we did some EWF too. All super fun to play. Again, I loved Terry Kath's guitar work. @cclarry , our resident guitarist, you and I seem to like a lot of the same rock music and guitarists. How about Terry Kath? I thought he was brilliant at times. 25 or 6 to 4 is a masterpiece of lead guitar playing IMO.

As far as I'm concerned I love when everyone is talking Wurlis/Wurlys however we choose to spell it. I think we need a dedicated Wurli forum. Even though, I'm not much of a player. Who here is a decent Wurli player with good chops? I grew up with a mother who was a killer keyboardists and my sisters were really really good. My son has a 88 key midi controller, it was trying to show him how to play it last Christmas that got me to attempt to play again. I actually think I'm going to try to learn some new techniques. The keyboardist from Jamoarqui (sic?) is a YouTuber who shares his blues and funky electric piano licks and I think I'm going to spend some time. Is anyone else doing anything like that -- like studying blues, funk and R&B techniques and riffs? That's what these things are great for. I've played with some really talented keyboardist, but I've never really been one. I was always on drums with bands.

I didn't date her. I didn't stand a chance. She liked my much better looking friend, who was also Polish-American. The weird thing? She looked like a female Peter Cetera and she was beautiful and that might have been weird. I swear I don't have a thing for Peter Cetera except that I love early Chicago (60s/70s) with Terry Kath. And one of his cousins was college pal of my wife. But other than that no direct connections to a band named after my hometown. InstraEd what part of Chicago are you from. Maybe tell me with clued and I can tell you what part! Chicago has huge Polish and Irish populations.

In person I make tons of jokes about my Italian heritage, largely because I grew up in a place where they absolutely hated Italians and a bunch of other groups. When I was a teenager I hung out with the neice of the original lead singer of Chicago, Peter Cetera. If you met her you'd immediately be able to tell they're related. I remember she had a party at her grandparents house. They refused to let me in and asked me "are you an Italian or a Mexican?" I chose the former. The grandmother said they didn't like either and doesn't let them in her house. My friend overheard the conversation told her grandmother to let me on in. The grandfather added that they'd let me in if I promised never to date their granddaughter. I agreed and the party was on! Good times. That was pretty much life in my Chicago neighborhood. That's music related, right? Because of Peter Cetera.

Fleer, I can't tell from your accent, where you're from, except Electric Larryland.

See despite what you folks may have seen today there are Italian developers I have great relationships with! And we're connected as friends on Facebook and he's never even blocked me!

? percent agree Larry. I know that and have watched it a bunch of times. The drummer on that tour was awesome and sadly died of cancer. He played that groove better than anyone since Bonham himself. Just an great song and a great performance. I'm a huge Zeppelin fan. Have been since I was a wee lad.

I suppose I'll download this later today, but I can't deny when I saw the name, I was hoping for a Zeppelin connection.

Andrea AKA Pettinhouse is a talented dev and a good man. Really good deals.

The dev and I had some PMs over at VI Control, he seems like a super nice person. Really genuine and kind.

I just realized that the web page for the Hammers + Waves - EP 145B states that it's an EXPANSION. Does it require that you own some other library or can you purchase this library alone without any other product (beyond owning the full version of KONTAKT. which I own).

Thanks, I'm not an existing customer, but the odds look superb that I'm soon going to be a new customer!

Thanks for participating in oversharing with me!

After sharing my incredible love of AcousticSamples Wurlie, I really can't justify spending $74 USD on it. Even though I might end up buying Skybox (I think that's the developer's name, but I could be screwing it up) Wurlitzer 145B library for $35 that was posted by Bad Penguin in the shootout thread. Why? The more I've played around with e-instruments library and created my own presets, the more I like it. I actually was able to turn up the clunky key sound I love (way more than in the factory presets in my shootout audio and TBH, I was going after AcousticSamples sound in their demos). So then Bad Penguin posts --- just like I feel about you, one of the super nice people I've interacted with here plus he's more hardcore on Wurlys than me, he owns a real 200A and I bet, unlike me, he probably can play it well -- and here's the rationalization I tell myself. If I buy the Skybox 145B, which someone here owns and loves (which makes me more comfortable buying from a new developer), I'll have two different model Wurly libraries instead of owning what would make like 13 total 200A libraries (but only like 8 of them are paid, the rest are freebies). As far as Vreeds, it's funny that you and the developer both got the impression I don't like it. He wrote something like "I know you don't like my Vreeds library, but here's why I think it's worth a second look..." And I was like, "No. You're obviously super talented. It's clearly an awesome library too. There's just some qualities of your Wurlie library like the clunk of the keys that pretty much sound like my idea of the ideal 200A library." I don't think you'd be making a mistake buying VReeds. The developer who made both tells me he thinks VReeds is better and obviously he made those libraries and has a lot of talent for capturing great sounds.i just fell in love with the sound of the Wurlie library because it reminds me so much of the sound I heard as a kid from our family's Wurly.

I too uninstalled Structure many years ago as it is a relic that doesn't fair well compared to today's samplers and sample libraries. KONTAKT is light years more sophisticated and you can easily find free KONTAKT and UVI libraries are vastly superior to those in Structure. Even SampleTank 4s factory library is in a different league than Structure. Of course, all of those cost a lot more. But I would suggest the free KONTAKT and SampleTank versions together along with the free Decent Sampler and SFORZANDO as superior alternatives that are even lower cost (free) . You didn't list it as in your consideration set, but you mentioned Loom Classic and I owned the original Loom and upgraded to Loom 2, which I still enjoy and I think Loom Classic would stil be nice.

In the end, that's what all of the deep discounting these devs has done to us. They've conditioned us that 15, 20, 25, 30 and even 35% off isn't a big deal. If you can just wait it out, they'll be a massive discount. And that's often the case. Now giving advice to at least a couple dozen sample and plugin developers, I've advised all of them not to engage in super deep discounting, that it will train the market to wait on that pricing and condition them that the actual value of your product is the discounted price. There's no greater example of this than Waves. If I was to tell you that I was struggling financially but just about to purchase a Waves plugin I like that isn't currently on sale and is now at its regular price of $229 USD, you'd probably tell me to wait for the next sale (which would likely be within hours!) where it would likely cost $29,-39 USD. Am I right? So these devs have unintentionally trained us to wait until we see deep discounting. A bunch of folks here have noticed that some popular developers have even inflated their regular prices so that they can promote their sales prices as greater discounts. This actually has been occurring a lot more frequently in the samples and plugin market in the last couple years than at any other point its existed since the web. I'm sure a lot of us have been around long enough to have noticed.

The shortcomings are usually not about the processing. The vibraphone preset has a lot of room in it, which you can take out, and I like that better. The vibraphone isn't that bad. It's just not as good as my other vibraphone libraries and that is, of course, my subjective opinion based on a factors like the tone of the instrument recorded, the recording itself and how much room is in the samples -- I do tend to like drier samples and generally avoid, for example, string libraries with a lot of room baked in. In the case of a vibraphone library, scripting isn't really a concern. So that's not a factor. It's one of those kind of libraries where if you hear a demo of it without external processing and you like it, buy it! One thing super nice about it is that it contains brushed and bowed articulations. Still, because I prefer those other libraries I've mentioned, I've never once used the 8Dio vibraphone library in a single project. I've always used the others I named above. As far as the strings, it's about the lack of intuitive scripting and the fact that when you get all of the articulations -- and for say, the Deep Solo Cello -- that's a ton of articulations, some of the articulations the tone of the cello sounds lovely and some of the recordings, you wonder how they made the cut. I've noticed composers on VI Control making these observations about this and other 8Dio libraries. I could speculate why the quality can vary so much -- for example, is it the cost of studio time and the rush to get big projects out -- but all I know for sure is the end result on my computer. Now. I actually did decide recently that I'm going to try to use my Deep Solo Cello a bit and started setting up custom keyswitches for the various articulations, and I think that I may come to appreciate it a bit more than I have historically.

I was thinking about posting reviews of 8Dio libraries and going through a bunch last night. I found in every case they're never the best libraries of my collections. But at the current sale prices, some of the libraries are worth getting, but not if you have the budget for better quality, better scripted libraries. Even libraries where scripting isn't that important, like their vibraphone library, the recording just sounds okay, but I never end up using it because I prefer my vibraphone libraries from Xperimenta Project and Orange Tree Samples, seem more crisp, have a more beautiful tone to my ear (and less room), but the samples seem like they're in a different league, just like 8Dios/SoundPaint's pianos don't seem to even come close to my better KONTAKT pianos from other developers that excel at piano libraries. Of course, that is completely subjective, so your ears and experience may be different. But when I've discussed this with two friends that both took sound engineering in college, they could articulate the reasons why and also had a good deal to say about the general 8Dio approach regarding scripting, which is that 8Dio is not really great at writing intuitive KONTAKT scripts. Their pianos and drums are okay. I would advise against their guitar libraries. Their strings can be a great value if you don't mind dumps of articulations that aren't well scripted and instead require lots of keyswitches, and tone quality that can vary between lovely and how in the world did those samples make the cut? The quality can vary in their big string libraries. 8Dio, IMO, is a mixed bag and I think that is why they can't succeed at keeping their prices higher. The competition in that higher price range is superior whether we're talking about strings, pianos, drums and percussion or guitars. That's my unfiltered opinion.