Being True to LA
LA seems to be breathing with electric excitement nowadays, forming it's own unique culture, without a second thought or single regret. How could it not? LA houses close to 10 million people, hosting an incredibly broad range of cultures and backgrounds which makes the prospect of artistic crossover and experimentation inevitable.
A couple summers ago I met a pair of Irish people who were drunkenly ranting, in bitter tone, about the bubble that LA is, how it is cutoff from real life, the real world, real people... and I had trouble disagreeing, (nothing to do with the number of beers and tequila I had drank,) but because they were right! LA has always had some sort of mythical presence; the land of fame and entertainment, the final destination of aspiring artists, the pinnacle of creative devotion, how could it be connected to the "real world", and more importantly, why would it want to be?
75% Off Eventide Blackhole – Hollywood’s Reverb (Ends March 31st)
75% Off Eventide Blackhole – Hollywood’s Reverb (Ends March 31st) Eventide has been running for over 40 years now and have placed themselves as veterans of the digital audio processing game. Their famed reverb plugin called Blackhole, known for its cinematic results, and powerful sheen-adding ability, just got a huge price cut and is worth mentioning while you can still get it cheap. The Blackhole plugin features 50 presets constructed by artists like Richard Devine, Flood & Alan Moulder, Sigur Rós, Vernon Reid and John Agnello. The gravity paramter allows you to invert the decay mode of the reverb. The most notable feature within the plugin is the unique and intuitive, ribbon controller, allowing you to hot swap, and morph between assigned parameters and ranges, for a expressive control. The Blackhole is centered around making artificial, out of this world, sounding reverb and can add a gripping aspect to any of your …
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Izotope DDLY – Dynamic Delay (Free Until March 10th)
Izotope DDLY – Dynamic Delay (Free Until March 10th) Izotope is releasing there powerful delay plugin for free until March 10th. This particular delay is pretty nuts in its capabilities, designed in a way that splits two different delays between high’s and low’s, and can get really heavy and grimy, real quick. The DDLY has got a scroll bar on the left side which divides the sends of your audio between two delays, top and bottom. In both delays there are a set of five parameters, and two different modes: analog and grain. In the analog mode you can control the time of the delay, the feedback, the trash (which really gets the grime going,) a dry control and a wet control. For the grain mode you can control, the time and feedback, but are given an alternate option of pitch, size, and mix. Another key feature in the plugin …
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Protoverb- Free Experimental Reverb
Protoverb- Free Experimental Reverb The biggest struggle digital reverb faces is to emulate a ‘real life’ reverb sound. Reverb affects could easily sit your sound farther back with competing noises, or add a tail of sound to make it ‘reverberate,’ but the attempt to replicate real life reverb is a bit more difficult. With that said, the sound of many reverb effects are generally accepted, and experimental reverb can prove to be stiff. U-He Protoverb is a free experimental reverb plug-in, that lets you randomize and get into tweaking your reverb sound. Results can be a real hit or miss, resulting in either warm organic sounding reverbs, to gritty unnatural digital sounding reverbs. Protoverb is laid out as if it is a reverb pedal, looking like something you’d find in the back of a used gear section, at a music shop in Echo Park. The idea behind the Protoverb is to randomize between two …
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Native Instrument’s Flesh- Music Making Machine
Native Instrument’s Flesh- Music Making Machine If you talk to some old school musicians about electronic music one of their biggest complaints, (worries, criticisms, hesitations-whatever it is,) they have about the genre is in regards to live performance. A largely held stigma against the lack of improvisational techniques leads some to question the value of electronic music itself. (In my opinion, this is not a valid conclusion.) Though some electronic musicians have taken it upon themselves to advance the improvisational capability for artists across the spectrum of electronic music. Musician and inventor, Tim Exile the creator of The Finger and The Mouth, has developed a software called Flesh, through Native Instruments, that is capable of creating multidimensional songs through a single sample. The software essentially draws from, and expands, a single rhythmic sample into a multi dimensional including bass lines, riffs, melodies, pads and more. The idea behind Flesh is …
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