Native Instruments' Kontakt, the "world's most powerful sampler" has been with us for 10 years! To celebrate this, Native Instruments has decided to hold a 10-day sale on a range of 10 highly sought-after products.
From 28 June 2012 to 7 July 2012, the following products will be going at half their usual price.
Here's the list of participating products:
0. Kontakt, of course
There are not many times in a year we can see Native Instruments having sale at such a grand scale. From the good variety of products up there. Take your pick!
I've purchased my license for Morphestra! Its really a good time because I am taking advantage of the 3-day offer giving me a 50% discount off the regular price! This translates to about SGD350, my local currency.
At the very moment my card details were successfully verified, an email with a serial number was sent to me. Talk about delivery efficiency!
Installation process includes running an installation manager. With my serial number I could initiate a download process (Morphestra falls under the downloadable product category, so there is no need to wait for shipping and delivery). Being a whopping 15GB in size, the installation is archive is split up into 23 parts, each about 653mb in size.
This seriously takes up some time (and bandwidth) to download. I started the process last night, and I've left it to download while I go to work.
Fingers crossed, I'll be able to install my new tool when I get home tonight! :)
I am posting this through email, testing the mobile capabilities of blogger.
From now till 28 June 2012, SampleLogic is selling Morphestra for 50% less! Just go to the product page, purchase Morphestra with following coupon code: MORPH50, and you will automatically receive the 50% off your purchase.
This is one of the sample libraries I have been planning to get! I am starting another round of purchase for virtual instruments, and this product is high on my list.
SampleLogic's products are all geared towards the realm of creative sound design. Morphestra is a huge library with more than 1200 instruments carefully recorded from sampled orchestral performances.
Like all other products from SampleLogic, Morphestra is meant to be an organic cinematic-instrument. It was designed such that it can stand on to produce a complete cinematic sounding track or cue for any tv, film or commercials out there today.
All the carefully and artfully designed instruments are sampled, processed and morphed, and to sound cinematic. The best part is, all the sounds can be further controlled and morphed by the huge array of tools in the instrument interface itself. This gives the musician more control than ever to make their instruments really unique and different, to stand out from the crowd.
Being quite sad I missed the last SampleLogic sale in March this year, I was going to make a purchase the last few days, but thank God I spotted this offer amidst all the other tweets and updates from my social networking friends.
Not being able to access individual channels of a multi-channel midi instrument (physical/virtual) is one of the greatest reasons why I went back to making my music in Cakewalk Sonar for a while. Knowing how to separately control signal flow is crucial to me (MIDI/audio). I feel helpless if I do not know how to use this multi-channel feature. To me this is the most basic feature in a sequencing software. The other big thing against the workflow in FL Studio for me, was the fact that I still do not know how to drop into an audio record mode inside FL Studio. I found that I always have to start recording the audio tracks at the beginning of the song. Sorry for digressing, this topic is better kept for another day.
Finding out how to do this has boosted my confidence to continue to work with FL Studio. Having mentioned all the drawbacks of FL Studio (mostly due to my incompetency), I am obliged to mention a very strong area of this application. FL Studio really feels more solid and stable in terms of interaction and resource optimisation. The latency I get from FL Studio is generally quite fantastic. I can never get the same almost-lag-free experience with my virtual instruments in Sonar. Also, I feel FL Studio gives a more solid timing sync to the music (again this is probably because of the superior latency optimisation in FL Studio).
Forwarding a promotional e-mail from Applied Acoustics Systems:
Dear AAS user,
Summer is finally here... For the occasion, we've put together the Monster Splash Summer Deal for our registered users – hey, that's you! Indeed, all our Professional Series instruments are at $89 each until the end of July!!!
Visit one of the links below to get your new instrument(s) today.
Once again, Alvin Yap aka Mr Gallen Wolf has gotten hold of very timely information - good news, people.
This time, he brings news of an amazing special offer, 90% discounted price on the AAS Strum Electric GS-1. What used to be a regular priced of US$199 is now US$20! Amazing deal!
First Purchase: AAS Strum Electric GS-1
This is a physical modelled guitar instrument that is also an intelligent guitar strumming assistant. All you need to do is to hold down a chord voiced like a keyboardist, and Strum Electric GS-1 would give it a fingering like a guitarist would voice it. There are also difference in the sounds produced in up-strokes and down-strokes. It is also capable of producing strings mutes and strings harmonics too.
It is so intelligent that when we are playing less than 3 notes at once, it goes into a non-strum mode where you can play it like any normal guitar patch. There is a 'legato' behaviour when you are in this mode. This prevents re-triggering of the hard attacks of individually played notes when the user is playing legato style.
Being a physical modelled virtual instrument, it does not fill up your hard drive with huge samples, and it does not have a big memory footprint when loaded. Also, it means it is free from audio sampling limitation like a fixed sample rate, or noisy signal chain during the sampling process.
Here's an official YouTube video demonstrating the Strum Electric GS-1 in action from the official AAS page:.
Second Purchase: Miroslav Philharmonik Classik Edition
This is a lesser version of the full blown Miroslav Philharmonik by IK Multimedia. The full version is a complete orchestral collection of instruments that are recorded from the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, in the very famous Dvorak Symphony Hall.
The full version of Miroslav Philharmonik is EUR169.99 on the IK Multimedia website. The lesser Classik version retails for EUR99.99 which equates to US$125.94 at this point of writing. It is almost a 70% reduction for me! Some of the sampled recordings used in this library of virtual instruments were the very ones created by Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš (the very famous jazz/fusion musician/songwriter/double bassist/cellist) to help in his composing work back in the 1993. These samples have been used time and again in many films for the next decade or so. That speaks volumes about the quality and expressiveness of the sounds recorded.
IK Multimedia were the guys who developed the wildly famous SampleTank sampler player plug-in early in the days when software sampling was just beginning. Even in the days when I was using hardware synths and tone generators, I had already heard of this product. In a few occasions I nearly owned this, being bundled with some keyboard controller I almost did buy.
Now the Miroslav Philharmonik is also running off SampleTank engine, but the interface has been customised just for this library. I finally get to own my first SampleTank based software virtual instrument!
So all in all, I bought these two at a total of US$59. Pretty good eh? :)
Once again, Alvin has 'saved' my music life by satisfying my mid-week cravings for virtual instrument libraries acquisition! And he also has saved me very real money by hunting down good deals like these!
About AudioMidi.com:
This is an online store with great deals!AudioMidi aims to be an online resource to help provide unbiased advise and information on music/audio hardware/software and tools. They aim to reach out to musicians from all levels from hobbyists to serious professionals.
To provide a 'no nonsense' approach to their reviews and products offerings and pricing, AudioMidi strives to offer the most competitive prices on the most up to date products in the market.They have a blog and an online store.
From this friendly blog post that gives a very concise tutorial to a very helpful 'label search' feature in Blogger, Google+ user tomgehrke blogs about the feature and shows how to implement this in a step-by-step manner.
At the end of the tutorials Tom even gives 2 tips to help us avoid common pitfalls. It should be straightforward enough for anybody to implement that on their blogs.
Returning from that tutorial, I've implemented labels (or keywords) to almost all my posts. Using those labels as a categorising criteria, I set up a tabbed layout structure to this entire music blog. You should be able to see the tabs bar just below the main title.
I was chatting with Alvin today and he gave me this link.
Here's an enriching and inspiring screencast showing a film composer creating a section of composition in under 8 minutes.
Amazing, isn't it?
Being a visual effects artist, watching him work reminds me of those videos recording artists that are involved in speed painting and speed modelling in digital art and 3D computer graphics. (Not a fair comparison of course, since mr Composer here is doing this in real-time while Speed painting and speed modelling video captures have quite a bit of time-compression, since the tasks take up much more time to achieve the final product).
One huge lesson that resonates when I watch this is the need for planning before actually executing.
I think the very important thing to notice, is that this amazing composer has a game plan in his head before he approach his workstation. It was with this big picture in mind that he could clearly plan out what he was going to play when recording his individual parts.
It looks like he has a little piece of paper where he has written down the gist of what he wants for certain key points in the music, and for certain parts.
Of course there were some experimentation and adding of other elements, but I believe starting the execution of laying down the main tracks and structure is another major part of the composing that got done in mr Composer's mind before the video even began.
In my many years of doodling and playing around with composing and sequencing software, I've been sequencing and composing at the same time. This is definitely a not efficient plan for me. I used to do 8 bars or a phrase, for all parts. Then from there I continue from the ending of that phrase and I proceed to the next.
With this method I experienced a huge amount of time encountering mental blocks and coming to dead ends where I either had to back-track and change the latest segment in order to get myself out of that dead end, or end up with a weak segment from there.
Another tendency I have which may not be a good thing: What I usually overdo is to thicken up the instruments too much at times, or try and make many things happen at once. It is usually a second line that plays parallel to the main melody or some part that tries to play something clever. Mr Composer has shown in the video that it does not have to be like this. Simple can be beautiful and effective at the same time. Less is more, some times.
Too many instruments doing their own thing may make the whole piece more complex (in a bad way) and distract the listener from the main idea that's going on. This will result in a less effective main melody.
With the kind of speed that mr Composer can churn out stuff while maintaining his high quality of work, it gives a big hint on the speeds expected of a composer for films, games and TV content these days. It seems like every minute counts and every move and decision he executes must bring him steadily closer to the final product.
