For the last year or so, Waves have been stepping outside their usual domain of audio plug-ins, and venturing into the Virtual Instrument category. Although this initially threw me off, I must admit, they’ve done a great job with their line-up, and they’ve just released the newest member of the family – The Waves Clavinet.
In addition, they’ve also launched the Pianos and Keys Bundle, which is made up of the new Clavinet, Electric 88, Grand Rhapsody, Electric Grand 80 and Electric 200 virtual instruments.
Have a look at the videos below to hear how they sound:
Although we haven’t had the chance to review any of the Waves VI products yet at Studio One Expert, check out this video review of the Grand Rhapsody courtesy of Dan Cooper from our sister site Pro Tools Expert
The Waves Pianos and Keys Details
Grand Rhapsody Piano: Sampled from the Fazioli F228 grand piano at London’s Metropolis Studios, using 8 pairs of first-class condenser, dynamic & ribbon microphones
Electric 88 Piano: Captures all the soul and sweetness of two authentic, road-worn 88-key suitcase pianos; “Top of the class for Fender Rhodes VI’s” (master keyboardist Jason Miles)
Electric 200 Pianos: Sampled from an original 200A-model electric piano to revive that classic, gritty, fat and majestic Wurly sound”
Electric Grand 80 Piano: Delivering the era-defining polish and brilliant tones of the original hybrid electric-acoustic CP-80 model piano
Clavinet: Faithfully sampled from an original D6-model Clavinet made famous by Stevie Wonder capturing every articulation of the original funkified icon.
Waves Pianos And Keys Collection Features
Waves’ iconic pianos and keys in one collection
State-of-the-art performance by the Waves Sample Engine (WSE)
Global Tune, Velocity & FX controls
Can be played as plugins or as standalone instruments
For more information, or to purchase either the Waves Clavinet, or the Waves Pianos and Keys Bundle, be sure to head over to the Waves website. On a side-note, it’s worth mentioning they’ve also sweetened the deal on both with some nice introductory pricing – which is always nice.
Check out this nice free sample pack from our friends over at Wave Alchemy – the makers of the amazing Revolution instrument for Kontakt. In addition to including the raw samples, they’ve also included some pre-mapped drum kits for popular formats including Kontakt & Battery.
Here’s what they have to say;
“As a special thank you to our loyal customers and followers, we would like to offer you an exclusive FREE drum sample pack courtesy of the Wave Alchemy team…
Included are 68 powerful analogue drum samples, each carefully crafted with a MFB Tanzbar drum machine, and tastefully processed on a sound-by-sound basis using our extensive collection of high-end hardware processors and sound shaping tools…
Expect to find lush claps, characterful bass drums, punchy analogue snares, fuzzy toms, crispy percussion, 5 pre-mapped drum kits for Battery, Kontakt, NN-XT, Halion & SFZ, as well as a 20% discount coupon, usable towards your next order at http://www.wavealchemy.co.uk!”
There’s no gimmicks or tricks, simply a download link for the free sample pack on their blog page. Now what would be really cool is if they did some Impact Kits, or a Soundset specifically for Studio One users. But who knows, maybe thats something we can talk to them about. 🙂
In the meantime, be sure to grab it – one things for certain, you can’t beat the price.
Here’s a nice bit of news for anyone looking to add to their drum library collection. The Loop Loft have just released their first 2 bundles in the PreSonus shop; The Art Of Brushes & Dry Drums.
The great thing about these Soundsets is they come fully loaded with a variety of different audioloops that will follow the tempo of your songs, lots of samples that can be used as needed, and also some Impact kit presets that can be used for creating great sounding simple drum kits.
In this video below, Marcus takes a detailed look at the Dry Drums & Art of Brushes bundles from The Loop Loft – Now available as Studio One Soundsets in the PreSonus Shop.
Dry Drums
“If dry, punchy and fat drums are what you’re looking for, then this is the bundle for you.. Ever since Ringo Starr placed tea towels on his drums with The Beatles, the punchy, fat sound of “dry drums” has been sought after for decades. With The Dry Drums Bundle we give you this classic sound served up in twenty-four complete loop sessions and a variety of meticulously sampled drum kits.
Recorded with an array of vintage mics, preamps and fully dampened heads, Dry Drums will easily sit in any mix, while providing the punch and clarity that is almost impossible to achieve with overly “live” sounding loops and samples. Each session comes complete with a multitude of beats, fills and transitions, allowing you to easily arrange your own custom drum track in seconds.”
Compatible with Studio One Prime, Artist, and Professional (Version 3.5 and higher)
A massive library containing over 1100 Loops
Contains Dry Drums Volumes 1 – 5
Instant Downloads
100% Royalty Free
High Quality 24 Bit 48 kHz Audio
WAV, Audioloop format, & Impact Kit Presets
Size: ≈ 1GB
Art of Brushes
“If you’re looking for brush loops, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve bundled together Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, and Vol 5 of our popular Art of Brushes series to give you the entire collection at an 85% savings. From jazz, to roots rock, to blues, to funk, this bundle of brush loops will supply you with the grooves and sounds you need to produce authentic, warm, and unique sounding drum tracks.”
Compatible with Studio One Prime, Artist, and Professional (Version 3.5 and higher)
A massive library containing over 900 Loops
Contains The Art of Brushes Volumes 1 – 5
Instant Downloads
100% Royalty Free
High Quality 24 Bit 48 kHz Audio
WAV, Audioloop format, & Impact Kit Presets
Size: ≈ 989MB
For more detailed information, and to listen to some audio examples of the individual volumes and the bundles, be sure to head over to the Loop Loft Page in the PreSonus shop.
In this video review – team member Justin Bryant puts 8Dio Anthology Strings through its paces. He demonstrates the various patches, with some audio examples and a GUI walk through.
Overview Of Anthology Strings
“Anthology Strings was crafted by Academy Award, TEC and G.A.N.G Award Winning Composer and Producer, Troels Folmann and Emmy-Nominated Composer and Orchestrator, Colin O’Malley. Anthology is the true reimagination of our original Adagio and Agitato String collections – hand-designed with our favorite 66.500 samples from both collections.
Anthology contains both Ensemble, Divisi and Solo String sections for both Violin(s), Viola(s), Cello(s) and Basse(s). All recorded exclusively with grand Neumann microphones – inside a rare church recording environment. The three sensible microphone positions (Close, Mixed, Far) offers you full mastery over the sound. We developed custom techniques for the close microphones – allowing them to record much closer and intimate than your common church scoring environments. No samples overwhelmed in reverb. Instead a touching and passionate collection of strings. All designed to capture your most beautiful thoughts.”
System Requirements
Full Retail version of Kontakt 5.5 or later required
Not Compatible with Free Kontakt Player
109GB of harddrive space
Ability to download
PC Quadcore / 2.4GZ+, 8GB ram
MAC Quadcore / 2.6Ghz, 8GB ram
For more information, please visit the 8Dio Website.
Courtesy of Dan Cooper from our sister site Pro Tools Expert, check out this video review of the Hip-Hop EZX, expansion pack for EZDrummer 2 By Toontrack.
Here’s what Dan had to say
“Like all the other themed EZX expansion packs for EZ Drummer 2, Hip-Hip EZX provides a wealth of focused drum samples and loops that inspire creativity. Toontrack market the EZX products as “Mix Ready” and I have to agree. The quality of the samples are always top notch and Hip-Hop EZX is as good as any other EZX expansion pack.
Hip-Hop EZX focuses quite strongly on signature Hip-Hop drum sounds and does a great job of providing users with a one-stop shop for Hip-Hop grooves, however, I believe these samples will also work very well in many other styles of music production.”
Feature Overview
Produced by Mattias Eklund & Alexander Juneblad
22 mix-ready kit presets
16 acoustic snares, 18 acoustic kick drums
100s of acoustic and electronic percussion sounds
Includes custom MIDI drum grooves for each kit preset
System Requirements
2 GB of free hard disk space, 2 GB RAM
A working EZdrummer 2 or a Superior Drummer 2.4.2 (or above) installation
For more information, or to purchase Hip-Hop EZX – Click here.
Studio One is a powerhouse of a DAW when it comes to Sound Design. Features like Event FX, time-stretching, Extended FX chains and ‘drag and drop to browser’ Audio Exports lend themselves very nicely to anyone using it in this capacity. But there’s one area, where nothing beats a solid 3rd party application – and thats organizing and cataloging your media.
Having an application thats capable of metadata tagging, and streamlined searching options is a must for anyone serious about Sound Design. On top of that, take into account modern day high speed internet and cloud based storage, and there’s some really amazing opportunities available.
Check out this fantastic find by Mike Thornton from our sister site Pro Tools Expert. Mike is an experienced Sound Designer / Post Production Editor with more years experience than some of you have been alive. So needless to say, when he speaks, I listen.
Here’s what he had to say:
“I have talked about Soundly a couple of times on the podcast as my Find Of The Week even though it has been in public beta for a long time. It is already my go-to sound effects librarian software and now it has been officially launched.”
What Is Soundly?
It is billed as “a cloud-based sound effects library and workflow tool” but it also does a very good job of cataloging sound effect collections on local drives as well as being a cloud-based sound library with access to thousands of premium sound effects and a powerful workflow tool.
In Use Summary
My Thoughts And Experiences With Soundly
Soundly lets you search your local sound libraries, edit and place them to on the timetime instantly. That for me is the main feature in Soundly, when I am working in Pro Tools using Workspace, if I have a 5 minute atmos track, I’ve got to import the whole thing, drop it somewhere else on the timeline, audition it, trim it down to what I need, and move it to the correct place on the timeline. With Soundly, I simply play it, select the bit I want, and drag just what I want straight into the right place on the Pro Tools timeline. Job done.
I was also impressed at how Soundly catalogued my 50,000+ sound effects that use a range of different metadata systems. It just worked its way through my libraries, and now searching for the right sound effect in Soundly is quick and easy, and unlike Workspace in Pro Tools, I no longer have to look across different fields, the metadata is all there in one place in Soundly.
Now you may be saying that this isn’t new, there are other sound effect librarian packages that do similar things and you would be right but that isn’t all Soundly does.
What if I don’t have ‘that sound effect’ I am looking for? This is where the cloud based side of Soundly can kick in. You can now search their cloud based libraries, audition the sounds, when you have found ‘the-one’ then you can buy it and bring into your session all from within the Soundly application.
More Info
Where Can I get Soundly?
The Soundly application is available for download and is available for Mac or PC and is FREE to download and includes access to 300 sounds.
Want More?
The Premium SaaS version includes 6000+ premium sound effects, full sound catalog indexing, access to the Soundly store for specialized in-app purchases, and access to 100,000+ more sounds from Freesound.org to use within Soundly all for only $14.99 per month.
Thomas Trelnes, video editor at Uhort in Oslo, the home of Soundly, told us….
Soundly is the fastest SFX tool I have ever used. I counted my steps to get SFX from my previous tool into Premiere Pro; it was 11 steps! With Soundly, I’ve taken that down to down to 3 steps which can literally save me hours on a project.
Peder Jørgensen, Lead Developer and co-founder at Soundly explains why it has taken so long to bring Soundly to market…
After an intensive public testing for a full year (and 5 years in development), Soundly is finally out of beta and ready to meet the world. Our beta testers tell us we have created the world’s easiest way to get and use sound effects – a true game-changer for everyone involved in content creation.
Features
Core Features In Soundly
Instant Search to quickly find the sounds across cloud libraries + local files
Access sound effects in the cloud from anywhere in the world
Tweak & Edit pitch, speed and reverse on any sound, and hear the results in real-time
The Store allows additional free and premium sound effects libraries – immediately delivered
Import Local Files – including metadata – to easily manage your existing SFX collections
Drag and Drop whole sound files – or snippets – from the Soundly cloud straight into your project
Access the extensive Freesound.org library directly from within Soundly
Smart, lossless compression for lightning fast transfers
Index local wav, aiff, mp3 and flac files up to 192khz 32bit from mono to 5.1.
Reads metadata from production music libraries in mp3 format
Built on Google’s infrastructure for unparalleled redundancy, safety and speed
Available for both Mac and Windows
Pricing
Soundly Pricing Plans
Free – 300 sound effects included – you can use the free version on your local libraries
Premium – 14.99 per month, with 6000+ premium sound effects, full sound catalog indexing, advanced store, includes access to Freesound to use within Soundly
I would like to see more libraries being available on Soundly. In the Store section there are both Free and Paid For libraries but it is good to see the SoundBits libraries in the store built into the Soundly app. I really hope that we will see more libraries added and there are all searchable too. So to independent sound effects producers, pease talk to Soundly and see if you can get your libraries into Soundly too like Saroo has from SoundBits.
Latest Version
New Version Of The Soundly Software
If you have been using it during the public beta like me then make sure you download the latest Version – v1.3
Whats fixed/new:
Greatly improve performance on large (1TB+) local libraries.
Search wild cars. Remove words from search with minus (-) – “Car -door” will find all files with the word “car” that does not have the word “door”.
Share playlists. You can now share playlists in the cloud with other users.
Change the order of your cloud and local libraries by dragging and dropping in the library view.
Soundly now remember your layout, ordering of columns, width of library view etc.
improved sorting on searches in local libraries.
Code signing. The code is now signed which means no more warnings when downloading it off the internet.
Fixed a bug with some 32 bit wave files distorting.
New upload function. This is a big one for multi-users who upload their libraries. The old version could be a bit unstable especially on windows, but it is now stable and it is what’s been taking up most of our time since the last release.
Easier sharing of libraries added contacts and direct access to all the users in your multi-user account.
Logarithmic volume fader
Remove files from your local library! Finally we got this in 🙂 Sorry it took so long.
Right-click a library to search only in that library.
Russ has told me that he’s tested it in Studio One, and it works brilliantly, so for anyone who’s into Sound Design, feel free to give it a shot, and let us know how its working out for you.
Our good friends at e-instruments have just released Session Keys Electric S. According to e-instruments, the Electric S gives you the retro sound of the 1973 suitcase electric piano with all the modern magic you could imagine. Heres what they have to say:
The Suitcase Piano
“Nothing embodies the evolution of the Rhodes Piano better than the 1973 Suitcase: a killer package of keyboard, amp and speakers.
To recreate this much-loved electric piano classic we hunted high and low for a top-quality original. We unearthed a magnificent 1973 suitcase which spent weeks undergoing painstaking specialist restoration. Once back to peak condition we began detailed recording to capture every nuance of its original sound.”
Check out this video below that demonstrates the different sounds & features of the Electric S
In Summary
1973 Suitcase
Two separate sound banks: Studio and Live
Pentamorph sound control to transform the whole sound with a single knob
Animator with over 400 flexible phrases
Smart Chord function to create instant piano chords from single keys or pads
Effects chain with Tremolo/Auto Pan, Chorus, Phaser, Amp Simulator, Compressor, Delay and Convolution Reverb
Paul has just got himself a Rhodes and is itching to play it (or do his best to play it) at every given opportunity. So in this video he compares it to a few different VSTI’s and is surprised at the results of the patches on Presence XT.
Studio One’s simple Drag & Drop workflow is fantastic.
But sometimes, having each audio event on its own track is not what’s needed. Sometimes you just need to quickly fly in some samples, and you want to have them all reside on one track, butted up against each other.
Examples of this could be for tucking in drum samples or reinforcing certain elements of a production, or perhaps cleaning up samples before dragging them into Impact or another Sampler instrument. Or maybe you work with a template and are working on a radio spot.
Being able to drag in different SFX variations from a folder can be really handy. Especially if you can drag them all to their proper destination track in your template for instant auditioning in context of the production.
In this video, Marcus Huyskens demonstrates how to do a ‘horizontal timeline drop’ with Audio Events in PreSonus Studio One from the browser, or Finder/Explorer window.
As one of the most in-demand session drummers of the past 20 years, Matt Chamberlain’s extensive list of recording credits is a veritable who’s who of the music industry including Peter Gabriel, The Wallflowers, Fiona Apple, Kanye West, David Bowie and Elton John (just to name a few). With the release of Matt Chamberlain Drums, songwriters producers and engineers around the world now have unprecedented access to the unmistakable “vibe” of the drummer behind countless hit songs. Recorded at Chamberlain’s personal studio inside of the famed Sound City complex in Van Nuys, California, the Matt Chamberlain Drums collection captures an incredible range of beats, sounds and styles.
Experiment with your own drum mixes, re-arrange sections, speed up the tempo or slow it down etc… everything will stay locked in time and snap to the bar!
Discount Code – Save 40% on the full version with discount code: StudioOne
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