spectrasonics???

[AdamF]

Anyone here have any of their products?? The demo seems really amazing. I was thinking of buying one or more of their plug'in modules. Just wondering if anyone here has any experience with them doing house/dance music...??

[Slim Shady]

Atmosphere is amazing, so many great sounds - good for pretty much any kind of music (I use it for film scores).

Stylus is kind of a joke, but there's some decent stuff - just poorly conceived and excecuted.

Trilogy, I haven't tried.

[AdamF]

Hmm... I was thinking of trilogy and stylus. I like a lot of percussive stuff (i do tribal house type music usually) and thought it looked cool... hmm...

[timyork]

Best to try these for yourself. I have Atmosphere and Stylus and my experience of them is they are both excellent.

I've used a lot of programs for programming drums - I do dance music. I'm also a drummer of 26 years. Believe me, Stylus is really advanced in what it is able to do for both drums and percussion.

Think of all the work you might have to do in recycle to chop up loops, then re import them back into your sampler/sequencer. In Sylus that work has already been done for you. Plus there are audition patches, with a different loop on every key, at every possible tempo, to save you the time of loading in loops one by one.

The filters are bloody marvellous, plus you can make it self-automate (see creative techniques, point 3, in the manual). It's a really simple idea, but it works a dream.

Plus there are loads of single hits and they sound great - really high quality and up to the minute.

And there's a huge library of turntable fx.

And it's not very CPU intensive.

Once you get it, it's really intuitive to use.

I don't work for Spectrasonics.

I own/use Battery, Waldorf Attack., Logic 5.5 and EXS24.

Sorry Slim Shady, I couldn't disagree with your comments more.

Tim

[Slim Shady]

...really high quality

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Your kidding right? C'mon, even Reason has better sounding drum samples than stylus (OK, better is not the right word, as neither of them qualify as "good"). It sounds like a toy box to me, but like I said before, I don't do dance music, so maybe small tinny drum sounds from 1982 are all the rage.

Just my opinion, but I wish I could get my money back on Stylus. I use atmosphere all the time though.

[HeftyLefty]

Hey Adam,
for a cheaper solution, you may try the Plugsound sample instruments. I use the PS-03 Drum&Percs. It is RTAS, the OS X beta is working fine for me in PTLE 6, and I got it at Guitar Center for $79.
Its similar to Spectrasonic products in that they load a bunch of samples, and its based off of the same "UVI-Engine" or something to that effect.
But it doesn't have loops or recycle features. Its just a huge amount of single hit drum samples (including electronic and acoustic sounds), with envelope, lfo, and filters. I think they sound pretty darn good for the price.
http://www.usbsounds.com/usb/exec/product?prod=PLUG3
-btw, great job on the superchumbo remix.

[pk_hat]

have to agree with the Styuls negative comments. While I wouldn't consider it a joke, I do think they could have done a way better job with the single hits. It's great if all you use is loops, but to program your own with the single hits provided, that was poorly implemented. You can't tap your beat on a keyboard, you have to draw in your notes as your kicks, snares, hats, etc. are all on different midi channels, different tracks, they are not keymapped as kits!

And the sounds? I'm sorry, while some are very good, there's a bunch of them that are so compressed and effected, they seem to be grasping for air. High-pitched and snappy, too many of those which, to me, are unuseable...

There are some good things to say (I don't want to come across as such an Anti-Spectra). The scratches are great, the percussion sounds are great, and I really like the groove menus (different loops across the keyboard all at the same tempo, many bpms available), great for jamming out and getting ideas down quickly.

As for the drum hits keymapped into kits, Spectrasonics confirmed in an email that it will be implemented in a future upgrade, which is good to know.

In the meantime, I'll be looking into Plugsound for sure, very curious (the demos are not available from the site, however).

[Manu Janko]

oups, I'll go the other way here: I love all these new toys. Stylus: hundreds of loops and if you don't find THE ONE, you can EDIT THEM. In this way, they are keymapped as kits: if you load a groove control, you then get a kit! And I don't agree, it doesn't sound like a toy but there are so many sonds, some are quite...foolish
Atmosphere: just great for...atmospheres (I understand it's unvaluable for film scoring)
If you want more plain synth sounds, then you get the PLUGSOUND "synths" which is great for that.
TRILOGY: I've got a new friend, he's a double bass player, he's always available and his name is...TRILOGY!
So, any other opinion?

[pwat]

Originally posted by HeftyLefty:
Hey Adam,
for a cheaper solution, you may try the Plugsound sample instruments. I use the PS-03 Drum&Percs. It is RTAS, the OS X beta is working fine for me in PTLE 6, and I got it at Guitar Center for $79.
Its similar to Spectrasonic products in that they load a bunch of samples, and its based off of the same "UVI-Engine" or something to that effect.
But it doesn't have loops or recycle features. Its just a huge amount of single hit drum samples (including electronic and acoustic sounds), with envelope, lfo, and filters. I think they sound pretty darn good for the price.
http://www.usbsounds.com/usb/exec/product?prod=PLUG3
-btw, great job on the superchumbo remix.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

[pwat]

Sorry the last message jumped out of my hands too fast.
Hefty, I installed the OS Xbeta for Plug Sounds, put the dat file in the plugin folder but got the message that the dat file wasn't there. Any thoughts???
thanks