Magic Russ

I'm a little disappointed that Butch Vig Drums isn't GM friendly. Also, with most other NI drum things, you can copy their MIDI files to your own directory to use with other programs. These MIDI files not only are not GM compatible, but each clip is its own track in a standard midi file. I guess this gives me an opportunity to brush up on how to use drum maps.

Guitar Rig has always been known for it's (non amp) effects and modulations, to the point that you might see KVR users post that nobody uses it for guitar anyways. This new update, with all the Studio Effects included, gives a lot to anyone who was already in that camp. The whole "input filtering" thing just seems to be a more prominent way of tagging patches for intended uses. The modulators have been there, but the Flair Arpeggiator is a striking example that shows new possibilities. For those who don't have GR6 yet, this patch uses their Flair flanger, which has a pitch parameter. The patch uses a step modulator to modulate that parameter. The sound you get is like an arpeggiator, but has a different sound than what you get if you were to modulate a pitch shifter in similar fashion.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but... I like the Fire Breather amp a lot. It's a Marshall type amp with 3 different gain levels. I preferred it over the British Collection in Amplitube. The Chicago is based on a 50s era type Fender amp. It has nice character for clean settings. It sounds ok broken up with single coils, less so with my bridge humbucker. Like I've said in another thread, although the old amps are the same (just always in HQ mode), the new matched cabinets are much better than either the old matched cabinets or the control room components. You have fewer options but the options they give you sound much cleaner and more present. While this doesn't make the old amps sound state of the art, it does help them sound a bit better. Anyone who already has the mod pack knows that they sound quite good on guitar. It's nice to see that they are included now. It's also nice to see their vintage compressors, solid series, and reverb classics included. There's also a component called Dirt. It can get some interesting fuzz and distortion sounds.

The old amp sims are the same, but the new matched cabinets are impulse based and sound much more present than the old ones.

This morning I had GR6 and Super8 in my account.

Ordered it an hour ago. Did not see guitar rig in my plugins to install. Hopefully by the time I get back from dinner it will show up.

I was going through some old projects, and realized that for how old it is, Triangle II still is pretty good. A 64 bit recompile would not be a bad thing.

Acid is more focused on audio loop manipulation than most other DAWs. I find it a bit easier to do those things in ACID than Cakewalk. But for every day use Cakewalk is my choice.

Neither Amplitube nor S-Gear work correctly for me in ACID. I get a bit of stuttering/jitter. Does anyone know if this was fixed in the last few updates?

The envelope mode on the flanger seems to open up some nice possibilities for pads. I wonder why you don't see that more often.

Funny, I would have thought Track and Project templates would have been #1 and #2 respectively. Track templates especially save time when you are dealing with Reaktor instruments. I actually clocked this on an older machine of mine. It took about six seconds for me to drag a template and have it instantiate whichever instrument I was testing at the time. It took over a minute to load Reaktor, find the ensemble, and load the patch. With project templates, I always like to have a quick load template, for those moments when I wake up in the morning with a crazy idea. In many cases it might make sense to have a template which relies on multi-gigabyte libraries. However, when inspiration strikes, you don't want to be waiting on your instruments to load. In those cases, I use Battery with a small drum library, a couple of audio tracks (some for guitar, some for vocals), a couple of simple synths, and maybe TTS for basic instruments.

But is it deeply sampled? Otherwise I am out.

An epic organ sampled while being smashed with a pickaxes , reamped in a cathedral in Prague featuring a custom granular synthesis engine.

I got Lurssen as part of the Max deal. It's ridiculous how easy it is to make a mix sound good. It almost feels like cheating.

For me, the problem is not so much space as much as it is organization. Trying to find the best loops and one shots can be a challenge. I really should check out some of the sample grouping tools. Then when it comes to instrument libraries there are too many cases where I am not sure if something is worth saving.

The bundles contain a bunch of loops and presets for Massive, Prism, Monark, and Battery. I assume if you have Maschine it's easy to work with these. If, like me, you don't have Maschine you could browse through the content with Komplete Kontrol instead. I don't typically use Komplete Kontrol in my DAW for most things. Maybe Pianos and EPs (especially since Lounge Lizard is NKS compatible), but usually not for synths. If I want to use any of these presets in the synths they are made for, I have to copy them from where the expansions are stored and into the user directories for the given synths.

I t I'm not so sure about that. I remember the Scarbee Rick Bass was only in the Ultimate version, but is now in Standard. Cuba was in 12 Ultimate but not Standard, now in 13. Same with the Sunburst guitar. Same with Crush Pack. But, there's a lot of stuff that's been around for a while that hasn't found its way down, such as most of the AR Drums and Scarbee Basses, as well as the reverbs and compressors (although cheat mode: they seem to be available in GR6).

OK, Nautilus is actually pretty good for bass sounds and can even do some decent simple analog style pads. Iridium, on the other hand, sounds like stock SynthEdit oscillators run through distortion. The other two just sound a bit dated to me. Again, this is just based on a quick sample of presets, maybe they need a better patch designer.

Probably not. Listen to the demo tracks. Few of the presets sound any better.

They didn't list it on the product page, but Evil Dragon said on kvr that Replika would also be included in GR6.

I had let my subscription lapse for about six months. Any recent issues worth checking out?

There is a video on Groove 3 if that helps.

That's cool. Also glad to see they fixed the ASIO driver bug. It's quite annoying to have to try out a bunch of drivers because they didn't get them labeled correctly.

Also, due to issues with the developer, this is not something you should expect to see upgraded to 64 bit any time soon.

More likely that Sennheiser paid for a set number of authorizations and finally hit that number.