I don’t know, did this one sort of fly under the radar? I haven’t seen a lot of mention of it.

A name familiar to the budget conscious sound processor over here on Windows, Voxengo have released their first cross-platform plug Overtone GEQ. Not only do you get the benefits of Voxengo mastermind Aleksey Vaneev’s deep, deep knowledge of DSP, you get it for free.

But make no mistake, this is no bog standard bit of EQ code. No, this thing is deep. I won’t try to sum up the what and how, but it does impart a whole lot of audio voodoo to your tracks. It has/needs a lot of power and is not a per-channel EQ per-se, but throw it on a bus and listen to the magic. No, really, it’s a great sounding EQ. It’s not really meant to be surgical though I’m sure if you take your time or know what you’re doing you can use it thusly.

The GUI is a vast improvement over their old Windows-only plugs. It’s really well thought-out and clean for something so potentially complicated, and the on-screen hints are integrated nicely. I do wonder if this means he’s going to start porting his Windows plugs over; I imagine it is a promo for something yet-to-come. I use quite a few of his current plugins and I have every confidence that they are every bit the equal of plugins that cost twice to coin.

While I spin my wheels in other areas, here are few new sites that will help distract you at work, while dreaming of noddling in your home studio with an unlimited budget.

Muff Wiggler’s Blog

Intellegent Machinery

Innovative Synths

In the meantime, I’m going to be easing myself back into this.

Surprising absolutely no one, but pleasing nonetheless, Cakewalk have polished their shoes for NAMM and released a new patch for Sonar. A great set of fixes and some nice additions to the step-sequencer.

What’s especially interesting is you may probably will be able to use one of these.

You know, provided Euphonix write some solid Windows drivers and keep up with production. But it does seem poised to make Mackie Control users feel very inadequate.

This just landed in my inbox:

Right in time for the holiday season, u-he proudly announces the release of More Feedback Machine V2.0:

http://www.u-he.com/mfm/

And because it’s the appropriate time, the pre-order offer of 59$ will remain valid for another week from now! - Don’t miss out on it and check out the new features and factory patches!

So it’s going up to a reasonable $79, but hey, 20 bucks is 20 bucks. And while at the moment this is way more DSP than I need, I will happily endorse any U-he creation whether I buy it or not.

And the thing is obviously a beast:
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You know, just this morning I was thinking to myself, I wonder what happened to BFD 2.

Well, I will wonder no more. Here it is, available for ordering if you need it.

While working last night, I reminded myself I did not need this update - I’m trying to get the full use out of the version I already own, and it is certainly more than capable for my needs.

That said, this looks totally bitchin’.

Yanks. Always with the hyperbole.

But now that the feasts are winding down, denizens of the U.S. now prepare for their second helping of crass gluttony: discount shopping.

I won’t go into how distasteful I find the whole thing, but suffice to say this year I’m half expecting riots.

Nevertheless, chances are if you’re near a metropolitan area you could brave the evacuation-level traffic to get something like %20 off some already marked-down crap at your local Guitar Center.

Ah Guitar Center. On the off chance you don’t have any first-hand experience with a Guitar Center Superstore, well, picture MusiciansFriend.com and MySpace, but, you know, as a store. Or more specifically, as a supermarket.

Yet, for all it’s petty crimes - bad to laughable advice from staff, devaluing of musical instruments¹, the impact on smaller boutique shops^{see 1} - I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think they get a bad rap.
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Two new VST pluings are now available to anyone who wishes to download. One appears to be a rather polished “sampler” that is more or less official abandonware. The other is a raw chunk of open source programming that may be a diamond in the rough.

The former, Vember Audio’s Shortcircuit, is simple-sample engine, with the emphasis on traditional sampler paradigms, i.e. not build around huge sample libraries, i.e. you drop single sample into it and mangle, modulate and trigger them. Windows only. I don’t know, is there a good MAC VST/AU simple sample playback, like Live’s Simpler or Cakewalk’s DropZone?

B.) The other, VSTLus by programmer John Williamson, is the first iteration of a MIDI utility that runs custom MIDI scripts. So all those hours you’ve spent scoring the web for free VSTi MIDI/MFX plugs and trying to understand/get them to work, can now be spent learning what appears a straightforward scripting language, that will do whatever MIDI tricks you can dream up. It’s all a bit above my head, especially in regard the the plugin’s programming, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it. Windows only, but since it’s a BSD license here’s to hoping some enterprising MAC/~nix coder can recompile it. I image the scripts are cross-platform, and there’s a rudimentary API, so there’s plenty there for the hardcore. In some ways it reminds me of mucoder’s hypercyclic (my top choice for the Dev Challenge), or, more specifically, a stripped down MFX Development Kit. Personally, I love a good GUI, and the MIDI-hacking I’m most interested in are those that lead me in directions I’d probably not come across on my own, different flavors/degrees of generative and sequencing and modulation scripts. So hypercyclic fills that slot nicely for me. But who knows what can happen with this.

The final top 3:

1. Elements of Nature
2. hypercyclic
3. The Element of Surprise

In 2006, 3 of the 4 I singled out were the top 3 placers.

This year, I’m batting 3 out of 3!¹

A keen eye for quality and innovation? An influential opinion among the members of KvR? Or am I merely some sort of idiot savant?

I suspect it has something it has something to do with this², but there’s no way to back that argument up without sounding like a complete jackass.

But, obviously, I believe three very worthy digital contraptions were awarded their due. Not the order I would have put them in, but why quibble?

Anyway, some morning-after notes:
Because of my recent adventures in system maintance none of my initial downloads got beyond a 2nd chance. So, yes, I may have overlooked some gems, but apparently I was pretty damn close.

It’s interesting that a SynthEdit plug took the top spot. And the 3rd spot. I would have thought that the cross-platform plugin would have drawn in votes the SE plugs couldn’t get. Then again, hypercyclic’s genius isn’t quickly apparent: it’s a MIDI tool, a smart and unusual MIDI tool and one that benefits from strong host MIDI-routing, but not as gee-wiz apparent as a snyth or DSP.

About the SynthEdit plugs. It’s great that this development environment is out there and lets some real artists do some fine work. We now have access to all sorts of plugins that commercial developers wouldn’t come up with on their own. But its bugs are becoming more and more limiting, for both the developers and the users. Even if te SE developer releases a new version which fixes the dual-core bugs that apparently plague it (I haven’t had my dual-core long enough to encounter this myself) and the “all notes off” bug, that leaves a lot of plugins out there that were created on the old version that need to be recompiled. Nevertheless, this is a real victory for the necessity of VST development platform that is available to the enthusiast as well as the more serious coder.

As rekkerd says “…it is a well deserved win. xoxos has released tons of cool freeware plug-ins over the last few years, more than doing his part in the community.” It’s a cool idea, thoroughly executed, though it’s actual long-term usefulness is still a question. Kudos to Ugo for his exploration of simplicity in the creative process. And cheers to the hypercylic devs for giving me a tool I look forward to exploiting more fully.

^{1Look below the list, in the notes, at the bold text; the bold formatting was inserted at the time of writing.}

^{2The link is to a google lecture on the paradox of choice. Watch it while thinking about your workflow, your plugin folder, all the things about you current setup that you think could be better. Really, it’s enlightening.}

Well…

A new hard drive and a copy of MS WindowsXP Professional later, the computer is back up. And it seems my SATA samples & audio drives are intact. XP Pro recognized them with out the brief struggle I went through on my old polluted XP Home installation. So good news.

But getting here was not easy. My legally obtained copy of XP Home Upgrade was useless to me since I had somewhere along the line lost/discarded my WinME installation disc. (Don’t laugh. That OS worked way better for me than 98 ever did. Okay, laugh a little.) I had an old version of Ghost and a DVD image of a previous OS re-install - and I struggled for a day trying to make it work with floppy drives and boot-disks, half-remembered DOS commands and old 8-bit programs, the works, all bringing up memories of long past IT work. But nothing worked and I don’t have the time.

I thought briefly about Vista. But then I thought better. Really, I have nothing against Vista - it’s on the very laptop on which I’m typing. It’s a fine OS for internet and 2D graphics and web coding. But it wants to be connected to the internet and I’m just not prepared to go down that road with my music rig. I’m fine with never having to worry about network drivers and firewalls and such. Not connecting my DAW to the internet does bring up some interesting issues regarding the OS and driver updates however. (And I get to speak to someone on the Microsoft payroll when I activate it over the phone. Always less painful than I think it’s going to be.)

So I have to decide whether it’s worth it to install one of the gray-market post-SP2 update packagesor not. I mean, looking through this list there’s a lot of crap I could not care less about; and then there’s a few things like this: A non-paged pool memory leak occurs when you capture specific MIDI SYSEx messages in Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Yikes.

So, while mucking about in the guts of my music computer, of course I got to thinking about just chucking my motherboard & CPU (ASUS & AMD 64 3200+ respectively) and just go dual processor already. I mean, I’m already having to rebuild my work environment from the ground up. And my motherboard is not communicating well with my processor fan so it won’t boot without telling me there’s a fan error or if I monitor the fan with some utility it reports the fan as turning on and off, which it clearly is not and the temp never goes above 46/47. (I’ve been ignoring it for the year or so that I’ve been running it.) So it’s kind of a crap motherboard. And I’m sure I would notice the speed and power.

So why not? Well, it would behoove me not to spend the money. I’d have to chuck in for some new RAM, probably go back down to 1gig for a while; it would probably all come to about $300 give or take $20. Moreover, I’ve been working fine for a couple of years with the same relative amount of power and getting along just fine. I’m really trying (I swear) to stick to “If I can’t afford it I don’t need, and even if I can I probably still don’t.” Why not hold out another year, or until something breaks, and get a real posh setup?

Anyway, let the driver & software installation begin.

^{The Gates cheesecake photo is via the Coding Horror blog and it’s a pretty interesting read. I recommend it.}

I’ve now spent some time with the 2 Soniccouture sample sets I’ve purchased over the last few months, specifically Konkrete2 and the Hang Drum libraries. So, I feel fully qualified to rave about these products, and in general develop a bit of a gear-nerd crush on the company.

General fan-boy notes: Slick, well-functioning web-site, with a good eCommerce business model. (Some other payment options might be advised but I’m fine with paypal.) But, more importantly, insanely well-produced content, that is as specific as it is flexible, and it’s reasonably priced; in terms of sample libraries (and music software in general) they’re downright cheap. You’ll need a Kontakt so there’s that; I mean, most of the titles are released for other sampler-players as well, but what they do with Kontakt is where these libraries really shine - the scripting is insanely good.

Konkrete Drums 2: It took me a little while to figure out how to make them usable. Obviously, it’s not EZDrummer - not any sense.¹ And it’s far more extensive and varried than your bog-standard x0x sample kit. But the mapping vaguely recalls your standard drum-kit mapping (kicks and subs down around #36). And most of the hits seem to be single velocity - caveat: I say that not having fully explored the library: it’s really frickin’ huge. The range of sounds is really expansive, from organic to completely inorganic, metallic to completely warm and squishy. And this is cool but really I purchased it for the glitch-script it comes packaged with. Go watch the video, you’ll see what I mean. Nice, right? And with Sonar’s new multi-lane controller view makes short work of this.

Hang Drum: I said to my producing partner last night, “The problem with these libraries is that in about a year you’ll be hearing them everywhere.”

Let me revise that. In about 6 months you’ll be hearing them everywhere. I’ve already used them on 3 tracks.

It’s amazing how they’ve approached putting together a multi-sample of an unconventional instrument. And, as everyone notes, it’s easy to just sit there with the “Jamming” script turned on and just muck about for hours. So, here I am, once again, giving away the game. For a while these are going to be like Reason and you’ll be watching TV or playing XBox and some piece of music will drift by and you’ll think to yourself, “Hey, that’s the Hang Drum library.” For a little less than $100 US - less if you’re European, you can sound like every other producer for the next, oh, 7 years. What will be interesting is the people who really start pushing the library in unconventional ways. But even if you don’t use it in a single track you should buy it just to experience its musicality.

And if you act now you can get their Abstrakt Bass for a discounted price. Honestly, when I first was poking about their site I thought, “Yeah, whatever, another bass instrument.” But, again, this thing appears hugely deep, covering all manner of, erm, basses. And, once again, they top off a really extensive but economical library with a batch of Kontakt-scripting goodness. Right now I’m so glad I could never afford Trilogy.

And for you lechers and freeloaders, they have a well-stocked freebies/demo page so you can taste their brilliance. But, really, this is a company we want to be around for a while so buck up and buy some new sounds.

¹I’ve edited this for clarity, and to make a feeble joke.