Sometime last year I wrote about how I had once owned a Moog MG1/Realistic Concertmate. It’s not just that I had no idea what it was or barely used it while I had it, or even that I sold it to some friends for like fifty bucks - it’s that of all the crap I’ve hung onto over the years I had to get rid of that. And every once and a while something comes along to remind me how misguided I was at certain points in my life.

Today this is pointed out via Analog Industries. Alerted to a new freebie sample set from the dedicated geniuses at Goldbaby that utilizes a Moog MG1 run through a bunch of Audio Damage plugins. I’m not on a broadband connection right now so I won’t be able to audition them for a while. But I’m prepared to download and weep.

_{Photo ripped the matrixsynth flicr stream}

Here’s a sample set that’s so underground it doesn’t even have a website. I don’t know why, I’m a complete sucker for these kinds of things; I think there should be more folks out there sampling off-beat instruments, found sounds, toys, forgotten instruments.

Actually, I guess I should be doing that. Damn, I’m lazy.

Anyway, thanks to KvR user Architeuthis for not being lazy.

Sorry, this is my first sample library and so I don’t have all that professional stuff going for me like a website and a quick Pay to Download system setup. That will hopefully come in the future.

* Recorded in 24-bit / 96,000khz
* 15 tone musical box in the key of G#
* 14 alternative samples per tone, 210 samples total
* Coming soon for registered users: A version of the sample library with crank noises

- Listen Here (first two melodies dry, third melody using EQ and KarmaFX reverb)
- Download Manual here

Send $15 to my paypal account argitoth-at-gmail dot com and you will receive a username, password, and product key to your e-mail. When sending the payment, specify the following:

-First and Last name
-An e-mail you want to register the product with

It is available for Kontakt. More samplers will be supported soon. Reply to this thread if you would like support for the sampler you use.

I actually haven’t receive my link yet, so I’m posting this on good faith. The links are going out fairly quickly; by the time I got back to my computer several hours later it was waiting for in my inbox. He’s a verified paypal member and seems to have been around KvR for a while, so let’s assume this is all on the up and up. The demo does sound pretty fantastic, and I have the perfect track for this.

^{Photo by Kriss Szkurlatowski, via stock.xchng.com.
So, yeah, the photo is just something I found and does not represent the sampled box.}

Chris Randal, of Audio Damage renown, has informed his readership that he marking his 40th birthday today. Happy birthday, Chris. Welcome to the declining years.

In said post, he anticipated the occasion by noting some of the musical milestones of a particular lifetime. Since there’s nary a bandwagon I won’t jump on, here are a few of mine, though it’s not my birthday:

• #1 Song on the day I was born: “The Sounds Of Silence” Simon & Garfunkel
• First new album I purchased with my own cash: “Duty Now for the Future” Devo¹
• First stadium concert: Grateful Dead, Providence Civic Center²

As a present for Chris why don’t you head over to his label and buy one of his records. I assume he gets to keep all the profits for those (since they’re digital downloads it’s all his, right?) it’s the next best to his requested Paypal cash grab³.

^{1That sounds way more prescient that it probably was. Before and after that anomalous purchased, mostly influenced by my best friend at the time, my tastes were a lot more in keeping for a kid growing up in NH in the 70s. However, I rediscovered the album in my punk rock years and realized how fucking brilliant it is. To this day, one of my favorite albums. And I still have that copy, much worse for wear.}

^{2This was before their mid-to-late 80s resurgence; I happened to be in town the night my cousin was going, and getting a scalped ticket was incredibly easy and cheap. My cousin ended up being a life-long deadhead. I did not. Though I’ve often wanted to cover a Dead song for the academic exercise of it, and simply to be contrary.}

^{3Yes, I know he was joking}

PS: While we’re on the subject of gift giving, I do want to call attention to the two most recent posts from sensible misanthrope Violent Acres that are about the best things I’ve read on the issue: #1, #2

As I mentioned a while back, long-time plugin developer Voxengo have undertaken an overhaul of their product line. Starting with the somewhat baffling, gorgeous sounding totally free OvertoneGQE, they followed up with the VariSaturator and the Voxengo Crunchessor.

Since I was in the market for a new compressor, I took advantage of a new release special offer (now unfortunately passed) and got in on this last one. If you’re familiar with Voxengo you know that he never stops working on his product, and we’ve already been treated to a couple of bugfixes. You’ll also know, even without a discount they’re well reasonably priced.

So, I’ve had a while to use it and I’m relying more and more on it. I’m not one of these gearslutz who can discern between a Fairchild and Pultec¹ but this thing works great. It can be as transparent or characterful as you’d like. Though I don’t think anyone would have argued that Voxengo haven’t always produced top-o-the-line DSP.

What’s most impressing me about the new Voxengo plugins is how vastly better looking they are. As much as I relied on them in my productions - Voxformer and GlissEQ are particular favorites - they were functional looking at best. Well, while they were overhauling their development platform, someone over there also spent some serious time thinking about the GUI. Not only are they smartly configured to respond to your interaction, and softened with a nice “Web 2.0″ sheen, if you don’t like the color scheme you tweak it to your liking.

So, not as singularly unique and characteristic as the Audio Damage GUIs, or with the gear porn gee-whiz photo-realism of, say, the new offerings of Waves. But nevertheless, a real feather in the cap of one of the best deals in DSP.

^{1Yes, that’s a joke. Though feel free to point out how wrong I got that.}

_{Awesome yearbook photo uploaded by Kristin Smith (her mother), via stock.xchng.}

I don’t think I’ve done much writing about GForce Software on these threads. Which is odd. GForce Software are, without question, among the elite of commercial independent audio developers - along with fxpansion, SonicCouture, Audio Damage, Ohm Force - that are cool beyond all reasoning.

I know, “cool”… what does that mean, right? A word so overused as to be meaningless, a verbal tick slightly better than people who stammer “you know” every three words. But I feel about these developers the way I felt about certain independent record labels during my formative music years, labels like Homestead, Touch & Go, SST: creative, adventurous, with a lot of attitude and the taste to back it up. In some ways, as a fan, it felt you had a relationship with these companies because they were run by a few individuals who knew their shit. I didn’t always like everything they were putting out, but I was almost always interested and had respect for their choices.

Imperfect and over-thought analogies aside, you get the point.

The first GForce product I procured was the MTron, which I still love, though, let’s face it, has limited use. (Disclosure: I don’t have the 3rd Tape bank, so I’m about 20 sounds short of the full sounds. I’m holding out for the promised MTron Pro.) But I’m fascinated by vintage sounds so this was one of the first VSTs I bought. Then I got impOSCar, which is still my go-to softsynth. Really, I can’t stress enough how much I love that software. The beauty of GForce products is that in addition to sounding great they seemed to be designed by actual musicians. While sometimes it’s fun to tuck into a multi-page synth that makes you feel like you’re trying to solve a rubic’s cube, the amount of milage GForce get out of a single screen on impOSCar is truly impressive. And, yes, it screams like a bastard.

(I just bought Oddity; I haven’t really had a chance to explore it or utilize it.)

So I was very excited when I heard that GForce were producing a sample-based instrument of the great string machines of years past. I was listening to M83 a lot at that point, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, when it finally was released I was skint, so it wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally got around to ordering it.

Not that GForce products are expensive; they’re really cheap compared to a lot of other synth makers, especially considering the quality. I was just really broke and short on work.

And, yep, it’s already been used on a few tracks. I’ve heard some people write it off as a “one trick pony” on boards and a few bone-headed reviews. This couldn’t be more wrong. The depth of sound is perhaps not all-encompassing but it’s certainly not limited. It is very versitile. And with the additional control built into the smartly designed but still classy GUI it can do a hell of a lot more than just lush pads.

Though, if you like lush pads this shit is a no brainer.

I know it may seem redundant to purchase an application that more or less replicates a lot of built-in functionality for a program, but if you’re a user of Cakewalk’s Sonar or, especially, Project 5, you will probably be well served by Agitated State’s forthcoming MenuMagic v1.0.

MenuMagic extends your control over plugin organization in both of Cakewalk’s flagship sequencers in just about any way you might care to have them extended, from global renaming to cross-application synchronization to intelligent categorization and beyond.

This has been in development for quite a while - I think it was first announced shortly before Sonar 6, and to be honest with you, not only had I forgotten about it, once Sonar got the plugin manager I thought it would probably go away.

Fortunately, it did not. The built-in Sonar plugin manager is quite handy, but even it has its limitations. This appears to address most, if not all, of those.

What really sold me on this is that it takes care of a major oversight in the Project 5 v2.5 update. Hey, swell, we got the plugin manager, but for some odd reason there is no plugin organization in the program itself. Being that the primary focus of Project 5 was as a softsynth studio this is a rather bizarre omission. And since that update was, what, a year ago? one wonders if once again Cakewalk doesn’t really have any idea what to do with the program and that sooner or later, when they milk the last few dollars from it, they’ll retire it for good. Which leaves one wrestling with absurdly messy plugin management.

Anyway, MenuMagic will now take care of this, one of my two biggest gripes about the program (non-configurable hardware outs being the other; seriously, if I’m not using outs I should be able to not have them cluttering up my workspace). So even if/when Cakewalk lets Project 5 wither on the vine I’ll be able to squeeze a few more years of life out of it.

And now is the time to act. Agitated State is extending the pre-release price of $24.99. Which is about the perfect price for such software.

Further my explorations in finishing my audio rig, I’m getting close now. So very close.

I had ditched the Alesis i|o 26 a while ago due to its really poor drivers. This pretty much convinced me that I don’t like firewire audio interfaces. I don’t see the point really when you have a desktop computer and latency is important. In my experience, PCI drivers are more solid. Perhaps on a Mac this is different, but even the heralded RME drivers used way too much CPU when I pushed them at all.

For a while I reverted to my EZbus/Audiophile setup. M-Audio may make absolute crap but they know how to write a driver, or at least a solid PCI card driver. And I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the card’s converters or clock since it was handing those duties off to the EZbus Mixer. But I quickly remembered why I ditched this setup in the first place. Sure, the output amplifiers on the EZbus are really nice, but the pre-amps have little-to-no headroom which makes them pretty useless for any sort of line-in. I’m guessing that the converters and clock are above average at best. And the loop-back latency is huge. Plus there are a few other limitations that I won’t bother to enumerate but make it a less than ideal recording rig, digital lofi or no.

So, after another round of reading specs and gearslutz.com threads, I bought a Lynx L22 card. I contacted the guys at Mercenary Audio, who are fortunately just up I95 about 20 minutes, and they had one in stock.

Let me take a minute to say a few kind words about Mercenary. Obviously, I’m lofi. And kind of thick. On top of which, I don’t have a lot of money to throw around. I’m not entirely their target customer. But they treated me with complete respect, answered all my stupid questions, and helped me understand my purchase. They also showed me around their studio and workshops, which was very inspiring. I can’t recommend them enough. I really look forward to being able to business with them again.

The Lynx was a painless install. More importantly, the difference in the sound was stunning. The same night that I installed it, the friend that I record with came over. I didn’t tell him about the upgrade and just pulled up a song we had been working on. “The bass sounds great,” he said a few bars in. “What did you do to it?”

Seriously, insert your favorite audio snob cliché: “Blanket lifted off the mix…” “…punchy…” “tight bottom end…” et cetera. I just know that a lot of the muddiness that I/we had been struggling with was either cleared up or much easier to sort out. Even running into the EZbus (via SPDIF, so clocked and covereted by the L22) the improvement was stunning.

But the problem was basically, what to use as an interface. The EZbus wasn’t going to cut for the aforementioned reasons, and I don’t have the dosh to splash out on a summing box, outboard converters or an AES mixer. Nothing was really worth my trouble in my price-range after blowing my load on the card itself. Then it occurred to me: just use the Alesis as an small mixer, and save myself a lot of expense and hassle.

So I get all the advantages of the Alesis (multiple in and outs, SPDIF, optical, phono) but I don’t have to worry about its shortcomings. It’s converters, as near as I can tell, aren’t all that bad, but since I’m summing to the Lynx, as well as sending my analog signal to the L22, it is basically souped up patch-bay. And for that it works pretty well.

All I need now is a decent pre-amp.

So my advice to you bedroom producers and project studio jockeys: scrimp and save and get yourself a decent soundcard. It’s worth it.

One of the more entertaining things I’ve read, here’s a great bit of legal smack-down served upon purveyors of audio-cable snake oil, Monster Cable, Inc.™.

I’ll assume most people who visit this site are well aware of what complete assholes Monster Cable, Inc.™ are. You know, aside from technical/marketing claims that are exaggerated at best, and that they sue like they were the first company to use the word monster. And now they tried to put the legal hurt on the wrong guy, Kurt Denke, who runs an independent a/v cabling company, Blue Jeans Cable.

I’m cynical, so I just assume most corporations abuse the legal system, but Monster Cable, Inc. ™ are just so blatant and egregious. So, it’s good to see someone with the balls to slap back.

Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

I applaud you. It may seem a little dry, but a great read it is.

Further, if any of these patents or trademarks has been licensed to any entity, please provide me with copies of the licensing agreements. I assume that Monster Cable International, Ltd., in Bermuda, listed on these patents, is an IP holding company and that Monster Cable’s principal US entity pays licensing fees to the Bermuda corporation in order to shift income out of the United States and thereby avoid paying United States federal income tax on those portions of its income; my request for these licensing agreements is specifically intended to include any licensing agreements, including those with closely related or sham entities, within or without the Monster Cable “family,” and without regard to whether those licensing agreements are sham transactions for tax shelter purposes only or whether they are bona fide arm’s-length transactions.

Here’s something cool and unexpected.

Our heroes over at Soniccouture.com have gone and whipped up another product that makes you wonder why no one had thought of it sooner.

Scriptorium.

Rather than just produce another of their fine sample instrument libraries, Soniccouture have tucked into the guts of Kontakt and give us a toolkit for taking Kontakt to the next level. One of my favorite things in the Soniccouture libraries is giving us access to the hidden goodies that help power their masterful sound design. And now they’ve really gone to town and programmed up a whole 35 Kontakt scripts that range from “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Awesome!” (Group Sequencer) to, “Huh. Interesting…” (Morse Code). A few are borrowed/upgraded from some of their other product, so I can attest to their quality. And I’m damn excited to try the others: if you’ve ever hunted for useful Kontakt scripts on the web you know what a score this is.

So, if you haven’t played around with scripts in your copy of Kontakt you’re missing a whole lot of time-wasting fun. They’re dead easy to work, really; if a dilettante such as myself can use them then certainly most others can. And these look to open up a whole world of possibilities. Plus there are 60 instruments included to get you started, along with 3 demo 4 tutorial videos.

I have a great idea for re-building a certain discontinued softsynth that I missed out on buying, and this is just the ticket to get me started.

And, although this is both version 2 and version 3 compatible, it’s perhaps another argument as to why NI should allow for other upgrade options.

This has to be the best licensing agreement I’ve read.

For The sounds found project:

You are free to do with them whatever you desire. Authorship is void here. Too many declarations of property are made by people who simply pressed a record button, this project exists to encourage a different path.

How can you not love any project that has samples of “20021217: Scissors, like any room, Heidelberg” or
“20020922: Mad violinist, bathroom, St. Wendel”?

I’m not sure how one goes about submitting but there seems to be a very cool community working over at http://www.intelligentmachinery.net. Grab your field recorder and explore the ambiance of your life.

Coming soon: The bucolic soundscapes of Pawtucket.