Here at last...

Propellerheads released RECORD today. They are going to make a metric ton of money with this I think. Maybe a ton plus: It’s listed as a $149 upgrade NOT the $129 price quoted everywhere. Factor in $20 shipping to the US, and that’s $169 out of the door. On the plus side: The box set includes an upgrade to REASON4 for owners of REASON versions 1 – 3 and that’s a helluva deal for those folks. But if you have REASON4 already, it’s just an extra $20 for naught.

I’ve really got to give it to the Props: They know how to make a helluva product trailer.

Coming soon. Check out the video previews...

…pretty cool. (Check it out here.) I’ve only spent an hour with it. Quick first impressions before I get off to work:

• Pretty easy to figure out what’s going on — especially if you watch the intro videos on the website
• I was hoping the “german engineers” alluded to in the adverts were emagic alumnus. If the interface is a hint, it looks like they are folks from the old Cubase/Nuendo crowd.
• The interface is cold, very monochromatic.
• Assigning controllers is dead simple.
• I experienced a few odd crashes. (More on that in a bit.)
• From what I can tell, automation is all breakpoints, no bezier curves or things like that.
• It has a nice approach on workflow (based on the little bit I’ve played around with)

(To be continued…)

Just wanted to mention very quickly that Adam Fielding has released his CD Distant Activity on Magnatune.

Adam Fielding Distant Activity

I don’t know Adam personally, but I am familiar with his work for Jeremy Janzen over at Nucleus SoundLab. Adam contributed a number combinator patches to both Viral Outbreak and ReCombination. His combinators are a marvel of design — beautiful sounding and very functional. (You can see some of them in Jeremy’s video demos of both refills.)

Distant Activity is not my “usual cup of tea” as my personal tastes tend toward instrumental tracks (whatever genre), and this is mostly a quasi – ambient (inadequate term please suggest one), somewhat beat-oriented collection of songs with well-crafted vocals. It’s less ambient than I would have expected based on my limited knowledge of Adam, but this excerpt from his bio on Magnatune highlights how limited that knowledge was:

“Although Adam’s earlier tracks were geared more towards industrial and VGM styles while taking an interest in metal and post-hardcore music, his style would later evolve to encompass a wide variety of sub-genres including dance, ambient, synthpop, downtempo, breaks and neo-classical styles while retaining his unique production style and melodic focus.”

Obviously, a multi-talented guy. You’ll find the player on the next page. I like track 6 in particular.

Well September is shaping up to be a heck of a month for VI & VE releases…

Available Now!

First up is the much anticipated release of Omnisphere by Spectrasonics. Based on an in house software engine called ‘STEAM‘. (Get it? The STEAM engine? Hardee Har Har.) It looks to be a deep instrument with loads of efx on call.

The build up to this has been going on since the January NAMM show. And I have to say, I like the way they went about it: Every 6 weeks or so, they released video shorts on some aspect of the product. A couple of videos in particular stood out: One video provided a brief and well produced history of synthesizers and synthesis. (If you want to know why sound presets are called “patches”, check it out.) The other featured their crazy sampling approaches.

Personally, I’m looking forward to it. Eric Persing and crew do great work, so expectations are high. And they are particularly high for owners of Atmosphere as Spectrasonic’s intel Mac-based wrapper for the old plug-in leaves many cold. I hope that one can get into the sounds’ design to a great degree if only to “de-hollywood” them a bit. (IMHO Spectrasonic’s stuff has a very slick, made for the screen, heavily produced sound. Good for lots of stuff, but not everything…)

Ordered mine this morning. Look for first impressions soon after it arrives…