Vernon Barnes

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.

That made me think. One should be able to use the Amplesound Riffer patterns to. Of course incompatible keyswitches & articulations will need to be worked around. Its something I will try when I have learnt EZBass basics. On the other side of the coin I prefer the sound of the Amplesound and Orange Tree basses. I am wondering if drum maps may help get things closer by re-mapping keyswitches. One thing is certain using the output of EZBass elsewhere won't be seamless.

Well, I have put my reservations aside and ordered it for £127.60 including VAT and minus around 1.5 euros of "Best Coin" - Serial number was instantaneous. Downloading now, test drive tomorrow.

Exactly this. EZKeys piano MIDI is going to work on any piano library with may be a few differences caused by differing velocity curves, Bass is different because of the many articulations, guitars will be even harder. The closest thing that I have come across to EZBass is the Riffer function in the Amplesound basses, this suffers for the same limitations and if you want to use the output from Riffer you are pretty much stuck with Amplesound. Unless manufactures get together are develop a standard for this (not going to happen) it will always be the case. EZBass looks like it is in many ways is what Amplesound's Riffer could have been. Riffer is cleaver in its string selection and use of multi channel guitar mode and comes with some excellent riffs but they have not got the chord /key change thing beyond a clunky transpose function. Programming your own parts requires really good knowledge of bass playing if its going to sound right. The Amplesound basses grew from a "normal" VSTi / library with Riffer added an extra feature later and they can be played as well as any virtual bass. As they can use MIDI guitar mode they would lend their selves to being played with a guitar controller (is there such thing as a MIDI bass controller?)

One thing EZKeys has taught me as a (rather mediocre) synth player is that I will never be a piano player. As such I find EZKeys very useful. .

This is a reservation of mine. Presumably a part contains different articulations, how are these triggered? I you try to use an Amplesound Riffer MIDI with another bass VST Amplesound's key switching may not be able to be remapped to the appropriate articulations. So you are pretty much stuck with using it with Amplesound basses or doing a awful lot of MIDI editing. If EZKeys uses velocity switching as you comment "at high velocities. You get a whiff instead of a note. " may be suggesting it would probably be possible to map mutes, palm mutes, sustains, harmonics etc. in a Orange Tree Evolution bass and save it as a new snapshot for use with EZBass MIDI. I will be looking for documentation and hopefully a demo before committing. The other issue is how hammer ons and pull offs are indicated and will this transfer to the target instrument. My suspicion as been one will need to use EZBass to get a accurate playback. Can the built in effects can be bypassed for a DI sound for processing in the DAW.

Not yet. I have noticed that with the more recent releases the free Analog lab presets have been a bit more limited.

Has anybody tried this with odd time signatures. I find the automatic search engine in Superior gets a bit confused with things like 5/4 and 7/8.

At that price I am interested enough to try the demo. ? I wonder what buying this now will do to the price of the upgrade to version 8?

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I have run the Western Digital Lifeguard quick diagnostics and the drive passes. I am now running the advanced diagnostics which is going to take the best part of three hours. The sister drive failed and was replaced last year. I am considering options, one is to replace the potentially problematic 2TB drive with a 4TB drive. WD 7200 drives of this size seem very expensive, Toshiba seem better value for money but I need to do more research.

I have downloaded several more of the Anthology series and I am not feeling the love. It would be disingenuous to say they are bad but nothing is grabbing me and I think in most cases I could find better sounds in my collection. I also downloaded the SRX keys. It is a source of decent sounds with a small footprint but again I don't think it brings much new to my party. I have yet to download others as unlike the Anthology sounds it seems to be necessary to install on the system drive. They are not huge but if you install all 10 SRX modules you are looking at approximately 3GB and having this on a SSD system drive negates the small footprint argument.

Given the age of the computer, at least 6 years any serious issues and I would consider a replacement but I don't want to do that just yet. The good news is the disc image completed without problems and everything is working ok for now.

Just what you need in lock-down. I went to open a project earlier and it failed. Problems accessing one of my sample drives. I tried to open folders and just got IO errors. After rebooting the computer all seems OK. Everything should be backed up apart from Komplete 12 for which i have the install discs and some of the more recent libraries I purchased. I have the downloads on another disc. Never the less I have cleared enough space on an external drive to create a new disc image, which I will attempt later as it will save a lot of time if the disc need replacing. I am debating if I should order a replacement disc now or wait until there is a total failure. Lock-down makes everything more complicated.

Very intuitive. Thanks!

I have downloaded one of these. 16 tracks including room mics etc. It seems to be well recorded and comes with a track listing with notes.

This looks interesting, free drum stems from session drummer Emily Dolan Davies. https://emilydrums.com/stem-club-about/

I have moved on to look at the anthology series and the Concerto player. One issue seems to be if you insert the Concerto player in Cakewalk it only has one output, when you look in GUI it has the option to send different parts to different outputs as one would expect from a modern multi-timberal ROMplier. (There is a similar longstanding issue with Drumcore where multi-outs are not available in Cakewalk.) I cant say I am blown away by the anthology sounds I have down loaded so far. They are not bad but given I have seemingly better options already they have not started to tempt me with the Pro membership.

I am happy with the composer cloud subscription. One thing I have found is I get more use form the items I would not have bought outright than the ones that appealed most at first glance. EW have kept adding new content which keeps it fresh.