Vernon Barnes

Over the holidays I was resisting GAS. I was really close to buying another Toontrack SDX. I decided to spend some time with the ones I already had and delve deeper into the features while I was going through a dry spell writing wise.. Previously I had simply routed the individual drums and mics to channels in the DAW. Now I started to route internally to busses, setup sends, play with the builtin effects and get creative with the bleeds etc. Then route the busses to individual channels in Cakewalk and save a number of track templates. in All quite satisfying and it showed me I have a lot more than I thought I had. Of course looking at the differences in mic setup in various SDXs does increase ones curiosity about some of the other packs. Oh well. Next I decided to look in detail at the big EastWest kits in composer cloud. The Spike Stent and Joe Ciccarelli libraries. I had only given them a casual glance before but they are really rather good. They appear to be designed to sound good "straight out of the box" with a large range of presets covering many styles. There are plenty of good MIDI grooves too. The mixer has in/out kick mics, top and bottom snare mics etc. there are room mics and bleeds so the whole thing is more versatile than I had first imagined. The mixer channels can of course be sent to separate channels in your DAW. All in all there are some very good options here for expanding the percussion pallet. Looking at the kits in other EW libraries like Ministry of Rock 2 or Fab Four it appears on certain kit pieces can be active in an instance at one time. You select these in the mixer tab. As a result several instances will need to loaded into Play to get a full kit. There are some useful sounds spread across various libraries once you realise the odd way things are setup. And finally, following the sad death of Neil Peart I went back and visited the older Sonic Reality library "Neil Peart Drums" for Kontakt (it used SR's Infinity Player as a licensing vehicle so Kontakt Player could be used.) Listening to some of the NP solos on Youtube that have been posted in the last couple of days I think SR had the tone of the drums, particularly the toms accurately done. Using Kontakt of course is a bit of a pain compared to dedicate drum samplers but the multis do a good job of routing in the Kontakt mixer so setting up individual outs is pretty easy. I enjoyed playing with this again and made a track template for future use. So the best deal may be something already sitting on your hard drive! P.S. I must give addictive Drums another try one day.

Black Grand is very good. There are no turkeys in this lot, I have them all. The Solina and Prophet are probably the weakest (in terms of features, not sound) but at these prices they worth grabbing.

Well, I had a short run through and I am not overly impressed by my first encounter. Some vowels and constants sound good but others less so. The phrases are OK and if they match what you are looking for they would be useful. Word builder at first glance is unconvincing, with practice one could tease more out of it but even the stock phrases are not that clear. To some extent one can get away with the vagueness on the choir libraries, like the bloke from 8Dio said "nobody understands what a choir is singing anyway" but here the weakness in word builder is more obvious. I am very happy to have this available on my composer cloud subscription and it will probably get some use but I am not sure i would have bought it. Realivox The Ladies is serious competition . There is no word builder, just stock articulations which can be chained and assigned to a keyswitch but this can be surprising versatile for la las and do wops and that sort of thing and it sounds a lot more realistic than the word builder phrases. There are also several different voices to choose from and stack if you so wish. (Needs the full version of Kontakt)

One possible use could be producing a guide vocal for a session singer. I have used Realivox The Ladies for this but the word builder could have potential.

I have not really played around with VOS, initial explorations did not grab me. I have had some success with Voices of the Opera and Voices of Empire. They are what they are, you probably don't want them too exposed in the mix but they stand up against other similar products.

Backup Singers is now available for download if you are on Composer Cloud, a 10GB download. I am downloading now but it will probably be tomorrow before I get chance to try it out.

The EW Installation Centre was updated yesterday a sign something is about to happen. Backing Singers is not showing up yet.

There seems to continuity between some tracks in as much as you would want to play the album in the right order.

Excellent band, Bent Knee!

I have SSD 4 and had hoped there would have been major improvements in the the interface so I installed the free version when it came out, but it did not make the step change needed for me to upgrade. I think SSD would get more use if the interface was better but I seldom fire it up. There are some nice kits in there but between Superior 3 and BFD3 I am pretty well covered.

Had got to be best album and song title of 2019. It's by A Formal Horse. The music is, like the title, wonderfully bonkers and unlike anything else I can think of. http://aformalhorse.com

I always use the downloader and I have not had installation issues. The main drawback of the downloader is you need twice the disc space on the target disc during the installation. The installation files can be deleted or moved after installation. If you download on another computer you can still use the downloader and copy the library folder across to you DAW.

No. but it needs the full version of Reaktor!

It was a simpler time when I was young. A great joy was getting hold of bangers (fireworks) and setting them off in cowpats.

Good thing about Composer Cloud is these new things get added so you only have to worry about the disc space. On another note is backup singers / backing singers a US v UK English thing? Backup singers to me sound like ones that are there in case the singer's voice fails rather than to provide backing.

WARNING. Watch the small print. Looks like most are 32bit an "require JBridge" for a 64 Bit DAW.

I was at this concert in early November, quite a magical night. Magenta are a prog band but this annual event is mostly acoustic with solo spots, guests and the odd cover like this one.

I have both Venus and Mars and I am sure I paid a lot less than this for them. They are very good.

Pulled the plug! Got the Freebee downloading now.

Thanks.

It does not show as free on that link, but I found it on the scrolling banner at the top of the home page. However I can't seem to it to show as free when I put it in the cart with Lacrimosa. I am still procrastinating on the choir, I have several good ones already but the Brass makes the deal a lot more appealing to me. And those arcs in Lacrimosa set it apart.

Of course if I am trying to use it I might get frustrated by the complexity and just use a Melotron choir instead. ?

This is tempting me but I think I will try and resist.

I got it but Artutia Software Centre hangs trying to authorize and install it. They have really overloaded their system ?

Why not? It's a sort of medieval Hoover sound ?