Mike Greene
01-20-2006, 10:48 PM
First, a little unpleasantness. When I went back to my bag (secured to my bike lock) this afternoon to get another bottle of water, the water was gone! I had a suspect in mind and sure enough, I later spotted Stefan Podell with an Arrowhead bottle in his hand and a guilty look on his face! :p
I spotted a few gems today:
Real Guitar 2 - Yeah, I know it's already out, but this thing is cool! It plays like a guitar on the keyboard, but you need neither good keyboard chops nor any knowledge of how to actually play the guitar. Pure genius in design IMHO. But you have to SEE demos (which they say are on their website) to understand. I highly recommend.
MOTU Ethno - It's not out until March, and we could only watch a staged demo, so I don't know if it will be as cool as advertised, but for $299, how bad can it be? 4 gigs of sounds and another 4 gigs of loops that are editable (including tempo.)
The MOTU guy does great demos, too, by the way. He's up there with Eric and Phil Jackson. I almost want to go back to Performer. But I'm pretty much married now to Logic, so I found out this:
Logic Users - Those guys at Redmatica are maniacs! (How do you like my BT impression?) First, most of us already have EXS Manager (I think that's the name.) But what I didn't know about was "AutoSampler." It will blow you away! (Sorry, BT again.) It automatically samples one patch, a few patches, or the entire library of any hardware or software synth and makes EXS instruments that duplicate them. Automatically! You set a couple preferences (number of velocity levels, keyboard range that you want, etc) and it does the rest. So I can finally get rid of some of my old hardware synths that I had to keep "just in case." And some of my buggier soft synths can be dumped as well. "AutoSampler" is $150 and available now. In April, Redmatica will also have "Keymap" which is a fantastic EXS sample editor, but much more than I can explain here. I really like this company! :cool:
DFH - Yesterday I said EW wasn't showing anything new. Actually DFH (drums) has a new DFH light module coming out in a few months. Certainly not groundbreaking, but now the record is corrected.
Speaking of DFH, while Andreas was showing two of us some cool tricks, this third guy (let's call him "Bozo") walks up, waits a minute or so, then butts in and asks if DFH does endorsement deals. Andreas says, "Sometimes, sure. Here's my card. Give me a call next week." Bozo then explains (to all of us, mind you) that he's not sure if he'll be able to take an endorsement deal with DFH because he already has one with BFD (another drum library) and golly, all his endorsement deals are getting hard to keep straight because everybody's just all over him to please, please, please, Bozo, let us give you free stuff and on and on. Hmm . . . I'm not sure why I'm sharing this story, but it's something that sticks in my mind, so there you go.
Speaking of bozos, I'd swear there are fewer 80's throwbacks wearing Spandex than in previous years. And I even spent a bunch of time in the guitar area today.
Origins - I loaded it and played around with it last night night. I think maybe I'd better give it another try when I get home before I post my impressions. Hopefully that's enough lines to read between, if you know what I mean. ;)
VSL – This is a long one, but for now, let's just I really want it. I'll start another thread about it in a day or two.
So until then, does anyone know if Stefan will be at the show tomorrow? If so, I think I may need a new hiding place for my stuff! :D
- Mike Greene
I spotted a few gems today:
Real Guitar 2 - Yeah, I know it's already out, but this thing is cool! It plays like a guitar on the keyboard, but you need neither good keyboard chops nor any knowledge of how to actually play the guitar. Pure genius in design IMHO. But you have to SEE demos (which they say are on their website) to understand. I highly recommend.
MOTU Ethno - It's not out until March, and we could only watch a staged demo, so I don't know if it will be as cool as advertised, but for $299, how bad can it be? 4 gigs of sounds and another 4 gigs of loops that are editable (including tempo.)
The MOTU guy does great demos, too, by the way. He's up there with Eric and Phil Jackson. I almost want to go back to Performer. But I'm pretty much married now to Logic, so I found out this:
Logic Users - Those guys at Redmatica are maniacs! (How do you like my BT impression?) First, most of us already have EXS Manager (I think that's the name.) But what I didn't know about was "AutoSampler." It will blow you away! (Sorry, BT again.) It automatically samples one patch, a few patches, or the entire library of any hardware or software synth and makes EXS instruments that duplicate them. Automatically! You set a couple preferences (number of velocity levels, keyboard range that you want, etc) and it does the rest. So I can finally get rid of some of my old hardware synths that I had to keep "just in case." And some of my buggier soft synths can be dumped as well. "AutoSampler" is $150 and available now. In April, Redmatica will also have "Keymap" which is a fantastic EXS sample editor, but much more than I can explain here. I really like this company! :cool:
DFH - Yesterday I said EW wasn't showing anything new. Actually DFH (drums) has a new DFH light module coming out in a few months. Certainly not groundbreaking, but now the record is corrected.
Speaking of DFH, while Andreas was showing two of us some cool tricks, this third guy (let's call him "Bozo") walks up, waits a minute or so, then butts in and asks if DFH does endorsement deals. Andreas says, "Sometimes, sure. Here's my card. Give me a call next week." Bozo then explains (to all of us, mind you) that he's not sure if he'll be able to take an endorsement deal with DFH because he already has one with BFD (another drum library) and golly, all his endorsement deals are getting hard to keep straight because everybody's just all over him to please, please, please, Bozo, let us give you free stuff and on and on. Hmm . . . I'm not sure why I'm sharing this story, but it's something that sticks in my mind, so there you go.
Speaking of bozos, I'd swear there are fewer 80's throwbacks wearing Spandex than in previous years. And I even spent a bunch of time in the guitar area today.
Origins - I loaded it and played around with it last night night. I think maybe I'd better give it another try when I get home before I post my impressions. Hopefully that's enough lines to read between, if you know what I mean. ;)
VSL – This is a long one, but for now, let's just I really want it. I'll start another thread about it in a day or two.
So until then, does anyone know if Stefan will be at the show tomorrow? If so, I think I may need a new hiding place for my stuff! :D
- Mike Greene