Music rollout begins this week
My long worked on projects are almost there and I will begin the rollout starting tomorrow with Our Zimbabwe
Jul
15
Jul
13
Steinberg Rupert neve vst plugin light review
PLEASE NOTE THAT I NOW HAVE A NEW SHOP FOR ALL MY PRESETS AND ANY OLD POSTS REFERRING TO MY OLD SHOP ARE NOW DEFUNCTAll my presets are now here
Plugin shootout in 24 bit 96 khz wav format
Just did a quick and unscientific shoot out between AlexB’s MWeq against the super expensive new release by Steinberg.All of this is subjective of course and what I call nice may be another’s poison.
The coding is exceptional and those Yamaha tech heads know how to make good algorithms. It was Close close close.
I have one portico 5033 and of course passing audio through even just with the bands engaged is an experience and I use it exclusively for vocals at mixdown.
My subjective feelings as far as ratings go are that obviously first is the Hardware – then Alexb’s version, then the plugin. I also did a quick shootout with Q-clone and the plug and q-clone were similiar although Q-clone gave a less zippy high end. The low end was much nicer with Q-clone as well.
After all has been said and done – Alexb’s rocks and is a fraction of the price. If people knew more about Nebula they wouldn’t shell out close to half the value of the harwdare for a plug. It does have a couple of advantages though – the plugin is CPU light and has all the bands available at once.
Guess if you want clean transparent then the plugin will make you very, very happy ………and a little poorer. If you want a little more warmth, depth and less clinical – Nebula.
Just my two cents but perhaps others may wish to chime in. 😀
Jul
04
Vienna Suite personal review
Vienna suite is a host of plugins made by the superlative samples producer VSL. I have been a VSL user since the early days when they only had the full library in Giga format and since having moved to Vienna instruments I must say the company has remained at the forefront of the most realistic sample libraries and also innovative software solutions for orchestra emulations.
The Vienna suite is comprised of in their words – ” ten high-precision audio processing
plug-ins for mixing and mastering on all major 64-bit and 32-bit
host DAWs”.
These plugins are of the highest quality if transparency and total respect for the integrity of your audio is paramount. Make no mistake, just because these plugins are made mainly for VSLs own orchestration packages does not mean that they are useless for general mixing. They are laden with highly useful presets and great starting points. I shot them out against my Sonnox dynamics plugin and IMHO the compressor came up trumps although Sonnox is more feature laden. The VSL comp has a clearer rendition with no distortion in opto mode.
Both eqs are wonderful in their resolution and the mastering EQ rivals many plugins costing many times the price of the whole package. They seem to neither add their own character nor distort the signal. Simply massaging it in the chosen direction. My GML 2032s are getting jealous because they cannot work ITB and sound as transparent.
The panner makes true stereo liberation a possibilty in my Sonar DAW. Channel tools may see less work from now on.
The Hybrid Reverb is the best convolution reverb I have in my arsenal. I have waves IR1, Gigapulse,Reverberate, Perfectspace and others and this reverb sounds incredible against them.
The rest of the tools are icing on the cake.
The best part about the Vienna suite is that you get THREE licenses on purchase. In other words if you buy three Vienna keys ( USB elicenser by Steinberg – £20 each ) you can put a license on each key and have one for a workstation, one for the laptop and one as a spare in case anything happens.
Highly recommended. € 475 download. £ 420 boxed. VSL site
Jun
27
Heard from Mr Hogbin the other day
For all the boys who went to Plumtree High School in Zimbabwe in the mid 70s, eighties and nineties you will no doubt know who Mr Hogbin or ‘Pin’ is. The wonderful chemistry teacher who was also involved in the backstage stuff during the plays also did most of the recordings at the school. Well after my post of the old reecordings word got to him and he kindly provided a stunning recording from before my time.
Mr Hogbin is now in Botswana and has made a life for himself there. May I say he will probably have the most imacculate garden in the block if my memory serves me right. He hated us hitting sixes into his garden from Pattison field he he he
His final words to me in his e-mail were ……… Enjoyed the prize giving performances on your web site. Thought you might like this one. Long before your time. I am trying to digitise a number of recordings of the school choir but lack time and expertise. All on a cassette tape I made over the years called “Plumtree Sings”
Best wishes,
….Mr Hogbin hopes to do a few more when time allows and when he does I will be more than glad to host them here for the world to remember. Thank you Sir and bring em on. Now – I don’t know if Mr hogbin is into social Media but if he is and you did go to Plumtree do say good day to him and thank him for these free recordings. I was so blessed to hear from him and I am sure you will too. The move to Bots hasn’t always been the easiest so show him some love.
And here it is.
Jun
25
GML 2032 – Sharing the love
PLEASE NOTE THAT I NOW HAVE A NEW SHOP FOR ALL MY PRESETS AND ANY OLD POSTS REFERRING TO MY OLD SHOP ARE NOW DEFUNCTAll my presets are now here
Just to add my love for this extraordinary piece of gear. It is at the heart of my studio. I have two and they give the most superlative results. Clean, clean, clean high resolution sound. Nothing comes close when clarity is the goal. Reference transparency is the name of the game. I don’t normally say this to blokes but, I love you George.
Jun
25
Our Zimbabwe 2011 almost ready for distibution
Well it’s been long time coming but ten years on the anniversary of its release we are doing it again. You wouldn’t believe it but a kind soul called Michael Angel who is also a brother in the Lord has offered to Master Our Zimbabwe for me. And he is asking for nothing in return.
God bless Michael. I will be making a version of Our Zimbabwe available for ‘free’ from here to help the charity. By free I mean that I will be asking for the smallest voluntary donation to my chosen charity, the Mumvuri project. It is an orphan shelter in Banket.
Jun
13
Acustica nebula
Can I just say that this is about the best plugin I have ever used period. It is amazing. Today I was pretty frustrated with a mix that I am working on for my next album. So I decided to pull out the old trusty Xlutop chainer and chain a few Nebula effects together.
Had another go with using the consoles and now I can say I GET what it is all about. You need to chain these suckers together. So – I updated to the latest version of nebula and also got Alexb’s 4K compressor recently.
What I did was set up a chain in Xlutop chainer. For those who don’t know it is a piece of software that let’s you well – chain a series of FX together. It has horrible latency as it does not report plugin latency to the daw. Anyway – here is what I did.
R2R – MLC input – 4K compressor – Chain of ML eQs ( Hshelf, Hmids, Lmids,Lshelf ) MLC Buss out,R2R
After bouncing down the track and adjusting for latency I am blown away. Get a chainer plugin and it all comes together from a workflow point of view. It is one track at a time and you do need to commit but boy does it sound like I have an SSL anmd Real tape in my home studio.
The great thing with chainer is that you can set up your default chain and adjust per track. Thumbs up from me now….
Now here is the roll call of the top nebula third party producers that take your nebula universe to the next level.
VNXT
Jun
07
Becki and Dave’s wedding
I was just the singer mind you but I had my camera – GH2 PAL and snapped away. Hope you guys enjoy it
Jun
06
I found some cassettes in the archives
A few years ago after I left Plumtree School in around the late 90s I visited Felix Westwood my former school teacher, choir director and mentor at Plumtree. She has been such a great blessing to so many people over the years and she kindly allowed me to borrow some of the tapes from Plumtree school while I was there. I stumbled upon them again recently and decided to digitise them. These bring back soooo many memories. I have to say that listening to recordings that are over 16 years old is sobering. First these recordings were done using old school dubbing techniques from cassette to cassette so the quality is not great. I had to do some heavy noise reduction to get them even barely palatable. Second – well the singing in most cases makes me cringe especially when I am singing – but this was before we had access to autotune. Thirdly – it reminds us that time flies and it waits for no one. Anyway – for the sake of nostalgia here are some songs recorded in my last prize giving at Plumtree High school. Of note from the night in my memory was Mr Hepburn chastising me for not mentioning the hockey results enough in my headboys speech. I think he was right ya know because I was biased towards rugby he he he
UPDATE – as a result of this post Mr Hogbin who had been at Plumtree for many decades just got in touch. Those of you who went to Plumtree will know that he made all the recordings of the choir and plays – anyway – he sent me a file from way before my time and I will share it pending his permission.
Jun
06
Aurelia release available now here via Paypal
In 2006 I released my first studio Album. I worked with the wonderful record label producer Robbie Bronimman
It has had steady interest over the years and now I am making it available for the first time as high Studio Quality 24 Bit Flac files for those who enjoy high quality music.
Aurelia 2006 CD Quality Flac Price £ 10.00 [wp_eStore_fancy:product_id:18:end]
You can get it on iTunes
The mp3 version is available here as well
Aurelia 2006 MP3 format Price £ 7.99 [wp_eStore_fancy:product_id:17:end]
