[Rwp] Introducing myself and a quick question

[Chris Belle]

I think hardware is always a good choice,
one thing about it, it doesn't change, if you learn it, it will work in 
any DAW.
But the thing about hardware is that it does get out of date in the 
sense that you can't easily change samples in it,
some high end instruments allow for extra memory to load samples, but 
that is not how those instruments are usually used you buy a keyboard 
largely for it's onboard samples, and tight integration to it's own 
operating system and features.
Sadly, at least for now, most of the development for third party 
instruments has been done for sonar users,
because they were willing to pay for development,
and there was enough of a user base to warrant that from third party 
developers, who are often small companies, or one by operators who do it 
as a side line,
but since each DAW expresses vst windows differently you can't just use 
a scripting package for hsc or ahk straight across.
One person Steve Spamer
has a site with lots of info on accessibility and some of my own work is 
even over there,
there's a guy in Italy
GN Luca who has done some work with kontakt 5 with ahk scripts, he sells 
some stuff and gives some away for free,
the thing about kontakt is that each library is different, and even 
though Steve hasdone a free set, it won't work for all libraries,
And not all his work I don't think has been done for reaper.
In many ways right now,
sonar is still the gold standard, but we are hoping to change that in 
the future, and what I've seen now is very encouraging.
I think reaper will have a more universal appeal,
inexpensive enough for the casual recording person but powerful enough 
for the pro as well.
But it won't have all those third party instruments like sonar did, as a 
big starting point,
like dimension pro, or rapture,
or even little tts a great little gm2 level synth for song writing, the 
sfz player, and sessiondrummer3,
a nice 12 output drum synth which the good thing about sonar's synths is 
that they use the open sfz format so it's easy to mess around with those 
if you know a little sfz coding.
That happens to be a bit of a hobby of mine, I love crafting my own 
instruments.
Sfz is nice because there's no heavy gui interface to deal with, you 
learn a few opcodes and then you're off and running provided you have 
some good samples to work with.
See if I want a good snare drum, I go make or buy samples I like, and 
then I can map my own keys, and layer up my velocity layers, and make it 
up in a few minutes the way I want.
I realize, this is a far cry from loading up the latest huge offering 
from kontakt,
with all it's bells and whistles, but it works for me.
Here's the info to Steve's site.
http://vipaudioaccess.com/

And in closing, I am an old school midi guy, I had all those first run 
synths the old dx7 and alphajuno one which I still own,
and the first sampling grand piano made by Korg,
so now a days you can buy nice keyboards with tons of sounds for well 
under a thousand dollars, even the low end stuff sounds pretty good, I 
think casio  made a work station a couple years ago for around 500 bucks 
with organ draw bars,
even, roland makes stuff, so does Yamaha they all have versions of their 
keyboards which startg in the hundreds nad goes up from there.
If you can do some searches on line and listen, or visit a music store,
hardware module especially in the analog synth realm have made a big 
come back, there is just something about hardware you can't get with 
soft synths,
sometimes, there is just a real feel and you don't have to worry about 
computer performance or latency or the like, it just works.
but there's always the looming spector of accessibility,
did I just buy a 2 thousand dollar beast I can't run?
Well there's been a lot of blindy's using the mo stuff,
I personally like the sounds of roland gear, but it's kind of a bear to use.
I knew a guy on midimag Drizza,
who used to sell mo tutorials, he might still be doing that.
But that whole line of keyboards seems to have found great favor in our 
community.
If you want to go old school, and kurtzweil,
someone even invented the kirtzweil reader a while back which can read 
the midi display I don't know what happened to that project, but if I 
can find some emails on it,
the brothers Scramenti
not sure if I spelled that right, but they developed that system, and 
yes of course it was sonar users,
but I don't think it was exclusive to sonar users,
so you may get some mileage there, but I think the later kurtzweil units 
wouldn't work with that system anymore,
and anyway, as much a religious vibe as those kurtzweil units struck in 
our community,
I have nothing against them, still many great classic sounds there, they 
tended to be very conservative about new technology,
the stuff on the mo as far as amount of memory, samples, fx and features 
far out paced that line.
The things to look for in a keyboard are menus that don't rap, and no 
touch screens,
harder to come by these days, but even in saying that, there are synth 
immulations and keyboard things on the iOS
platform you can get for very little which are showing up to be 
accessible or partially so.
It's like we're inventing the wheel all over again on the Ipad, so you 
can hook up an inexpensive controler, and use your IPad as a synth module,
you won't get the performance you would from a great computer, but hey, 
it's something to mess about with.
Hope all this helps a bit.


On 3/2/2016 3:30 AM, Kevin Brown wrote:
> Hi,...This is Kevin Brown...
>
> I don't know how you feel about hardware sound modules, but I have 
> been using the "Motif Rack" with very much success,...granted it is 
> more expensive,...but I believe worth the investment...
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