Vernon Barnes

Yet again Bandcamp is supporting artists selling through their platform today by waiving their fees so 100% of the purchase price goes to the artist. So its a good day to treat yourself to some new music. Bandcamp have my respect!

I made the mistake of watching the video. I nearly backed off when VAT was added but I reckon I will get my money's worth from this.

Is it free or is it $49? You can certainly download it and use it for nothing but there is the option to buy it. I must take the time to read the T&Cs.**** I went to look at it again and I can see the version I had install was quite old. It has been improved a lot. I doubt if I would have paid the full whack for the Arturia but I got it for $49 as I have V collection 7. The Arturia adds presets and additional modulation options both of which go beyond the capabilities of the original. As the architecture of the synth is very straightforward the lack of presets on the DiscoDSP is not the end of the world. also the Arturia has built in effects. Convenient but not essential if you have some decent VST effects. I have had a quick 5 minuets with the IK, scrolling through the presets. It has an immediacy about it and the presets sound very good indeed. It lacks the total tweakability of the other two but that won't worry a lot of people. The other down side compared to the Arturia is the load times when changing presets. Edit. *** The DiscoDSP use is unrestricted but they ask you to buy to support further development.

Interesting that this happened right after Arturia's release?. While I figure it will be pretty much redundant as I have the Arturia product I am downloading now. I think the Syntronic stuff sounds very good but I get frustrated editing sounds. One of the big things for me is you are stuck with an oscillator wave form in a patch. One of my first actions in tweaking a sound is often to play with the oscillator wave forms. On the plus side the ability to change filter types is a nice touch so it will be intresting to try the OB-Xa with Moog filter.

Yep - from the Toontrack website "Works with EZdrummer, EZdrummer 2, Superior Drummer 2 and Superior Drummer 3" If anyone is a Superior user and has problems installing a MIDI pack without EZDrummer they should take it up with Toontrack. EZDrummer expansions should also work if you have Superior but not EZDrummer according to the website with the caveat that if you have older versions of EZ or Superior some of the newer expansions could be an issue. For the recent Action EZX SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. 1 GB free disk space, 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended). A working EZdrummer 2.1.7 or Superior Drummer 3.1.2 (or above) installation. And the older Funkmasters SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. 1.2 GB of free hard disk space, 1 GB RAM. A working EZdrummer 1.4 (or above) or a Superior Drummer 2.3 (or above) installation.

Icon. The late, great John Wetton. And a young Ann Marie Helder, I really waiting for new Panic Room material.

Tonewheel is great. Its absolutely filthy sounding so it won't be suitable for a lot of tracks but if you want heavy and distorted this is perfect.

I love OTS but it will have to exceptional. I have more virtual Rhodes than you can shake a stick at.

I saw them twice, once at Reading Festival in 1975. I saw the C-Beams glittering in the dark sorry - the lasers glittering through a torrential rain shower. The set list for that show https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/yes/1975/little-johns-farm-reading-england-63d81277.html I also saw them in Bristol but my memory is vague here. I am sure it was the Colston Hall, which would have made it 1975 a few months before reading, but I am also sure Wakeman was with them and it was the Topographic Oceans tour so it must have been the Hippodrome in November 1973.

65 module updates going on as I type.

And..... Just how good was Chris Squire!!!

And something completely different.

And if you ever thought Robert Fripp was far too serious.

I find that you have to open Voltage Modular stand alone, then close it and open it again to get the updates to start?

I see they have made is authentically hard to program. It really was pain in the **** in that respect. I had quick wizz through some of the presets and it sounds pretty good and the paraphonic architecture is captured so it requires its own special playing technique. The other recent release Tricent looks interesting.

I got a real one, but it no longer works. If I am brave enough to get my soldering iron out (I have been procrastinating for a long time.) I will try to replace the backup battery which is probably why its lost its memory. The presets were loaded from a tape cassette but I have downloaded the files and I hope they will load from the audio out on my laptop. Meanwhile I will be giving this VSTi a whirl!

Here is Tina Gao. She is providing the Cello on "Doldrums", Sadly only via he Cinesamples libraries for Kontakt and some dodgy programming by me.

$29 - goes to $39 later. The advantage here is the synths can be integrated into modular patches that use other modules making them more versatile than a straight VSTi emulation. (and more complex) https://store.cherryaudio.com/bundles/vintage-voice-bundle

Sorry for the misunderstanding, that was clumsy wording on my part. My curiosity was, did the chord names come from some meta data that was dragged across from EZKeys or where they determined in EZBass from the actual notes. If it was the former it would have complicated the workflow with non-EZKeys MIDI. Chords are recognized regardless of the source. I have yet to try "jazz" chords and see if they confuse EZBass.

I have been playing around some more. First off I wanted to confirm that chord recognition was taking place in EZBass and was not being transferred from EZKeys. This was my understanding but I wanted to make sure. When dragging my own MIDI parts the chords were correctly interpreted, including inversion. I think creating your own very simple MIDI piano phrases and and dragging them in is a good way to start to understand the way EZBass interprets the data. With simple triads with no left hand part only the rhythm and chord is available (doh!) when there is an inversion EZBass uses the lowest note, not the root note to create its part. It would be nice to have the option to do either. Next I wanted to try complex time signatures and played around with some MIDI from the EZKeys Seventies Prog pack. Everything worked OK. I got a really nice thing going with some of the very busy 7/8 EZKeys parts without any extra editing. The transition option works pretty well if you select the most appropriate transition for the part. From there you can move over to grid editor and tweak it. I notice there are no factory grooves in 5/4, 7/8 etc. so I am hoping they will add these. I also think they need to do a Rickenbacker expansion.

The one Larry posted recently in this thread cleared up a couple of things that were puzzling me. I missed the bit where you had to tell it if it was keyboard or drum MIDI initially and it clarified the drum options. I had a play around last night with one of the 4/4 "Oh Yes" patterns in EZkeys. (Its only a quaver away from a copyright violation ?) The bass parts generated went exactly instant Chris Squire but they were pretty good.

I have all access and it's very good. I don't think I would have ever got to grips with programming the Arturia Synclavier and CMI without it. It's also been very useful for BFD and Superior Drummer. There are also useful tutorials on non software stuff like music theory and instrument playing.

Looking at the OTS Evolution basses instead of the default velocity switching of articulations its possible to use key switches and they can be mapped to anywhere on the keyboard. I suspect it will be possible to map common articulations between OTS and EZBass reasonably easily. It looks like the two use similar methods for hammer ons. Some deep experimentation is necessary but I am quite optimistic that something can be set up that does not require extensive MIDI editing. I cannot see any way to re-map Amplesound key-switches in the interface. As a lover of odd time signatures I noticed that EZBass is currently lacking grooves in 5/4, 7/8 and 11/8. Hopefully these will be added in future expansion packs. I did try dragging some 5/4 drum midi in and EZBass produced some sensible suggestions.

Thanks, updating fro 1.3.16 now.