Soundslut

All about audio gear

[soundslut]

https://soundcloud.com/team-brooklyn/mariah-carey-we-belong-together-trapstep-neuro-hybrid

[soundslut]

whats good homie? Yo i was wondering if you can make me a sylenth skin? that camo one you made is crack!! Nice page too.

yea man, let me know your email and I 'll send you one. Do you want it to say "producerslab"?

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Rain Drum

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Felis Dubsteppicus

[j1sbeats]

[gkbeatztha1ne]

You better be Chopin the right samples!!

[soundslut]

im narcissistic that's why I put my own name on Sylenth. Now we've got that out of the way, this is my tribute to the enigmatic Sylenth from Lennar digital. It's fast on it's way to becoming a classic. 

There are so many good VSTi synths, and yet this one is really a stand out. It's easy and to use, sounds great, always does the job. It's a go-to synth. It's not a hyperbrain like many nowdays but it always delivers niceness. Perfect if you're making any kind of club music. It's very popular with all kinds of electro. You might stumble across some sounds you know very well.  Everything kinda came together with this design. If I was only allowed to use one VSTi synth i'm tempted to say it would be this. It's a producer synth.

Many people think the original is ugly and I have to agree. Hence the need for the kevlar and brushed steel camo with alloy knobs facelift. I always liked getting the camo weapon upgrade in call of duty so this is like the Sylenth verson of that. The doctors say I'm the mental age of 9. The current version doesn't allow reskinning, you have to hack it, but you don't have far to look for a PC or MAC tutorial. I think the general outcry of the horrible UI has prompted the company to officially support skinning in a later version. I just read that somewhere on the internet, don't hold me to that one.

Anyway you just reedit the resources and make them look how you want. If you can't be assed doing that, message me if you want a slide with your name on it and I'll make you one.

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New Remix just out

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How do you keep up with all the key commands or functions with the different DAWs, won't you get confused? ;p

There's several ways to do this, the sexiest being the optimus maximus which I talked about on page 2 of my blog, you can get a logickeyboard for your chosen DAW or the eco option is stickers like this, short of actually buying blank stickers and writing your commands on them.

[soundslut]

The muse receptor. in case you aren't familiar, is a computer in a 19 inch rack box running a custom version of linux redhat. It makes use of windows VST and VSTis and acts for all intents and puropses as a synth rack, guitar processor rack or drum rack for use in a live situation.

 I got one as an alternative to a rack rompler. I found the experience of owning one a rollercoaster of emotions, mainly because I made many assumptions about what it was and the realities of making it work for me, so here's a checklist of cool things and bad things about it.

The cool things, it has massive polophony. You can plank on your keyboard and every note will sound. You can load up several instances of VSTs and has no trouble playing all of them. It has low enough latency for a profesional keyboardist not to notice any lag while playing. You can put all the high quality switches in your software on. It has it's own version of rewire called uniwire running over ethernet that lets you route midi and audio to and from to your DAW, each with seperate outs and midi channels literally into the thousands. It interacts seamlessly with other win or mac computers. You can mount it's drive as a remote drive on your desktop and drag your sounds and patches to and from it. It supports up to 1.5TB space on the drive on newer models, will accept ilok protected software. It will even work in "unsupported mode" allowing you to make use of a lot of other windows format VSTs and VSTis. The AD/DAs on the unit itself are fairly respectable. If it crashes, which is not often once it's set up, it takes under a minute to come back with all 16 VSTs loaded and just a few seconds if you have 1 VSTi in your template. You can view the VSTis on a vga monitor that you can connect to the unit without it being slaved to a computer and connect a usb keyboard & mouse to it for direct input to the VSTs. You can screenshare from a computer over the ethernet cable and see your VSTs that way. You can also access VST patches from the front panel alone.

The bad things. It's really designed to be a VSTi PLAYER for a live event. That is, if you like designing and messing round with your VSTis, switching samples in and out, it becomes slightly more unstable. You have to remember to save your patches frequently because it can spontaneously restart if you're in your VST messing with it. You have to follow receptor's patch management system to control patches , making it more difficult to export anything you've made in there back to a DAW based VSTi.  Because the OS is so stripped back it's a miserable affair loading samples for reaktor or battery. Forget searching or any other normal computer services you would expect outside the VST UI.  It doesn't support most USB music keyboards, only a few cheap lame ones, which kind of goes against the requirements of a professional keyboardist. You may find you can only MIDI your expensive USB stage piano, and thereby experience some of the latency you were hoping to avoid. One version of the receptor comes prepacked with native instruments guitar rig, except it doesn't support NI's own USB guitar rig kontroller. You have to use a MIDI guitar controller if you want to do that. Receptor support is a paid service. Uniwire doesnt support multiprocessor on your DAW, so if you have a multicpu PC or mac running your DAW, too bad, you have to use only 1 processor which will force you to run the DAW with massive amounts of latency so your expensive desktop doesnt shit itself trying to make everything in your in DAW work.

The Receptor is brilliant but the company's small development team and lack of vision for what it could be is holding it back a bit. They designed something so you can play your VSTis on the road, it succeeds there but with a bit more support of devices and situations and multiprocesor support it could be a game changer, because it's not that expensive and it can do such a lot. If you're on the road a lot and you just want to play VSTis and not do deep reprogramming with them, then it's definately worth getting.

I have a 32bit Nuendo DAW on a 12core mac  and I found it more powerful to have a single processor Nuendo and Uniwired receptor, than to try to do everything in Nuendo alone with multiprocessor on, and I dont care about latency because I program in the sequencer.. Come 64bit (once all the plugin developers finally get round to VST3 64bit  ) I may rethink my situation.

What this product needs to be great is to support more devices and situations with other equipment, but I say that with respect that this would allow it to move beyond just being a VST player you can take on the road.

I wonder what it's competitor will be like when it comes out?

[back-then]

For pleasure and popularity

[soundslut]

For those of you who wonder about Cubendo it's like this. First there was Cubase, then they decided to start from scratch and build a hard disk editor to rival Pro tools. Conceptually this was a good idea but now they put most of Cubase's features  (and you can get all if you pay a bit extra) in Nuendo with an NEK.

Since Cubase and Nuendo have evolved side by side it would make sense to just have one great product but they want to make it cheaper for users just starting out. in a way Cubase is like Live intro or a lite version of the software. It's designed to be more composer focused. It's just odd that the two DAWs have different names.

 i know about Reaper, FL Studio, Ardour, Studio One. Pyramix, Sadie, Digital Perfomer, Sonar, Fairlight, Samplitude all of these are chosen by many for various reasons. Ardour is free. 

I have never used Reaper, but I think it looks very promising as a contender for best DAW, because in reading their documentation you can see they listen to their users and have thought about solving real problems users have, instead of making ill concieved decisions or pointless features that many other DAW makers have done in the past.

The greatest DAW I've ever used and continue to use is Nuendo and here's why I think it beats every other DAW, despite it's many shortcomings.

VS Pro tools and other big DAWs -  Ok the video impelemtation is not as perfect as PT, it's reliant on quicktime, but that does mean the technology moves along faster where with Pro tools things take ages before they update or really innovate it. If you spend some money and make an effort , the video sync is close enough to get a job done. It's workflow features beats Pro tools and other DAWs by a LONG way. You would save up to 1 hour or more's work every day on Nuendo vs Pro tools just with the workflow features. That's huge.

Vs Logic - dealing with audio is faster and better in Nuendo. Logic started out as a sequencer whereas Nuendo was always a hard disk editor, and it has Cubase's sequencer which is nearly as good as Logic's.

The Cubase sequencer is the one everyone copies btw, Ableton, Reason and many other sequencers have stolen a lot of their ideas from Cubase.

Vs Ableton - the timing and VST implementation is better in Nuendo. Sure it's not as stable but thats because it's keeping the memory hungry 3rd party VSTs happy and in sync. Ableton's sync is dodgy with 3rd party VSTs whereas Nuendo is always perfect all the time. the delay compensation is automatic, always perfect and never needs any attention. Ableton is only better if you don't add anything to it, but this limits your sonic capability. Your stuff still has to sound deep, three dimensional and sonically rich yes? As great as Ableton Live is at stretching and shaping audio, Nuendo is even better at this in most situations.

Vs Reason -  yes the VSTs nuendo comes with may be a bit dumb but once you have NI vsts or other stuff in there it sounds great and you forget about the stupid free VSTis it comes with.

Nuendo is more expensive, it crashes if the memory is close to full, there are many ridiculous things about it, but it has unequalled workflow and customisation, almost anything it can do (and thats a lot) can be given a key command and customised, even the preferences.

Most important of all , I think it actually sounds better than any other DAW. It's always sounded better. Whoever engineered this took huge trouble to make sure the way it sounds is always amazing. Sure there are times when other DAWs catch up, right now Protools has a 64 bit mixing environment. Well done, but how long did it sound inferior for? Years, and that says a lot about a product. The sound quality in Nuendo comes first, ahead of any other considerations and that is as it should be.

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Which is the greatest DAW?

There's a distinct advantage when your sequencer is also your sound generator. They can share parameters and help each other in a way that 3rd party plugins with a sequencer can't.

Reason&Record and Ableton Live both do this. The instruments in the software have buttons that do magic time saving cool things in your sequencer, and if you were to try to touch almost any control, the sequencer is way ahead of you recording it if you wish, there are no communication problems, supreme efficiency meaning stability, low latency, good workflow and always perfect timing to the nano second.

But hang on, am i being a dick? Does it really take more than an afternoon and a template to set up a plugin to talk to a sequencer properly?  Well it can be done, but all 3rd party software evolves at it's own pace creating lots of opportunities for everything to disconnect itself.

Whenever I've used Reason or Live, I've ended up with music just about every time. You would think you should yes? But Often I've used something like logic or cubase and ended up doing computer things, distracted and dazzled by some amazing life changing thing I would love to use if I only learned hexidecimal programming or boolean algebra  to really get it going. Those DAWs can be so deep . With something like Reason, there is so little standing in the way of being creative.

So what's the downside of all-in-one DAWS?  Well they sound very "in the box". No matter what they give you they always seem to have the same flavor about them.  I would recommend using DAWS like this with additional outboard processing hardware to escape the sameness of them.

That could be an analog summing desk, some nice mastering gear, tube equipment,  or a few well chosen boxes. Ableton can use AUs and VSTs, so having something like a UAD card integrated with that* would really make it sound different.

*addendum - I tried Ableton with a UAD Card and it caused a nightmare of latency and timing issues. Stick to plain hardware or add plugins via rewire.

Reason with Record looks like equipment you can touch, it's reassuringly real to work with, but personally I don't like the sequencer. Below version 4 it was amazing, but somehow they made it more complicated and lost something of the elegant simplicity it had. You shouldn't need to be opening windows all the time to do stuff, you should be on one or 2 pages the whole time max, that's what I like anyway.

Ableton doesn't look real at all, it looks like a science project, but it has such amazing creative tools that can turn a sound upside down and inside out in a million ways, all musical and all interesting. Everyone does tutorials for it too, you dont have to look far for help. Every man and his dog is a certified Ableton trainer.

If I had to choose between them it would be Ableton live. I love Reason, but I don't like the sequencer and I don't like how you can't have 3rd party integration. You can argue that allowing 3rd party means it will definately crash on you at some point, Reason never crashes ever and that's mostly why. Yea well, you need something else in the mix for a fuller better sound, it's worth a few crashes, in a studio anyway.

I wish you could use Reason's gear as VSTs but I can't see them ever doing that. There's rewire of course and both these apps support it, but truth is, it makes the whole thing unstable and isn't really complex enough to fully integrate 2 DAWs. So does this mean I'm saying Ableton Live is the best DAW ever in the universe?  For some people in some situations, yes it is.

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What's your take on Ableton as a DAW?

I think Ableton Live an incredible creative DAW. It's the most musician friendly, easy to use and the only true jammable DAW. I stayed away from it for years because I thought it sounded like shit, but after they upgraded the engine and using V8 for a while I realised it defaults to sounding like shit so that it won't have memory issues, stop working and crash during a live performace. If you put everything on high quality mode and use it in 32 bit in 48 or 96k, it's pretty much the same as the high end DAWs. The i/o will affect how it sounds of course. If you have nice i/o it's pretty nice. I've found it more stable and smoother with 3rd party VSTs than cubase / nuendo. I don't like Analog much, but I do like Simpler, Sampler, Operator, Tension and Collision, and the audio and midi effects are great.

Downside of Ableton Live, not as good as Protools or Nuendo for post but almost nothing is as good as those two for sound design and working to picture.

It's geared to everything being a clip so it's ability to move sounds on a timeline and work with is a bit basic compared to what the Classic DAWs offer. There's no decent monitoring either so you need to have a hardware or software monitoring if you want to do things like have a calibrated sub and crossover. There's no surround capability either.

It stacks up well against Reason too. Reason's sequencer let's it down a bit, it's not quite as fluid and idiot proof as Ableton Live and Reason wont let you use VST/ AU but Ableton can. It's a can-do DAW. Great on a laptop, great in a studio and of course pretty much the best in a Live situation.

[soundslut]

Pierre Schaeffer created *musique concrete * WAY before sampling, where sounds from the natural or mechanised world could be gathered and presented as music, and I cant help thinking of John Cage who would draw lines on a weather map and play the music that fell on the intersections of the lines, or other different thinking composers from any age would appreciate what generating composition ideas based on semi structured random formula means for music. 

WELL NOW THERES AN APP FOR THAT. haha gees really

If you get what I'm on about, you might also be interested in WIDI. 

Play it audio and it quantises the frequency spectrum to a chromatic scale. Have you wondered what an explosion sounds like rendered on a piano? Ok it's a bit like what the piano does when you throw your family pet on the keys. Just imagine it don't do it.

If you scan musical audio into it, it will of course guess the key and tempo and do a decent job of making a MIDI file of it for you to use in the studio,  or make a midi ringtone that you could then quickly sell on an chinese ringtone webiste and make several yuan.

Seriously though, if you like sampling, this is a kind of sampling, but with a way to avoid any pesky licensing problems. Steal a groovy riff you like, played by a very old and long dead jazz genius and change the key and slow it down or speed it up and turn it into a minor progression when it was major or whatever.

You can do far more with this scheme than with a piece of cut up audio and with no ill effects, because it's just midi. You then decide what instrument should play it.

Those of us that write music on computer in a sequencer can't sit down drunk like a guitarist and noodle away. It doesn't work like that, and If you get wasted in front of your computer you'll just pour beer and ash into the keyboard, and probably end up watching porn.

For centuries musicians have sat down high in front of their instruments, tried to play their favorite songs, messed it up, and created something new that interested them enough, and a new song was born.

A sequencer programming musician can't really have that process, even with ableton live, its harmonically too structured.

 So widi gives you fuel for the sequencer. it wont just pick out the notes of a song, it picks out harmonics. You can scan a song into this and get all sorts of amazing results and ways of hearing a piece of audio you may not have realised. It can generate fistfulls of notes and several channels of it all at once.

This is good news if you don't like or have a music keyboard, and compose DJ style just in the sequencer. if you're so inclined, Widi might just be that opportunity to break the creative block you're having.

The downside is the app is a bit geeky. Not such a good UI with some relevant things put out of immediate reach, and a few odd things to deal with. The PC version is more elaborate than the Mac version which I am personally really offended about. But it delivers the goods, and its under more development.

Don't under estimate what this humble app represents.

your next progressive symphony could be  ~ Possum going thru the bins ~ for cello , in A minor

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Which is the best DAW? How about Logic Pro? Right from the start, Creator / Notator by then C Lab was special. You could tell by using it, someone had thought how it would be used, and made an effort to make sure your creativity was not interrupted while using it. it later became arguably the best midi sequencer in the world, and then hard disk editing was added.

That was kind if it's problem as a DAW. The sequencing was unparalleled but the audio side was not as well implemented. This improved over time making this definitely one of , if not the best DAW around. The midi sequencer is still the nicest, simplest to look at and use. Logic comes with some nice software instruments, better than you get in Cubase. 

I havent used it since Apple bought it, not because of them , its just that Cubase became much better around the same time so I started using that instead. Many people do serious amazing work on it and many would say it's the best DAW. It's not my favorite, but I wouldn't be too upset if I was given it to use on a project. It's worth serious consideration if you're looking to buy.

[soundslut]

Will the real SSL please stand up?

Well it can't because it's a plugin. These 4 plugs claim to give you that SSL sound, but one of them is wayyyyyyyy better than the others.

The UAD 4K? Yea it's a good compressor, it works, it's reminiscent of an SSL and has the look and feel, but it's not the best.

The UAD G series stereo does a good job of replicating SSL hardware, you could argue it's therefore the best soft SSL buss compressor.

The Waves G master buss compressor made under license from SSL? Yes it's ok, i don't think it's quite as good as the UAD G tho, and it's a tad squashier in a soft forgiving way than the original, and is not really the same when you hammer it.

The Duende SSL buss compressor? Yes it's the best, it's the punchiest SSL-i-est nicest sounding software buss compressor. It's not exactly like the G, it's better. It feels like an evolution from the philosophy that brought you the G, but they've taken a bolder step further.It's punchier, but doesn't sound like it's destroying anything. Ok it doesn't have a fade out, but do you really need that when you have a million different ways to automate a track? At the end of the day, the sound it makes kicks ass. 

It doesn't allow data entry ( at the moment) and host bypass is not supported, only the bypass button on the plugin, but who cares about that really. I expect they did that because host bypass is often nasty and clicky anyway on several plugins

Previously, SSL duende kinda sucked when you had to rely on SSL's horrible duende hardware. Why was it horrible? 

1. Because it used firewire 400 - way to ruin all our lives, they later improved this with a PCI card

2. Because you had to send it back to England if you wanted to change license ownership. WTF guys

Anyway those bad old days are gone, you can get a nice 64bit native, and apart from having to deal with their own proprietary copy protection system and not popular ones like synchrosoft or ilok, it's worth the trouble. 

So the best SSL soft compressor is EASILY the one .. made by...SSL

Go figure