Music Software

Digital Audio Workstations

Cockos REAPER – The DAW I currently use, which I started using in January 2011. What drew me to REAPER was the overall simplicity of the interface and the customizable hotkeys. The price point wasn’t bad either.

Jeskola Buzz – Anything I wrote between 1998 and 2011 was likely done in Buzz. Here’s an old page of Buzz tutorials and synthesis examples: THA Buzz Page

Digital Audio Editors

Celemony Melodyne – A fantastic audio manipulation suite that I use for all sorts of pitch, timing and formant alterations. It’s much more than a simple pitch correction program and can be used on more than just vocals.

[Buy Melodyne]

Sony Sound Forge – A general purpose audio editor. I use it for simple recording and editing tasks.

[Buy Sound Forge]

Native Instruments Software

Native Instruments Komplete 8 Ultimate – Out of the many plugins in Komplete, I use Kontakt and Massive the most. Guitar Rig also gets a fair amount of use.

[Buy Komplete 8 Ultimate]

Included Plugins

• Massive – A fantastic quality synth with a wide range of uses and lots of options. The modulation options are especially nice.

• Absynth 5 – Great for ever-evolving soundscapes and odd synths, but the interface is terrible. Luckily, it comes with plenty of usable presets.

• FM8 – A decent FM synth that can make some pretty good sounds. I don’t use it that often as I’m not really into the distinct sound of FM synthesis.

• Reaktor 5 – Reaktor is a strange program. It’s actually a synth-building environment, but some of the synths it ships with are fantastic to the point that I wonder why they aren’t standalone products. Spark, Prism and Lazerbass in particular could stand on their own. The rest of the Reaktor collection is fairly hit or miss.

• Kontakt 4 – A versatile and incredibly useful sampler. Komplete 7 comes with plenty of good sounds but the real value is in all of the great add-ons there are.

• Battery 3 – An old NI product that should probably have all of it’s drum kits converted into Kontakt 4 patches.

• Guitar Rig 5 – A large collection of effects, mostly designed after real-world guitar pedals. Quite useful, especially with the Reflektor and Traktor’s 12 add-ons.

Included Add-ons

• Reflektor – A convolution reverb that works as expected, except for the part where it only runs inside Guitar Rig. That aside, the impulse responses it comes with are very good.

• Traktor’s 12 – Useful effects for glitchy sounds and lofi effects. Most of the effects are designed to be toggled sharply and work well in this fashion.

• The Finger – Another set of glitch effects, except these ones are set up for live performance and triggering via midi keyboard. Good stuff.

• Guitar Rig 5 Mixing Effects – SOLID BUS COMP, SOLID DYNAMICS, SOLID EQ, TRANSIENT MASTER, VC 2A, VC 76 and VC 160. Compressors and whatnot, the most useful of the bunch being Transient Master.

• The Mouth – A voice-controlled synth thing for Reaktor. I haven’t tried it out yet as I wasn’t particularly impressed by the demo videos.

• Rammfire – An additional amp for Guitar Rig with a unique sound. Well, as unique as yet another distortion in a sea of distortions can be.

• Razor – An additive synthesizer that excels at making dissonant, noisy bass synths.

• Reaktor Prism – A physical modeling synth, which basically means it’s fairly decent at mimicking organic instruments. It’s unlikely that you’ll get a believable guitar sound out of it, but it’ll at least sound guitar-like. Prism could be very useful for making organic sounding ambient pads.

• Reaktor Spark – An advanced subtractive synth that attempts to be more analog and unpredictable.

Native Instruments Kore 2 – Kore 2 is basically a preset organizer. It comes with a hardware controller too but it’s really not that useful. The useful part is being able to access all of your presets and plugins via well-organized groupings. If you want a Fat Mono Lead for a Funk track – it can take you right to it.

[Buy Kore 2]

Kore 2 Add-ons

• Acoustic Refractions – A lovely collection of odd yet organic sounding patches, often using both samples and synthesis. Awesome stuff.

• North India – Fantastic Sitar and Tabla samples. Very usable and natural sounding. Can’t say much for the rest of the sounds.

• Absynth Twilights – A substantial collection of Absynth patches

• Paranormal Spectrums – An interesting collection of dark synths with effects-processed recordings layered on top. Some of the patches are incredibly silly, but there are plenty of good patches within.

• Sonic Fiction – Similar in style to Paranormal Spectrums, but with a sci-fi skew. Clicks and clacks and other real world sounds atop Tron-style synthesizer cheese.

Kore 2 Electronic Experience

A bundle of Kore libraries containing a wide assortment of patches for all of the Native Instruments products.

• FM8 Transient Attacks – I’m not a fan of FM synthesis, but there are some great patches in here. On the other hand, there are also a lot of dry, uninteresting patches and an excess of sequenced synth loops and arps.

• Massive Expansion vol. 1 – A collection of synth patches primarily for genres like Electro, Trance and House. Lots of saw stacks. Lots of locked chords.

• Best of Absynth vol. 1 – Lots of great Absynth patches, the majority of which are geared towards Ambient music and Film Score.

• Best of Reaktor vol. 1 – A variety of patches using the strange and unconventional synths built-in to Reaktor. Several usable sounds, mostly in the Ambient and Electronic category.

• Synthetic Drums Reloaded – A nice collection of drum kits using samples put together by various music acts. Most of the drums are fresh sounding with the exception or one or two kits that have recycled oldies that you probably have already. Who thought it would be a good idea to put “Amen” samples in here? Pendulum, apparently.

• Deep Transformations – A bank of effects patches, most of which are delay-based or use large chains of effects to achieve their results. The patches utilize Guitar Rig extensively. There’s some good stuff in here, but it’s nothing to write home about.

Kontakt 4 Sample Libraries

 

Native Instruments

• Abbey Road: 60’s Drums – A nice set of drums with an older sounding quality which I find quite appealing.

• Abbey Road: 70’s Drums – This library is geared more towards funk with the tight kit and 70’s rock with the other kit. Again, very nice quality sounds.

• Abbey Road: 80’s Drums – Drums with a distinctly 80’s flair, with the inclusion of a gated reverb on one of the kits.

• Abbey Road: Modern Drums – A good set of modern drums. Surprisingly, their sound is much less in-your-face than the Abbey Road 60’s drums. They certain have their use though and sit nicely in a modern music mix.

• Studio Drummer – The most useful drum kit library provided in the bundle, primarily due to it’s built-in effects, selection of mixer presets and an extensive database of pre-made MIDI drum patterns.

• Alicia’s Keys – A very nice piano library that has a lot more bass and resonance to it than the pianos included in Komplete 7’s Classic Pianos Collection (originally sold as Akoustik Piano). Alicia’s Keys sounds more alive and natural than the other pianos as well, perhaps due to better sampling of finger and key noises.

• Session Strings – A decent sound with terrible usability. There’s no way to trigger the articulations manually, which really limits the use of these sounds.

• Session Strings Pro – A huge improvement over the non-pro edition. The Pro edition comes with an expanded set of articulations and methods for controlling them.

• Retro Machines MK2 – A selection of old synth and drum machine patches, some of which are awesome, whilst most of them are just old and uninteresting sounding. I can generate my own basic saw waves, I don’t need a sample library of them.

• Classic Pianos – The New York and Vienna Grand have the best sound, both of which I use a lot.

• Vintage Keys – Some fantastic electric piano sounds and an alright clavinet.

• Vintage Organs – Organs. Mostly good ones with the transistor organs being the low point.

• West Africa – A lovely selection of african drums and instruments. The stringed instruments are exceptionally natural sounding. There are some preset drum sequences, which I consider to be too repetitive for use outside of dance music. Regardless of the repetitiveness of the loops, the one shot samples are quite usable.

• Maschine Drum Selection – A couple of Hip Hop oriented drum patches pulled from NI’s MPC-like Maschine controller.

• George Duke Soul Treasures – A collection of piano, electric piano, clavinet and Wurlitzer loops. The loops can be rearranged via midi notes, with a variety of options for controlling length, playback direction, pitch and volume.

Scarbee

• Scarbee MM-Bass – A good studio bass type sound that works for a lot of situations.

• Scarbee MM-Bass Amped – The same as the library above, but run through an amp to provide a few new tones.

• Scarbee Jay-Bass – A nice slap bass.

• Scarbee Pre-Bass – A different bass guitar from the one used in MM-Bass. As I am no bass guitar expert, it’s just another bass guitar.

• Scarbee Pre-Bass Amped – The above, but amped!

• Scarbee Black Bass: Amp 4 – Scarbee MM-Bass Amped before it was renamed.

• Scarbee Red Bass – Scarbee Jay-Bass before it was renamed.

• Scarbee Funk Guitarist – A truly fantastic sound, but the interface is only a slight step up from a train wreck. Fortunately, the quality sound is worth the hassle and everything you do can be saved as a preset.

NaturalStudio

• NSKIT 7 – A fantastic sounding sample set with an insane number of velocity layers for each drum. There’s also a set of bongos and congas and a few other percussion instruments that are also very good.

Project SAM

• True Strike 1 – A lot of great orchestral percussion samples. I’m a big fan of the Gran Cassa and Suspended Cymbals as well as the Xylophone and Celesta sounds.

[Buy True Strike 1]

• True Strike 2 – A more exotic set of percussion samples which are also very good. The Dystopia set has some nice cinematic booms in it.

[Buy True Strike 2]

• Symphobia 1 – A collection of symphonic sounds with a skew towards more extreme playing styles. If you’ve heard the Dead Space soundtrack, this is basically the library used for all of it.

• Symphobia 2 – More of the above, with the addition of more legato instruments making it much more useful than the first Symphobia.

Sonic Couture

• Array Mbira – A big-ass Kalimba. Good quality although it feels like the whole instrument should have one more octave up top and could have done without the lowest octave. Regardless, the overall sound is wonderful.

• Kalimba – A normal-sized version of the prior instrument. Handheld. This was a freebie on offer which has a nice sound to it.

• Hang Drums – Hang Drums are essentially inside-out pan drums. Instead of hitting them on the concave side, you tap them on the convex side. A unique and ethereal sound with a very limited range.

• Pan Drums – An expanded set of drums similar to the Hang Drums. The Halo Drums have a much rich and cleaner sound which I find more usable than the Hang Drums. The Tongue Drums have a unique metallic sound but it’s fairly thin.

• Guzheng – The Chinese equivalent of a Japanese Koto. A plucked zither of sorts. It’s a classic sound and the sampling here is very good although there aren’t enough samples to make repetitious playing sound realistic.

• Khim – A hammered dulcimer from Thailand. Sounds very nice but also suffers from a lack of samples, which becomes apparently when playing the instrument like it’s meant to be played. Still, the sound is very usable.

• Morpheus – A very clean vibraphone-like sound. Lovely.

• Skiddaw Stones – A rough, clunky mallet sound which sounds a lot like the instrument used on the Akira soundtrack. Very nice, but perhaps limited in it’s usage.

• Balinese Gamelan Compact – A very unique sound that seems nearly unusable for any music other than traditional Gamelan.

• Ebow Guitar – Sounds lovely but I haven’t found a lot of uses for it yet. Aside from the occasional fret noises, it’s difficult to get across the fact that it’s a guitar and not just a synth or bad flute sound.

• Bowed Gamelan – Sounds terrible. There might be a use for it, but I find it to be too grating of a tone and too slow of an attack to really use.

• Devilfish 303 – Well, it’s a 303.

• Tube Drum – Sounds like PVC tubes being hit. I haven’t used it in anything yet, but I can see the potential.

• Speak & Spell – Infinitely amusing, but ultimately not all that useful. The circuit bent samples are a real treat.

• VA Brush Kit – Sounds good, although light on samples. It’s a simple Jazz brush kit.

• Music Boxes – Two music box sounds that I use these a lot as they’re brilliant sounding. There’s a patch that layers the two music box sounds but I find that I get better results if I simply add both music box sounds to Kontakt so they’re slightly out of time from each other. Gives it more charm.

• RMI Rocksichord – Useless really, but it was a freebie, so I’ve kept it.

• Abstrakt Bass – The acoustic basses aren’t that great and it seems a bit odd to have a sampler full of synth basses, but there are a couple goodies in the mix.

Heavyocity

• Evolve – It’s like a movie trailer soundtrack in a box. A wide array of booming percussion samples and other weighty sounds. There’s a collection of vocals and melodic instruments as well, some of which are quite usable. Fantastic quality overall with an emphasis on action-oriented cinematic styles.

• Evolve Mutations 1 – See above.

• Evolve Mutations 2 – See above above.

Tonehammer

The usability of most Tonehammer libraries isn’t great and often leave me wondering why they set up the patches the way they did, but the sounds are fantastic nonetheless.

• Frendo – A broken string sound that’s simultaneously hilarious and creepy. Great for horror compositions.

• High School Drum Corps. – A high-quality drum line library. I really love the snappy quality of the snares and the tight ensemble sound.

• Mini – Lots of samples of lots of ordinary things and household items. Pencils, chairs, bubble wrap, paper, etc. Plenty of good samples. This library is a good example of the usability issues with Tonehammer instruments – they don’t use any key colors to show which keys trigger samples at normal playback speed. Sometimes there are several keys like this and they’re spaced-out with no way of identifying them.

• Shake vol. 1 – Shakers. Shakers! SHAKERS! Shake shake shake shake shake… SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE. Shakers as far as the eye can see.

• Gnomehammer – A line of freebies from Tonehammer. The most useful patches are the Toy Glockenspiel and Sleigh Bells.

SampleModeling

• The Trumpet – Truly incredibly quality here. A very articulate and realistic sounding trumpet sound. The various mutes available are also quite nice. There are several bonus instruments included with The Trumpet but I haven’t delved into those yet.

8DIO

8DIO is one of the companies formed when Tonehammer split up. The usability of these libraries is just as bad as the Tonehammer libraries.

• Requiem Pro – One of the best choir libraries available with Requiem being geared towards an epic movie soundtrack style sound. Some of the patches are a bit messed up, but the sounds are lovely if you’re willing to work around the issues.

• Progressive Metal – A glorified loop library, lacking in flexibility making this mostly unusable. This is NOT a true multi-sample, or “deep sampled” as they say on the product page. It’s loops and they’re either playing or not playing, that’s really all the control you have. Not worth getting.

Pettinhouse

• Direct Guitar 2 – A good quality guitar sound that’s severely limited by how the articulations are only activated at the highest velocity level. I also find that the note off sounds are too loud by default and usually turn them down 10 to 15 db.

Theodor Krueger

• Yamaha Pacifica – A remarkable feat of guitar programming prowess. The usability is high, allowing for incredibly natural sounding guitar solos with the lead guitar sound. The rhythm gutar sound isn’t as spectacular, but quite good in it’s own right. The velocity layers are set up properly, allowing for great control over the many articulations.

VST Instrument Plugins

My Favorites

QuadraSID – Emulates the sounds of the Commodore 64 quite well. I use it for the majority of the Chiptune sounds in my tracks.

Sophia – A lovely noise maker, great for all sorts of bizarre soundscapes.

Miscellaneous

Some of my favorite freeware VSTis are: PitchBlack, Drumatic 3, Fuzzpilz Oatmeal, SuperRiff Guitar, DMI Flute, Farbrausch V2, TAL-Elek7ro and ymVST.

Some non-freeware picks would be: Adventus, Whitenoise ZeroVector and Jeskola XS-1.

VST Effect Plugins

Voxengo

I have quite a few Voxengo plugins, but my favorites are definitely the following three which are used excessively in every track:

• Elephant Limiter – A very transparent mastering limiter. Set it and forget it, it does what it’s supposed to.

• GlissEQ – Simply the best sounding equalizer around. It’s dynamic behavior is very impressive in how cleanly it boosts and cuts frequencies.

• VariSaturator – A great tool that can be used to boost and sculpt sounds without drastically altering them. Alternatively, it can be used to add a helluva lot of bite to a sound and make it cut through a mix like nobodies business.

In addition to the above three, I occasionally utilize the following Voxengo plugins as well: AnalogFlux Suite, Crunchessor, LF Max Punch, Marvel GEQ, Polysquasher, Soniformer, Transgainer, Voxformer and Vintage Modulator.

Miscellaneous

dBlue Glitch – Makes glitch effects incredibly easy. The master filter is a nice addition, allowing for funky big beat filter swells and such. It would be nice though if the effects could be tied to midi notes like in The Finger instead of midi notes being used to switch through the step sequencer patterns.

DtBlkFx – A neat FFT effects suite that allows for all manner of strange manipulations, most of which sound like compression artifacts and unintentional mishaps.

Sonic Charge Bitspeek – Makes everything run through it sound like it’s coming out of a Speak & Spell, whilst still offering a lot of control over the way it processes the sound.

Sample Libraries

 

• ACID 7 Loops
• ACID Latin Loops
• Bangin’ Beats
• Mazsound Human Vocals Kit
• Megaton Big Beat Bomb
• Methods of Mayhem II: Damage Control
• G-Town Church
• Kalava Drum Archive
• Mixman Gloss House
• Jeff Baxter Skunkworks
• Vocal Planet
• Welcome to the Sampledome
• Phatso’s Drumloop Archive
• DJ BB’s Breakbeat Paradise Archive
• Prosonus Prepared Piano