Tag: Plug Ins
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The Core Is Getting Soft.18: SketchCassette
My mother used to tell me she got a weird feeling when she walked into vintage clothing stores in the 1990’s. She said a lot of the clothes on display looked she things was used to seeing in the 1950’s when she was growing up. It was odd for her to see the time of…
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The Core is Getting Soft.14: Bang a Slate
One of the digital tools I threw in the mix of my new record is SSD4, the drum sampler made by Slate Digital. It was the first time I used something other than an electronic drum machine to program drums. The closest I’d come to fake “real” drums was the time we sampled a drum…
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The Core is Getting Soft.12: Valhalla Freq Echo
“The best things in life are free.” “You get what you pay for.” If cliches are cliches because they’re true, which one of the above applies to free audio plug ins? Well, ca depend. When it comes to the Valhalla Freq Echo delay plug in, the answer is definitively the latter. This gem of…
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The Core is Getting Soft.11: TouchOsc
I’ve always been a latecomer to technology. When I got a fax machine in 1997, someone I worked with said, “Welcome to the ’80’s!” I didn’t get a cell phone until late 2008, and I didn’t get a smartphone until a few months ago. Continuing this trend, I got myself an iPad last week. The…
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The Core is Getting Soft.10: Madrona Labs
There are some soft synths or plug-ins I’ve bought where I could have conceivably sprung for the hardware version instead. But there’s no way I could have ever afforded a Buchla synthesizer – until Madrona labs came out with their Aalto software synthesizer, which is inspired by the designs of Don Buchla, who invented the…
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The Core is Getting Soft.9: Ring my Bell
For many years now, I have been using software in my meditation practice. In Buddhist meditation, we traditionally open and close each sitting by ringing a bell three times. One is instructed to follow the sound waves until they subside, providing a gradual transition in and out of the silent state of awareness. In today’s…
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The Core Is Getting Soft.7: The Kunst of Kunz
A quick look at ebay tells me that a used Roland Juno 60 can run you in the neighborhood of $550 to $1,195. If you’re really lucky, you can pick one up that was used on tour by Ministry, with their own presets still intact! I once considered purchasing a used Juno 60 at a…
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The Core is Getting Soft.6: Ohm…Ohm….Ohm….
While the last post in this series on plug ins and virtual instruments, “Tuba Time,” proved that there are some truly atrocious digital products out there, this should not cause one to give up hope. One of the best software developers out there, the French company Ohm Force, make fantastic products, and they are on…
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The Core is Getting Soft.4: Redwirez Rulez
It’s a tough enough job convincing folks that they shouldn’t look down on music software when it comes to stuff people use when holed up in recording studios. But the guitar amplifier is a public affair. Imagine a live rock band pulling out a laptop onstage instead of rolling out fearsome refrigerator size amplifiers. …