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Showing posts from December, 2017

Top 3 Free Drum Sampler Plugins

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for some, drum samplers can be a really handy tool for creating drum grooves rather than arranging samples in your DAW. Today we'll look at top 3 drum sampler plugins. 1) FXpansion Geist Lite Geist Lite is actually a magware sampler i.e, it comes free with magazine. However Beat Magazine gives it free for everyone with their EDM Inferno geist bundle. Download 2) Grooove BPB Released as a christmas gift in 2016, this is actually a capable drum sampler released by my favorite blog. Download 3) RitMix by Soundbridge This is a drum sampler with heavy editing capabilities.It is provided free by Soundbridge. Download

Review of Waveform 8, from a Tracktion 6 user's perspective

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 Waveform 8 (which was supposed to be T8 before the name change) is the latest version of Tracktion which is my DAW of choice. I downloaded a 30 days trail of latest version (8.2.7) to test it and here is my review. First Impressions ------------------ Waveforms UI looks familiar to anyone who has used Tracktion before, the first time i opened it, it detected all my tracktion projects,my plugins with ease. Waveform retains the same layout and controls as previous versions of Tracktion which is a good thing if you are a tracktion user. The UI is a huge improvement from Tracktion 6 and looks pleasent. It does however add few new elements such as a seperate view for Piano Roll, LFO Modulators, MIDI randomizer and a mixer view. Built-in Plugins ----------------- Buit-in plugins include all the old Tracktion effects, native sampler but it also comes with few extra instruments and effects such as Collective,Micro synth pack and master mix.FM synth is based on MDA DX10 which i

Best Free Samplers, 64bit version.

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Here are my favorite samplers that i think are the best. Grace   Grace by One Small Clue is a great sampler and has great sound shaping capabilities and is very easy to use. It supports various sample formats like wav, sfz etc. Download -  Sforzando   Sforzando is an excellent soundfont player and sampler you can load sfz files, convert sf2 to sfz files and there are lots of free libraries available for it. It also includes an easy to use wavetable synth called Tablewrap2. Download - https://www.plogue.com/downloads#sforzando Zampler   Zampler by beat magazine is another great sfz player which comes with tons of free libraries and supports sfz,rex2 formats. It features same engine as Synapse Dune so it has got an awesome arpeggiator,mod matrix,modulation sources and effects. Download - http://www.zampler.de/

Best Free Synths, 64 bit version

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Top Freeware Synths for Electronic Music Want some great sounding free synths? check them out Synth1 (Subtractive)   Synth1 is a subtractive synth, a legendary freeware synthesizer. The sound of it even matches some of the top paid synths. Once you get used to it, its a great synth to program. If you are not the kind of person who likes to create presets, there are thousands of presets available online. http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/ More on synth1:  Overview of synth1 by me                             40 free synth1 patches by me  Zebralette (Wavetable)   Zebralette is a highly cut down version of monster synth Zebra 2 by U-he. It features a single wavetable oscillator that is capable of doing anything you wish. It can morph between 16 waveforms and contains many modulation sources.It contains some amazing spectral effects to shape your sound.Many people have created amazing pads, leads,bass and analog sounding patches as well as powerful growl

5 Music News Blogs you should Follow

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These are 5 of my favorite blogs and my inspiration to start blogging.  1) Bedroom Producers Blog  Bedroom Producers Blog is the first website that comes to mind when i hear freeware. This is, in my opinion, the finest blog when it comes to free VSTs, samples, reviews etc. Follow bedroom producers blog and be the first to know about new freewares (with respect to music production). They offer their own library of samples and vsts aswell. https://bedroomproducersblog.com/ 2) Noizefield Noizefield is also a blog about freeware releases but they tend to produce more news articles than bpb, their content is short and to the point. They also offer free VSTs which i used to use before switching to 64 bit completely and some free preset packs for various VSTs aswell. https://www.noizefield.com/ 3) Rekkerd   Rekkerd is a blog for all kinds of music software (and sometimes hardware news). Follow this if you want to get news about new releases, updates and offers on vs

5 Uses of Audacity Other than Recording + Free Audacity Drum Samples

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 Almost everyone uses audacity, including the pros. Its the most simplest audio editor you can get for free. That doesn't mean its not powerful. A recent update in audacity brought MIDI playback, skinning and other cool features to it. Aside from the most obvious uses of audacity such as recording Audio, Voice overs etc, these are some of the ways to use audacity. 1) Extracting samples from recordings Do you often record sounds and sample them? i do. Audacity is the go to audio editor for me to extract samples because of its zooming capabilities and exporting selected audio. It also has some simple yet useful effects to shape your samples and also has support for VST effects and other formats. 2) Generating Electronic Percussion Samples Audacity has a built in generator which can generate waveforms, noise and some other tones which can be used to generate percussion samples (Eg: Generate sinewave at 80Hz for low end of kick and make transient using white nois

List of Free DAWs and my personal favorites.

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List of free DAWs These are the freeware DAWs that i know. I've picked top 5 among this based on the features it offers. The top 5 however is unordered. Top 5 Tracktion 6 (Windows, Mac, Linux)   Tracktion is the DAW i use. I love it for its unique workflow and its rack. Once you get used to its interface its one of the quickest DAWs which is light on your CPU aswell. It doesn't have any limitation. Pros: 1) Unique Interface, Full Featured 2) Drag and Drop Controls 3) Rack 4) Audio Comping, Time Streching 5) Single Window Interface Cons: 1) Very different from other DAWs 2) Not so good GUI  Soundbridge (Windows, Mac)   I found this while randomly browsing and its a surprisingly capable DAW. Still needs some bugs fixed but nothing big to make it unusable.It doesn't have any limitation. Pros: 1) Full Featured 2) Good GUI 3) Nice Selection of Inbuilt effects Cons: 1) Some VSTs fail to load. LMMS (Windows, Linux, Mac)   It is a DAW wi

List of Free Tracktion Resources on the Internet

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List of Free Tracktion Resources Guides/Manuals 1) Bill Edstrom's Guide to Tracktion 6 (Made pay what you want recently) 2) Bill Edstrom's Guide to Tracktion 7 (Made pay what you want recently) 3) Waveform 8 User Guide Get these: https://leanpub.com/u/billedstrom 4) Tracktion Manual Section: https://www.tracktion.com/training/manuals#t6 Video Guides: 1) Bill Edstrom Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/lilacwriter/playlists 2) Lay it Productions Tracktion Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPVeM9x2sYYs47yVsiu8N8GjTJrxED5Mp 3) Tracktion Software Official Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/TracktionSoftware/feed 4) StreamworksAudio Tracktion 3 Playlist (Old but relavent) - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKRYWdEpbc5NK6u_Ba5L0vwMoQOv81VVf 5) Recording Studio 9 Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeySI9gLWqezK73EfrsKcO-3IuICEKaaj (Reviews,Basic overviews,Comparisons etc) 6) Tracktion Videos Section: https://www.

Synth1: Introduction to subtractive synths.

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If you are new to sound designing, subtractive synthesis is the way to start things of. Synth1 is one of the best freeware subtractive synths around with tons of patches released for it. It is also one other best sounding synths. One disadvantage, its user interface is not friendly. This post gives an introduction to its interface, explains some basic synth parameters which are common to all synths and gives you an idea of synth1 and subtractive synthesis in general. In future posts, i am going to do a few sound design tutorials (dubstep basically) using synth1.  The above diagram shows all the sections available. Open the diagram in a new tab to use it as a reference when i explain the sections below. 1) Oscillator section Synth1 contains 2 oscillators containing basic waveforms. It also contains a sub osc containing 4 basic waveforms. Oscillator section is where our sound originates. The sound is shaped be many parameters which is gonna be covered in other sections aswell. Osc

TOP 10 FREE MUSIC MAKING APPS FOR ANDROID

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Android is a platform which is not considered seriously as a music making platform because of its audio latency. But as android has evolved the latency has decreased and with android 8.0, the latency is minimum. The things are about to change. More and more music making apps which were ios only are now coming to android. These are the Android apps that i think are the best you can get without spending a buck. Check them out, they are all free. If you want an extended list of freeware android music making apps, check the link at the bottom of this article.