Key Of Grey

February 24th, 2010 - A couple months ago, I reviewed the Vestax Spin which is paired with Algoriddim's djay softare. As I got used to using the Spin and djay, I got a little more bold and started diving into the more advanced techniques I could get out of both. Because the Spin has a limited amount of buttons, I mapped an additional Korg NanoPad. This allows me to use all of the common features of djay that previously needed to be ... Read More

February 21st, 2010 - I've been tooling around with Logic for almost 10 years now, and one of the additions in version 8 that I never really used was MainStage. MainStage is an application meant for performing live. You can use instruments and effects from Logic combined with live looping and MIDI triggering, to pull off Ableton-esque performances. With version 9 of Logic, MainStage was beefed up with better amp modeling, and better looping features making it more enticing for musicians. Since I ... Read More

February 13th, 2010 - I was watching a tutorial on multi-band rhythmic gating from Next Step Audio and Brian was using a cool audio unit plugin within Logic. It turns out that it was the Gateboy plugin from Sinevibes which is a pretty advanced gate with many cool parameters to tweak. You can achieve swing with your gating, or even get sounds that emulate beat slicing. They have demos of the plugins at the link below and you can check out the ... Read More

February 7th, 2010 - Andrea Pettinao is the sound designer behind Pettinhouse, a site where you can buy guitar, bass, and percussion sample kits for NI's Kontakt. He has a pretty big section of free Kontakt downloads. Most of the kits have a preview link so you can listen to what they sound like before you download them. There's some pretty good stuff on there. Of course, if you like what you've downloaded, you can always donate and support his libraries. Download page Read More

February 5th, 2010 - If you're like me and have been procrastinating about writing music for the RPM Challenge by reading music blogs, then you'll like what I'm about to post. MusicRadar has 10,000 free samples for your downloading pleasure. Now you can download samples and sift through them instead of writing your album! Well maybe that'll just be what I'm doing. In all seriousness though, I've downloaded a couple of their packs so far, and they have some good stuff in ... Read More

Photo courtesy of One Small Clue February 2nd, 2010 - I was looking for MPC-style plugins, when I stumbled across Poise. Poise is a Windows-only MPC-style VST that is super-intuitive. You drag sounds you want onto the drum pads, and you're good to go. You can layer multiple samples onto each pad, and adjust parameters of each layer. No muss, no fuss. There's also a very simple MIDI learn feature for mapping to your MIDI controllers. What I like about it is that it ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Pro Audio DSP January 30th, 2010 - The Dynamic Spectrum Mapper is one of the most powerful compressors I've ever seen. Unlike a multi-band compressor which only has a few bands, the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper is able to sample a full frequency spectrum map and apply compression whenever anyspecific part of the frequency spectrum goes over that established threshold. If it sounds complicated, it is, however the fact that the DSM does this all for you, behind the scenes, makes ... Read More

January 28th, 2010 - Having recently picked up a copy of Ableton Live 8 Suite, I've been looking at expanding it. Togeo Studios has a whole bunch of free soundscape packs and presets for your downloading pleasure. They have a good selection and they sound great, especially for free offerings. As for Ableton, I'm still getting used to the interface. Coming from a Logic and Protools background, I'm still not entirely comfortable with Ableton's workflow, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. ... Read More

January 27th, 2010 - Following this week's unofficial theme of acoustic design, FuzzMeasure Pro was updated to version 3.2 today. FuzzMeasure is a Mac-only acoustic analysis tool that you can use to do anything from measuring the frequency response of your basement studio, to collecting impulse responses of acoustic spaces to be imported into your reverb unit (for example Logic Studio's Space Designer). It's professional grade software that costs a pretty reasonable $150. Unlike legacy systems that required fancy hardware boxes, FuzzMeasure works ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Kenji Kojima January 9th, 2010 - The idea of using pictures to generate musical values isn't a new one, but Kenji Kojima's RGB MusicLab goes about it a slightly different way. By analyzing the RGB values of a photo, notes are generated in a linear and predictable pattern. They are sequenced in order going from left to right, top to bottom, and the user can choose instrumentation and granularity, among other parameters. Check out the video below for a demo of ... Read More