Reid Rosefelt

For anybody who is thinking about Modo Bass and even one more thing from IK, this is the time. I have always said that Total Studio is the best deal for IK. It is essentially their version of Komplete. The only thing is...maybe after all these sales, Total Studio 3 might be on the horizon? And that would probably give you everything since Total Studio 2. SampleTank 4, all those new T-RackS (including Sunset Sound) and AmpliTube expansions, Hammond, Syntronik Deluxe, Modo Drums, probably MidiBox too, etc. But it will be a LOT more $$$ than this for a new buyer. Also, there is no telling when it will come out It might be years. I bought Total Studio 2 and am enjoying using it right now, particularly Modo Bass and AmpliTube. I might go for the upgrade to Total Studio 3 right away if there is a decent intro price. I wish Total Studio was more like Komplete, when you know it always comes out in the fall on even numbered years, with a half off sale the following summer. You can plan! ? I am trying to be patient, but it's very hard to resist a lot of these products as I love IK so much.

On Kontakt Hub there was a dropdown menu at the top that allowed you to search by developer or instrument. And it worked well. A lot of sites have the same thing but don't work as well. For example, in the APD store it is very fiddly to get it to let you select a developer. Sometimes you don't remember the name, like "Abstrung." Or you don't even know "Audiofier," but you can pick it out of a list. I hope that this feature comes back. It's in this sense that I think Loot Audio is harder to search. Is it in there somewhere and I just missed it? I also find it less intuitive and harder to just browse around without knowing what you're looking for, but I guess I'll get used to it. Browsing around aimlessly is how I put together my "Tiger the Frog" holiday post on VI:Control and I think it's going to be much harder this year. But I'll deal.

To be clear, while UVI does say this deal includes two free expansions, in fact the deal is better than that--you get 100 euros to spend any way you want in the UVI store, and you have a little time to do it. In my case, I bought Falcon during this sale last year in October and then waited until the 30% UVI Store-wide sale during Black Friday to spend my 100 euros. By waiting I got FOUR expansions for an addional 9 euros. 39x4=156 156x70%= 109. You could also spend your100 euros on anything in the UVI store, but accumulating expansions really takes Falcon to another level. There are regular half price expansion sales that will help you add to your collection. This deal is offered every year, only at this time. So if you want the best price on Falcon, the time is now. But if you aren't sure, you probably can wait for it to come around again. I let this deal go by for years. I'm very happy I finally jumped on it last year. To be honest, Falcon scared me, like it would take me a century to learn. I think all the extensive documentation on the site backfired for me. The truth is that if you know a thing or two about synths, it's not hard at all. It's just sound sources, LFOs, filters, effects,arps and sequencers, etc. You know all that stuff. The difference is that Falcon has so many choices. The other thing is that you can click on practically any mod source and it will become a button or a switch on the front interface. One click. A very nice feature. And if you make a preset you like, you can drag and drop a picture in as a new front page. Very cool if you use a free source like Unsplash or Pixabay. There are also some odd drum sequencers that you won't find most other places. Also, they did a lot of updates between the original Falcon and Falcon 2.0. The kind of updates that other companies charge you for. So this is an excellent investment as we are only on Falcon 2.1. On the negative side, I have found it to be a resource hog. You should be able to load up a lot of layers, but I haven't been able to do that on my computer. It's main competition is HALion. I prefer Falcon to HALion, but HALion is less of a resource hog, so it's easier to load up a lot of layers. I'm going to buy another 32GB of memory this season, so I will see if that makes a difference. And @Fleer Unify is so light that it will definitely be a better way to layer up a lot of sounds.

The problem is that searching moves MUCH slower than Kontakt Hub for me. Anybody else experiencing this?

The URL redirects and they have all my purchases in my account there. Anybody know any more about this? Apologies if somebody has already written about this.

Just a heads-up. That's next Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm just letting everybody know in case they are shopping for a controller, SSDs, RAM, a Streamdeck, or whatever. There may be deals. Of course there may be better deals on BF and Cyber Monday.

I'm not sure this deal is still active. It's not up on APD.

I am always grateful for full demos. Ujam 30 day ones are nice, but the ones from NI and Arturia are awesome. I'm very happy using Pigments and Pharlight all the time without paying for them. I'll probably buy Pigments someday, but I don't need it. And I'll upgrade to KU13 this summer, but it's nice to be able to play with Pharlight and now to check out GR6 is pretty great. So kudos to both of those companies. I never use Guitar Rig, but this looks very good, particularly the idea that they will be making (possibly free) upgrades. It certainly seems like if they come out with something like Raum in the future, it will turn up in Guitar Rig. It's funny. The way they've got this set up makes it another one of those products like MixBox. Is there any other NI product that is resizeable?

FYI, the Guitar Rig 6 demo is up. This will work for 30 minutes at a time, and then you can reopen it. You just can't save your own patches. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/guitar/guitar-rig-6-pro/downloads/ Also, if you get Komplete Start, Guitar Rig Player 6 is now included. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-start/included-products/#c907895 I'm not sure if you can get it without getting Komplete Start.

You really make me want this, but BF is coming soon. ? Gonna see what happens then.

Everybody needs to download this ASAP before it is given away for free again!!!!! Seriously, I think it’s eventually going to be free all the time on the Reason site.

Indie Voices is limited, but certainly worth $5.

I remember when there was the Excelvan mic that sold for something like $6, including shipping that Larry posted here. It was something like $30 but then a secret Lars code brought it down to six bucks. Most of us bought it. I did anyway. It's not too bad. Capsule mic. Wind screen. Sturdy cardboard box. Weird cable that's not good for much. The thing needs phantom power though. Oh, but it wasn't USB.

I did try RA when I had Composer's Cloud, and I wasn't impressed with the sounds, and decided not to buy it. In terms of wide-ranging World libraries, my first recommendation would be EthnoWorld 6,(instruments only) which should be around $155 during Black Friday. UVI has regular 30% off sales, so you should be able to get World Suite 2 fairly soon for around $210. With both of them there is a range of quality, and there are instruments in one that aren't in the other. I like having both, and if you can swing it, it's nice. The only problem with these two libraries is that they can cause you to fall in love with these new sounds, and that can make you want to buy solo libraries. My growing interest in world music has been expensive. But of course, if you come to this page enough, you may already be going broke on virtual instruments and effects! ? I don't mind Sine, though. I may delete my Kontakt versions of the Inspires and have purchased a few of their other libraries. It is true that I am critiquing the OT library without owning it, which is the only way to judge it. I just don't have $300 worth of curiosity at the moment.

I'm out. Something about this doesn't feel right to me. The whole way it was made seems kind of glib and two steps away from authentic. This was made in an offhand way by a Hollywood studio musician to be used for a job by a Hollywood composer who knows NOTHING about Asian music. My belief is that the Erhu and the human voice are the two hardest things to sample. The Erhu can cry--it is so expressive. It is infinitely harder to sample an Erhu than a violin and yet most people do not find even superb sampled violins to be believable. Why? Because they know what a real violin is supposed to sound like. I have never heard a sampled Erhu that was believable in comparison to the real thing. And in my opinion, it is one of the most beautiful and emotive instruments that exists. At this point, Erhu phrases are the only way to go. For some developer to think that you can just pound out an ethnic library of lots of instruments in a short period of time does not show what I believe to be a respect for the music or the culture. Maybe the flutes or plucked instruments, but not really. Study for five or ten years with a master and then TRY to do it. Isn't that the way people learn how to play a violin or a piano? Know and love what the instrument is before sampling. Know the culture that produced it and the kind of music it plays. Can you record a symphony orchestra if you aren't familiar with the orchestral repertoire? People bash EastWest's Silk, because it is old I guess or because Engine sucks. But the truth is it is very good. It has an interesting approach that works for me. The more stuff comes out, the better it looks for me. If NI comes out with a Discovery, I'll buy that immediately. The Middle Eastern one was created by real players from their home countries. They are well designed and fun to play. At least they would be made by people who know what they are talking about and would be fun. I would also buy a Tarilonte Asian library immediately, as I believe him to be the very greatest artist of sampling. He loves every instrument he samples, you can just tell. I'm sitting this out. If it does turn out to be something I want, there will always be a sale someday.

The 8dio Lyre is pretty good. I just checked and I paid $8 for it last November. That doesn't exactly encourage me to buy the others. For eight bucks, maybe.

This is what the effects rack looks like in Syntronik and I have always loved that, even though I also own T-RackS and Amplitube. You only get four in the rack in Syntronik and there are 38 available. So mixbox is 8 in the rack and 70 processors. I LOVE the Syntronik rack and have always seen it as something very different from using T-RackS and AmpliTube. This is my very favorite offering from IK in a long time. Well done!

That's my point. If you have the full Soundtoys set you can load them up separately or in the rack. But with the rack it is rack only. I own many Soundtoys plugins and I know what they are very well. But when I load the same plugin in the rack, it is different. According to @Matthew Sorrels tbere is a gear dropdown, etc. which I didn't see. No, I want the real deal. So I will either buy the full set or not. The full set costs me $160 during BF. Then I can load whatever I want to load only--or use the rack if I want. But honestly I don't know if I need them.

But do you get the presets for the individual plugins with this? Maybe I did it wrong, but that was not my impression. Just the rack presets that combine groups of them. Anybody have just the rack now? If I'm wrong about this, I might consider this deal.

I was thinking of getting this, but you can only load the plugs within the rack. I have let the BF deal on Soundtoys go by for many years, but I enjoyed playing with this and they may have sold me on the whole deal.

You can reassign the keyswitches for articulations in MODO bass and save your new configuration as a preset. So if the EZBass keyswitch for "slap" is CO (or whatever), you would only have to change the MODO bass to match that. And so on for all the other articulations. Not all that hard and you'd only have to do it once. From then on you could theoretically output your EZBass stuff into MODO Bass and you'd get all the articulations. Theoretically. But I bet it would sound a bit different. But it's certainly worth trying.

I guess I feel that the best, or at least easiest, way to use EZBass is to use their basses. For me, it's too much work to transfer over all the keyswitches to another VI. If you do that, it's not exactly EZ. EZBass does have a feature where you can export MIDI without the keyswitches/articulations but for me that wastes the potential of EZBass. So I've always planned to stock up on basses when the price was right. And getting a bit of MIDI is a nice plus. I like that they're doing that. I never bought a second EZKeys keyboard, so I don't know if they did that, but I don't think so. But the two sounds that come with EZBass are better than this one. Better Precision Basses out there, I think.

Missed the mistake, so I guess I'll wait until BF and see what it is then. I guessed right about it being a Precision. It makes a lot of sense to include MIDI with each EZBass instrument. Do you think that the EZBass collection will also sell MIDI? If there's a genre like Reggae or Disco, you could play it with any of these basses. I have no doubt they will do all the most famous basses. I wonder if they will do an acoustic bass.

Finally the new Travellers all work on my computer. Some didn't even load at all until I updated Falcon, but I still thought there was something not quite right. Everything works perfectly now, and the new ones travellers are among my favorite things about this.

Mellow is probably my favorite product that ujam sells. I think that the ujam technology really shines in Mellow. One thing that inspired this video is that I have been saying for a while on this forum and on VI:Control, that the basses are my favorite things they sell. Also it was an excuse to become more expert in using EZBass.