2009. I can hardly believe it. How the time does fly. Busy, busy, busy. Well, after taking advantage of the 2-for-1 sale, I’ve now installed EastWest/QuantumLeap Goliath, SD2, and Symphonic Orchestra Gold. Since it took a few hours to install these three (the DVD reading part), I haven’t been in a hurry to install the 230 GB Pianos collection. All-in-all I’m very impressed with the quality of these samples, and the pre-configured, key-switched instruments that they comprise.

The browser UI for Goliath can be a bit hard to read, but the responsive support staff at EWQL assures me that that will be addressed as well as a few unloadable samples (in 40 GB) in an imminent update. Fortunately, although each of the PLAY-powered products have their own UI, they all play the same EWI file format. Additionally, when using the PLAY engine as a VST plug-in, you can choose the UI for any one from the products to play the EWQL samples - for me that’s the Symphonic Orchestra (EWQLSO) UI.

So far, I’ve been browsing the sample collections, playing a bit of this, a bit of that - still having not explored even the half of Goliath’s offerings (let alone each of the articulations in EWQLSO). That said, I have managed to compose a short piece using the three aforementioned products. I’ll post that piece later, as well as a bit more about each of the products in separate posts.

In my previous post (August? Gadzooks!), I was halting between two opinions: Colossus and MUSE. Since then EastWest/Quantum Leap (EWQL) have discontinued all of their KONTAKT-based products and replaced most of them with their new PLAY-engine models. I was hoping to find a copy of the discontinued EWQL Complete Composer’s Collection on the Web, but I was not successful.

Now, EWQL launches, then extends (until 31 Dec 2008), another 2-for-1 special. I can’t pass that up, right? So, today, I place my order for four products: Goliath (successor to Colossus) , SD2, Symphonic Orchestra Gold Complete, and Pianos - and get them all for the price of two! Rock (or classical, or new age, or techno, or …) on! Once I get them, load them up, and start to explore them, I’ll update both of you with my opinions.

With a growing number of disparate samples that I am not very disciplined in organizing, I am considering the purchase of a well-rounded sampler library player/virtual instrument that offers both a comprehensive set of bread-and-butter sounds and organization of those sounds.

Two products on my radar are EastWest Colossus, and Sonivox MUSE. With the difference of sample player technology (KONTAKT for Colossus and GVI for MUSE), both seem very similar in content and cost. Software isn’t easy to return, and I don’t want to throw away $600, so, I’d like to solicit input from the readers of this blog…

Which of these two products would you choose and why?

Since my wife bought me a MacBook for my birthday (hey, I’m not complaining) instead of Spectrasonics Atmosphere, I went surfing to the Spectrasonics website to see if they were offering any deals on said “Dream Synth.” When I get to the website, I see that they’re working on this really cool successor to Atmosphere: Omnisphere. Can you hear my drool dripping onto the floor? Man, these timbres even sound great in the videos using cheap headphones! I can only imagine hearing them in my project studio.

Speaking of videos, the current episode (5) on the website announces a contest, providing loops from the forthcoming virtual instrument. “Way cool,” I thought; then I learned that you have to be a registered Spectrasonics user to participate in the contest. So, do I buy Atmosphere so that I can compete in the contest, hoping to win a license for Ominshpere that will make said Atmosphere purchase obsolete? Hmmm.

Although I received it almost 1 month ago, I thought I should tell you about my recent computer purchase (Re: Computer Shopping)…

I am now the owner of a PC tweaked for pro audio from ADK Pro Audio Systems. Why ADK? The price and quality seemed comparable to offerings from Sonica. In fact ADK owner/founder Scott Chichelli told me that if I didn’t buy from him that I should buy from Sonica. Indeed, all of my email exchange with Scott was very personable. He was very helpful in working out the final configuration. Furthermore, the ADK folks have a great sense of humor (Check out their About Us page.)

(Some of) The Specs:

The new machine is powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU (under a large but very quiet CPU cooler with a cool blue glow), overclocked to 3.0 GHz. Since its running Windows XP Home, I only went with 2 GB of RAM (Win XP Home cannot use more than 2 GB of RAM for applications). The OS and handful of apps (SONAR PE, SpeedSoft VSampler 3, and a bunch of other VSTs and VSTis) are on an 80 gig drive, while I record audio to a 500 GB drive, and store my samples and SoundFonts on another 320 GB drive). For buring CDs and DVDs, I went with the less expensive LightScribe drive, as I’m tired of using gallons (a slight exageration) of printer ink to print decent looking disc labels. Since it takes just as long to burn a LightScribe label as it does to print a high-quality label in my ink jet printer - might as go for the LASER-etched labels that look more like commercial CDs than the paper labels.

The custom-built machine is housed in a sturdy 4-unit rack-mount case that’s about 20 inches deep. Much deeper than I expected, ruling it out for the typical 16″ deep rack case. Man, that case is big; But I love the black and blue motif (like you couldn’t tell that from this site). Even the front panel LEDs are blue. Cool.

Performance? I’ve run the diagnostics, and the machine smokes (figuratively)! In actual use, I haven’t done anything too tasking with it yet, but I can now play my VSTi’s in real time. Before with my 2.4 GHz P4, the latency was so severe, that I used an external sound module while playing, and later rendered the tracks with VSTi sounds. Now I don’t have to do that.

Ok. So I bonus myself a bit at the end of the year so I can continue (as in the infinitive) to upgrade my project studio. One of the things that I’ve been wanting is an external guitar effects processor. I’m not much of a guitarist, but since it was the first instrument that I learned, I sometimes find it easier to lay down electric guitar tracks with a guitar rather than sequencing the part via MIDI. The drawback to recording live guitar tracks is that - due to latency with plug-in FX - I’ve been recording guitar tracks dry and adding FX to the track afterward. That’s a problem because it’s hard to “get in the groove” listening to a dry (no amp; no nothing) guitar.

All that said, I didn’t want to spend $200 or more, since most of my stuff isn’t guitar-oriented, and I just don’t play enough to warrant a significant expense in that department. So, I did a bit of Web shopping, and read glowing reviews on this little item: Behringer V-Amp 2. For under $100 (eTailer price with my ASCAP discount), I figured that I didn’t have too much to lose. I didn’t! The unit comes with a foot switch, a canvas carrying case, and a bunch of nice presets. If the numerous presets weren’t good enough, you can download editing software, and hundreds of more user-contributed tones from the Behringer website. The MIDI control of parameters also looks promising.

How cool is this?

Earlier this year (which is almost at an end. =-o), I mentioned that I might compose a short tune using only two of the free/shareware VSTi’s that I downloaded about that time. Well, since I had real compositions to work on, I eventually got around to doing so.

Listen below to the short work that I created using FreeAlpha and Freehand. All of the tracks, except the “drums” were recorded using the aforementioned synths’ presets. I tried tweaking both synths to get a single percussive sound that would work across the keyboard, but in the interest of time, created the “drum” track using E-Phonic’s Drumatic 3.

I’m sure that any and all of these plug-ins offer a large variety of timbres with a bit of tweaking. For those of you that use VSTi’s, you might want to checkout these three and see what they can do for your compositions. If you like them, please consider a donation to the authors.