The Eastwest August special offer is Symphonic Choirs. The special offer sale price for August is $395.00, a $200 saving.

Note that Symphonic Choirs is powered by NI Kompakt, which is not Mac Intel compatible. Mac Intel users will need to run Symphonic Choirs in Kontakt 2.2 or higher (not included).

Eastwest

In my opinion, shit is an important element in a lot of music. With todays technology bedroom musicians are now able to make pretty recordings, something that in the past more or less was restricted to the studios. But what if we don’t want pretty? You’re not going to sound evil, brutal, ugly or fucked up with the help of transparency and gear snobism. As an advocate of shit I feel that I must protect the ugly from the pretty, and thus the reason for the title of this post (well, that and because I watch way too much Seinfeld).
Read more →

The new Take Five FX bundle contains the five FX plugins BARK, MATRIX, REFLECT, TDESIGN and VTAPE. If you buy TakeFive FX before July 31st, 2008 you will get VirSyns next FX plug-in for free. “Oh yeah? So whatcha bringin’ dude?”, PRISM – the pitch designer (pictured above). It looks like it bears resemblance to BARK, but pitch shifting is obviously the target this time.

If you’ve already own one or more FX plugins, you have the opportunity to upgrade to TakeFive FX. The upgrade price is the difference of what you’ve paid for one or more of the FX plugins.

VirSyn

Most Pro Tools users probably have Live Lite since it’s been shipping with Pro Tools systems for quite some time now. Personally I’ve been a Live user of both the full version and the Lite version since version 2. It’s been a while since I fired up Live but a while back I decided to give it another go, and since Lite was the only version I had access to, that’s what I used.
Read more →

For the last two or three weeks I’ve started using Ableton Live extensively again. I’ve always been a fan of it, but the amount of use it gets from me has always varied, depending on mood, what work I currently do and what kind of spiritual being currently resides in me.

I’ll post about my work with Live Lite later, and a review of the full Live 7 a little further on down the road. I know it’s been out for a while, but I figured it could still be of interest. I thought it could also be interesting to compare it (or at least parts of it) to Transfuser now that the full non-beta of it has been released.

I’ll be back with all this later. In the meantime, you might find the following news concerning Ableton Live interesting:

You can now download a free 14-day trial version of Ableton Live in case you don’t think Live Lite gives you enough to try, or you just happen to be one of the very few people who don’t actually have it.

Live has been updated to version 7.0.9 which includes many bugfixes as well as updated manuals, texts and lessons.

Puremagnetik has released Vector for Live which emulates Korg Wavestation.

Percussa has released AudioCubes DnB sound pack for Ableton Live 7, a free sound pack containing 30 DnB style sounds in .wav format, from Loopmaster’s Artist Series of sound libraries, and a premapped Ableton Live 7 set for AudioCubes.

Samplebase has announced that their sample-synth players Satellite (free) and SatellitePro are now both available in RTAS.

I’ll give it a go next week. If you try it out, let us know what you think.

Samplebase

A new website, called MyMusicSession has been launched. It’s perhaps best described as a blend between Ebay and Myspace but dedicated to online music and audio production.

MyMusicSession is a place to sell your work, yourself and your soul, in other words, advertise yourself as a musician, songwriter, producer or whatever your field in audio and music is.

If you need to get ahold of some fantastic musicians, songwriters or producers it shouldn’t be a problem. Or how about Michael Schenker (ex-Scorpion, ex-UFO) or Fernando Von Arb?

Behind MyMusicSession is Patrick Aeby, a merited musician in his own right. He was the Krokus drummer between 1999 and 2006 and has produced quite a few CDs, including Krokus. Besides that, Patrick has worked 10 years as a marketing manager for BMG Switzerland, and in the huge Dinemec Studios.

MyMusicSession

Native Instruments just released TRAKTOR 3.4 and TRAKTOR SCRATCH 1.3, free software updates that brings some news to the two DJ products.
Read more →

And who am I to argue? 5.1 Music recently launched what they claim to be the first production music library fully available in both surround and stereo.
Read more →

M-Audio has launched a new comic book styled guide to project studios. The first part deals with acoustics and studio monitors.

I guess the nerd woke within me, because I was a little disappointed to see that there wasn’t more of the comic book styled drawings!

Go grab it here at M-Audios website (PDF)