Behold....It's Clapbox (and its free)

First off, sorry for the slow post. It was Christmas and I have a 3 year old boy and a new set of identical twin girls so I had NO time to post. I did bust out the laptop today and find this. It is a free plugin for Ableton live called Clapbox. I can definitely see where all of the people who use claps in their music could use this at some time or another, especially the hip hop crowd. All you have to do is download the plugin and click on the pack. It will install, Ableton will open up and wallah. Go to the instrument rack and you will have a new instrument there. It is basically a clap sound with parameters that can be adjusted like any other sound. I got some pretty good "claps" out of it so have fun with this one. Here is the link to Clapbox so go get it and get to clappin.

Free Plug-ins from Kjaerhus Audio

I found a company that has some really good vst effects and the best part about it is they are totally FREE. The list includes a Auto-Filter, Chorus, Compressor, Delay, EQ, Flanger, Master Limiter, Phaser, and a Reverb. All are part of Their Classic series plug-ins and are free for download. I tried some of them out on Ableton and they work Great.

Don't be fooled by the fact that they are free, They sound as good as the ones built into my daw to me. You should check out Kjaerhus audio and download the free plug-ins here. There is also a lot of other vst's on thier site so checkem out.

Download ReBirth 2.0.1. for FREE ...legally

ReBirth was one of the first successful software synthesizers on the market at one time. On September 1, 2005 Propellerhead officially discontinued the Software Synth that once ruled the among the masses. ReBirth was the start to what we all know and associate with as far as software synthesizer type products today.

Propellerhead is celebrating by opening ReBirth Museum to commemorate its history. They are also making the software available for FREE. Propellarhead says all development on ReBirth RB-338 has stopped. There will be no future updates and no Mac OS X version. All personal customer support of the product will be discontinued. They receive very few questions from ReBirth owners anymore and all of the information they usually provide is now available in the FAQ section on the new ReBirth web site. ReBirth will be given away for free, anyone can download and use ReBirth 2.0.1. The download and instructions are also available on the ReBirth site.

This thing is fun to play with and pretty much just a BAD A@# piece of software. Add the fact that it is free now and you cant go wrong. Download ReBirth . You will have to register on the site first, after doing that (which costs nothing) you have access to all kinds of cool stuff like forums, downloads etc. The same user name and password also works on the Propellerhead Software User Web site.

You Try........You like

AudioCubes ?

AudioCubes anyone? Don't worry, I didn't know either. It turns out that they are Cubes that are capable of generating and processing audio and MIDI information. Meaning they can control programs like Ableton Live by switching their position in relation to each other.

They will also generate lo-fi sounds without using a computer. They ship with a demo of Ableton live and the software for the cubes plus some loops and samples.

There are some videos on their site. Check them out. I think they would be fun to play with and if you were a live DJ or performer they would spice up your performance but I cant see myself using them in my studio. I will say I have never played with them, Ive only seen them on the Internet so I wont be to quick to judge. That's why I wrote this and gave you this link to their site... so you can go judge them.

Here is a video of them in action.

Casio PT-82 /// A blast from the past!

Years ago (almost 22 years is a bit more accurate) I got my first electronic keyboard, the Casio VL-1. I was 10 years old and there was nothing any cooler to me. I put it in my book bag and took it to school and had a crowd standing around my desk the minute I got it out and hit rhythm select/start. It starting pulsing away with its blip beat sound and I was king of the classroom for the 30 seconds before the teacher told me to put it away or it would be hers.

I also still have a Casio SK-1 Sampler which I am in the process of circuit bending at the moment. I have finished all of the wiring and soldering but have yet to build a case for it that will hold all of the new buttons, knobs, and sensors I have added, but that will be a different post in the future.

OK, got a little off track there. What I was getting at is that a year or two ago a friend of mine gave me her Casio PT-82 she had from way back. I put in in a closet forever. Then I let my son play with it for a while, but I never really messed with it myself. I recently had a minor surgery and while picking my son up from Grandma's I saw the PT-82 in a pile of toys, I had honestly forgot I even had it. I asked her if I could take it back home and she said sure so I brought it home and dropped 5 double A's in it. It's crazy how we forget just how far we have advanced in technology but trying to play this thing will remind you real quick.

Believe it or not I have been playing with this thing for 3 days now (well, me and the kids). Its amazing how much we get used to the synths and drum machines today that do all of the work for us. With my Korg EA1 and ER1 I can hit play and when one of the pattern starts it sounds so good I really don't have to do anything except add more patterns to it to get something that will still impress people who don't know how they work. I'm not saying that it takes no talent to make electronic music, I'm just saying its getting so easy it makes us lazy. I sat around pushing 1 key at a time trying to get a cool bass line or lead melody and came up with some good stuff that I plan to sample and use in the future. Since it really doesn't do ANYTHING on its own it will be nice to say that the finished product is all my idea and not sampled or a preset sound or pattern.

I don't think I will be getting rid of the PT-82 anyway soon, Its kinda nice to go back in time and play with the synths and boards that got us where we are today.

Dexter DAW Controller

I stumbled across this last night and I must say this thing is pretty cool. It's by a company called Jazzmutant. It's a multi touch DAW controller. The best way I can describe this thing is that it is like a giant iPod touch screen that controls your DAW.
This is not the first touch screen controller on the market but what is so special about this is that it has Multi touch capabilities meaning that all 10 fingers can be touching the screen simultaneously and moving the sliders up and down just like a real mixer in real-time. This will be great for tasks like leveling multiple tracks. It also has very cool interfaces for adjusting the equalization, panning, and other effects making controlling your DAW a lot more fun and natural feeling.

JazzMutant has gotten together with some of the leading DAW producers so they could better integrate visual representation and two-way communication between your Daw and Dexter. The amount of information shown on the screen of the Dexter at all times is almost enough that you could turn your PC screen off and still control your Daw.
You can see a video of it here, I'm sure you will be impressed. It's kind of like when you look at your Daw and see all of the cool sliders and knobs and wish you could just control them by touching the screen, will now you can.
As far as pricing goes I can’t seem to find any online but I would guess since it is a upgrade of sorts or a next generation of the Lemur from the same company it will probably be around the same price which is a steep $2500…..Yes, you read it right…..$2500.
Anyway check it out here and go to YouTube and type in Dexter DAW and watch the videos and see what you think.

Free drum sample packs

I found this link in a forum last night while chugging around the web. This guy made samples of his 12 piece pearl master custom drum kit with zildjian cymbals and packaged them up for the world to download and test for free.
He offers the pack in RAW Samples, Ableton packs for the new drum rack in Live 7, and RMIV presets. I downloaded the raw samples and put them into Ableton 6's Impulse and got out my m-audio trigger finger and had some fun. I was banging away for a good 20 minutes adding effects and tweaking the sounds out. The sounds are 24 bit raw and processed Multi Dynamic samples and have a very real sound to them, especially for a free download.
He also offers another pack called Glitch kit one where his samples are created by importing (.txt, .midi, .pdf, ext.) He uses anything he can find as raw 24bit audio Data then he Edits & Tweaks out the samples. I have yet to download this one so I don't know what it sounds like.

You can get the samples here and they are free to download. There is a donate option there but it is not required so check it out if you like using drum samples in your music production process.

findsounds Dot Com

I read a post in a forum talking about this website where you could find just about any sound effect/sound you wanted. It was described as the Google of samples. I went to the site to check it out and found it was pretty useful. The site is pretty straight forward, you type in a sound you are looking for and it returns a LOT of results. I searched for gunshot and it returned over 200 results.
I will say that if you're doing commercial work I would be a little Leary of findsound's returns as they do just link you to samples found all over the web (which is why they give so many results) and I'm sure that some of the sounds are copyrighted. If you're working on a personal project, it couldn't hurt, but for professional work I would definitely look at the URL of the site the sound came from and find out if it's ok to use them to avoid any trouble.
The cool thing I liked about the site was that you can filter your searches by file types, number of channels, resolution, and sample rate. It will search for AIFF, AU, MP3, and WAVE formats. You can choose between mono or stereo samples and 8 bit or 16 bit samples.

With all of that said if you are needing a sound effect or sample for your music or whatever reason http://www.findsounds.com/ is a quick and easy to use place to find them.