Almost 400 presets that will bring a new life to the Novation V-Station synth Visit |
155 Synth / lead and bass presets inspired by many modern electronica genres. Visit |
97 lead / synth presets suited for modern pop, dance, electronic music genres. Visit |
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Interesting videos related with music, synthesizers etc. Read more |
Massively underrated, affordable drum sampler Read more |
I don't know why but "Who's the Big Dog now" video made me smile :) It's short, funny and well directed.
Do you need U-he Zebra2, Zebra CM, Zebralette presets ? I'm sure you do :) Just visit Zebra Family Presets webpage and you'll find tons of presets :) 
At wikipedia, you can find a well written, very informative article about Dynamic range compression. There are of course some basics at the beginning (ie. what compressor is) but you'll find some more practical stuff like: hard and soft knees, Peak vs RMS sensing, Look-ahead.
In 1984 (or 83 ?), I was four and was going to nursery school (school for childern, in polish: "przedszkole"). I remember two artists being constantly played on the radio. One was Tina Turner (I really hated her as a child ;) ) with the song I don't remember and the other one was Michael Jackson with Billie Jean. You should know that Poland in 1984 was ruled by communist regime - I guess it wasn't easy to have an access to all european / world hit records. So it usually ended up hearing same tracks over and over :)
It's time for some new Synth1 soundbank, created by Kaiyoti. It contains 64 patches with high quality Drums/Percussion, Plucked Strings and Pads/Drones. Just listen to the mp3 demo and decide if it's worthwhile - in my opinion, it is :)
EVM Occam SE (Special Edition) is a very rare gem. It's two oscillators wavesample synth. Each oscillator has 13 atmospheric, warm, pad samples so Occam is naturally some kind of ... pad machine :) There are of course some basic tools to shape the signal like filters, envelopes, modulation and pretty useful thing for pads - stereo enhancer. The GUI is nice and clean, the patches are ok (16 patches available).
Barricade is another very nice plugin created by Jeroen Breebaart. It's free brick wall limiter unit, which means that it has very high ratio and a very fast attack time. Ideally, this ensures that an audio signal never exceeds the amplitude of the threshold. Ratios of 20:1 and more are considered to be "brick wall".
It's time to write something in newly created category "Software vs Hardware" - more about it in previous post :) The Prophet-5 is an analog synthesizer manufactured by Sequential Circuits in San Jose, California between 1977 and 1984. It's the most classic synthesizer of the eighties !
Vintage Strings MkIII is a new (released in March 2009) virtual string machine that recreates rich warm string pads, and other beautiful atmospheric sounds of analog string machines. The string machine (also called string ensemble or string synth) was invented by Ken Freeman in 1970 as an attempt to replicate the sound of orchestral strings. It was so successful that it shortly became beloved instrument in its own right.
GRevDly is a tiny, small effect created by GVST (remember their free pitch correction GSnap plugin ?), which seems very usable. GRevDly simply plays the delayed signal in reverse. Reversed chunks are cross-faded to eliminate clicks. 
It's been a long time since I've added some free vst effect. It's time to fill that gap. Omniverb, created by Jeroen Breebaart, is a free reverb plugin with separate control of the reverberation time, echo density, room size, and early reflections. It can also be used as a gated reverb. There are 11 presets avaiable - I like "default hall" and "large hall" the most.We love summer it's our favorite season here in Poland!ps. With this post I would like to introduce a new category on vstCafe - Promotion which will contain posts about some promotions, discounts available on commercial plugins. It's nothing special - just an information which will hopefully let you buy plugins cheaper.
To celebrate the prehistoric Slavic holiday 'Noc Kupaly' (the longest day and the shortest night of the year), we have decided to organize a short-time, 9 days long special offer.
You can save 25% on any order (either individual plug-ins, a custom bundle, or an upgrade to a bundle or newer version) by simply entering SummerTime in the additional discount coupon field during check out at our web store.
Remember - the offer is time-limited and lasts until Monday, June 28th. After that night the days start getting shorter... Enjoy the Sun!
In theory, working with another person on a track should ensure that you get better, faster results than when you're working on your own, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.
Two very nice, virtual synths, presented earlier on VstCafe, have been updated.
Virtual synth Messiah (more info here), created by Gunnar Ekornås and inspired by Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 has been updated to version 1.1.
Since few days I'm proud user of Wusik Station - a hybrid vector & wavesequencer Sampler. Unfortunately I had not enough time to fully explore each feature (most time I spent playing samples :) ) so this small review will be focused more on economical aspect :)
Now, my thought - during last few days I really liked Wusik Station. It's nicely designed, it has a lot of features (many effects, sequencers, layers) - actually my home studio lacked good sampler and Wusik Station filled that niche. And samples libraries ? Very good stuff. Wusik Station introduces it's own format WusikPRST / WusikSND but you can also import WAV and SFZ (format developed by Cakewalk) files (you can convert Soundfont (SF2) files to SFZ with some freeware converters - for example sfZed).
Since yesterday, every vst plugin created by Odo (www.odosynths.com) has a freeware status :) There are some nice synths available. For example Double Six which is pretty sophisticated 6-operator FM synth with 32 Yamaha DX7 algorithms and 16 4-operator algorithms. 38911 Bytes seems nice for cheap sounds similar to legendary Commodore C64 machine with it's famous sound chip - SID 6581 :) Also there's a drum sampler and drum synth in one - Dr-Fusion 2. 
Everyone who tried both Ableton Live and Native Instruments Traktor knows that each program has it's own strengths and weaknesses. At www.djtechtools.com you can find nice article about syncing these two great DJing applications together. Tutorial covers the steps required to run each program on a separate laptop and mix them together on a standard audio DJ mixer.
Puremagnetik has released, two, new free downloads specifically created with Ableton Live 8 users in mind.
Hispasonic Sampled Series is a very nice collection of free high quality multisampled instruments created by DSK Music in collaboration with Hispasonic.com. Instruments include multiple velocity zones and are available in five formats: Kontakt, SampleTank, SoundFont, GigaStudio and Reason Refill (every format is about 270 MB in size, ~195 MB download).
What would you say if I asked you about Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 Vintage Synth emulation ? Most of you would probably point me at Native Instruments website and their Pro-53 virtual synth for 199 EUR. Others would say - pick SCI Prophet 5 or Prophanity, they're freeware. 
But then I started the real testing. It turned out that there are additional three pages with knobs, buttons, switches. I remember this moment perfectly because it was just - "woow" :)
Mo Volans, a regular contributor to EQ, Remix and Music Tech Magazine, presents a series of step by step tutorials for designing sounds with Future Audio Workshop Circle synthesizer.
Couple months ago I was wondering why most software chorus plugins sound similar to each other and actually rather poor. I couldn't find an answer and what's worse I couldn't find the plugin I like. I mean, come on chorus seems a simple thing to implement in software but for some reason most choruses are just terrible. I have a theory: lots of people don't know what a good chorus sounds like. Lots of plug-in users and plug-in makers have not heard really nice hardware chorus units. They have no point of reference. Hence plug-in makers build blah-sounding choruses based on the simple concept that you allude to. Just about every book on music related DSP will describe chorusing as a simple one-delay/one-LFO process, so many plug-in makers will code that up as their chorus plug-in, listen to it and figure that's what it's supposed to sound like, and leave it at that. End-users hear the result, go "bleah!" and move on to some more interesting-sounding plug-in.Features:
On 2nd June, Jeremy has released heavily updated version of his Atlantis virtual synthesizer plugin. If you don't know what Atlantis is then click here. So what actually has changed ? Lots of new features, bugfixes and since now - fully skinnable ui. To be honest ui was the weakest part of this amazing synth but not anymore. Click the thumbnail - it's the custom skin created by Limeflavour. 
Few days ago, one the VST Cafe users sent me an email with some recommended plugins. I decided to test them and the result is this post :) In my opinion, during last few months Music Radar has improved a lot. I like their latest idea of presenting "How to make..." tutorials similar to those printed in Computer Music magazine.
The Maestro Concert Grand is a sampled reproduction of a Yamaha CF-3 grand piano from the early 90s. It was chromatically sampled, to maintain the tempered tuning. 
VST Cafe seems finally up so it's time for some music action ;) About a month ago, Image-Line has released their newest synth called Autogun. Autogun is freeware and it shares the same additive synthesis engine as commercial Image-Line Ogun plugin. Autogun offers 4294967296 (over four billion :D) presets with very nice acoustic and overall, realistic metallic timbres. Of course it's not possible to check all presets because, according to IL math, it would take you 134 years ;) 
