Reason 5 Announced!

Go look here: http://www.propellerheads.se/

I've been using Reason since version 2, that is to say, for many years. In fact, way back in the day, I made all of my music via a combination of CoolEdit Pro and Reason 2, building sequences in the latter and exporting them for editing and arrangement in the former. These days, I use Reason 4 solely as a huge instrument rack, with each instrument unit ReWired into Ableton Live. That is, I bypass entirely the nice but very limited (e.g. no 3rd party plugins allowed) Reason sequencer and just wire up its instruments on channels inside Live. It's proved a very effective and powerful tool, because Reason has a ton of stuff I really like, most notably the NNXT sampler, THOR and MALSTROM synths, and some of the FX like the Scream distortion unit.

So, given all that, I'm quite psyched about the announcement of Reason 5. The first unveiling has shown a beefed-up Dr.Rex, now Dr. OctoRex, which as the name implies can load 8 separate rex files and lets you jump between them; there's some pretty cool potential there. I'm expecting some much bigger revelations in the coming days, though.

You can also sign up for beta-testing over at the propellerhead website.

Somebody. Buy. Me. This.

Currently for sale via ebay here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150442279122

A lot of synth gear shows up on ebay, naturally. But every once in a while one of the Big Guns of analog synths shows up on there and sells for some ungodly amount. I think I read about a Jupiter 8 selling for $8,000 or something. A CS-80 even showed up on there just a few months back, and the guy had to make half the post about the shipping plans (basically, it's a boat). Normally I wouldn't post a peep about some gear-lust I have due to something on ebay. Everything, after all, shows up on ebay at one point or another.

But.

This is the Arp 2600. This is the analog synth that I want more than any analog synth. Why? Well. I could say, because it's a "smaller" sized synth (e.g. not a veritable wall of synth, like the Moog Modular or the preceding Arp 2500) but offers a semi-modular, patch-based design, whereas a synth like the Minimoog, as revolutionary as it was, nonetheless was quite limited in its routing (though it's worth noting that the hard-wired signal path it sported became THE standard routing for basically every subtractive synth that followed, and remains so today). So the 2600 was like a pre-wired mini-synth but also a modular synth, shrunk-down. It even comes packaged in a funky little half-suitcase, complete with handle.

I could tell you all that....but the truth is, what makes a given synth a "favorite" is fundamentally a personal, subjective, unquantifiable kind of thing. Something idiosyncratic about the UI, or a childhood memory from a classic song you first heard it in, or, most likely of course, that special extra-something about the sound that sets it apart, at least for your ears, from everything else. In any case, the ARP 2600 has that retro-nostalgia perfection for me. I don't really know why. I don't even own a single truly-analog synth. But if I did, this would be it (well, this or a Prophet 5, anyway...)

Oh and the current bid is a mere $4,100.00

The Greatest FREE Music Plug-Ins...

Some of these will be obvious to all of you, some will be new to a few of you, and maybe one or two of these will prove nothing short of Life Changing for one or two of you. In any case, all of these are things that simply must be among your arsenal of music-crafting tools, because 1) they're great and 2) they're absolutely free.

1. George Yohng W1 Limiter

Grab it here: http://www.yohng.com/w1limit.html

Well admittedly this isn't the limiter I use for mastering (I use the very pricey but totally amazing Sonnox Limiter), but for a freebie, this little guy can't be beat. It's an emulation of the classic, expensive waves L1. Does it sound as good? I have no idea; what I do know is it brickwall-limits with great success and meanwhile is capable of providing a very hefty, noticeable volume increase, if wanted (just increase the threshold setting).

2. Synth1 (pictured above)

Grab it here: http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/

(Yes, the linked page is in Japanese; just click the "download" and "manual" links listed in english to the left of the image)

I almost didn't include this one, even though it's probably the greatest piece of freeware a synth-addict and computer-music creator could ask for. But here's the catch: it's PC only. So while I can enjoy this amazing emulation of the Clavia Nord Lead 2 synthesizer on my laptop, I sadly cannot put it to use on my iMac, where pretty much all of the DWIFH tracks are created, mixed and finished. Somebody out there, please, port this thing! Anyway, Synth1 is fantastic. Outdated interface, sure, but the sound is great, it's flexible, and there's hordes of user-patch libraries floating around the net. The developer of this beauty is Ichiro Toda, and after a many-years-long absence, he just updated Synth1 on 5-4-2010. If only he'd work on the mac port...

3. Stormgate1

Grab it here: http://www.araldfx.com/downloads.php#dla96dd0845f649eb792376e4a2bbfe001 

There are a lot of gate-fx plugins out there, but Stormgate is my favorite. It's a surprisingly flexible and intuitive little freeware beast, and I can't believe I didn't find it sooner (it's a fairly recent addition to my plugin collection). For those of you unfamiliar with them, the idea of Gating FX is simply to cut the volume of the audio source at user-defined rhythmic intervals. Stormgate makes this easy and fun to do: you draw the envelopes yourself with a handy selection of drawing tools, then chain multiple sequences together using a super-simple pattern-follow scheme. The best way to get a feeling for it is to drop it as an insert-effect for a softsynth, load up some kind of bright pad that would normally play a sustained timbre (like a string patch) and then create 16th note steps along Stormgate's envelope window: now play a note, and you've turned a sustaining pad sound into a tempo-sync'd rhythmic instrument. But you can run drum loops through this thing to great effect, or whatever else you wish to rhythmically-mangle.

4.Togu Audio Line Plug-ins

Grab them here: http://kunz.corrupt.ch/?Products

There is so much high-quality freeware on the TAL website it boggles the mind. Really all I can say is go and check it out for yourself, and GRAB EVERYTHING. Especially of note is the Elek7ro VA synthesizer, the TAL-U-No-62 synth (a Roland Juno emulation, Juno-style graphics included) and the TAL-Bassline (looks nearly identical to a Roland SH101...). All three of these are especially great tools for learning subtractive synthesis, as they are very straight-forward, bread-n-butter type instruments with approachable interfaces that also sound really great. 

5. dblue Glitch

Grab it here:  http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/

According to which music forums you read (or who is posting on a given afternoon) dblue's Glitch plugin is either the greatest freeware effect ever, or, rather, the death of electronic music itself. It's certainly one of the most aggressively debated pieces of freeware ever. Is it awesome? Is it cheating? I'll leave it up to you to decide...You feed it audio, you choose from a series of glitch effects, and well, they happen. The order can be controlled or random, along with some other parameters. Just go and play with it and see what you think. Oh, but only if you use a PC, because like Synth1, this one sorely needs a Mac port...

If you know of any other must-have freeware for computer music creation, please post links+descriptions in the comments below!

Rebirth, Reborn

This will of course be showing up in every single electronic music blog out there, but I had to note it here: Propellerhead's Rebirth, a software simulation of the classic Roland 808 and 909 drum machines along with the 303 bassline, has been born yet again, this time for the iPhone. It's 6.99 in the app store, and I'm about to find out if it's money well spent...(though certainly the concept has me quite psyched).

The original Rebirth program, released in 1996, was revolutionary: software synthesizers/emulations pretty much didn't exist at the time, except some primitive forms bundled with the DAW's of the period. It could probably be argued that Propellerhead started the whole movement right there.Which is rather fitting, considering the source material-- three early-eighties analog instruments by Roland that pretty much defined dance and hip-hop music, and who's influence on all genres of electronci music is as strong as ever today.

More info here: http://rebirthapp.com/