ADSR Sample Manager

If you are like me, it's very easy to slip into the endless search for the perfect sample for the moment. Then you find that you have wasted much of your precious production time.

My 53GB Ableton User Library is well organised but any help is always welcome so I was interested to see that ADSR have released a free plugin (VST and AU available) that scans your library and adds Tags intelligently.

It can be placed in a track allowing you to preview any sample, add, change or create Tags as you want.

Pick it up for free here

Rubel's Law

Today this one just felt right ...
Rubel's Law of Production - Mark Rubel, Instructor & Co-Director (2014) The Blackbird Academy

Great music poorly recorded will always be great; crappy music wonderfully recorded will always be crap

London's first Recording Studio

Possibly the first ever photograph of a ‘recording studio’. It was taken some time in 1898 at 31, Maiden Lane, London, where the Gramophone Co set up their first permanent recording room.

You can see that the piano is raised so that its sound can be captured in the (one and only one!) recording horn which itself would be adjusted to the height of a singer’s mouth.

You can find more details on this site

London’s first recording studio

A Perfect Take

Studio time 60 for all day recording

An actual advert seen on Craigslist. It almost seems too good to be true ;)

Craigslist advert

6 of the Best Unusual Software Titles (2017)

Here are some of the more unusual plugin titles so far this year.

iZotope Neutron which takes some of the housekeeping work out of your mixing

Aeris: Hybrid Choir Designer - the clue is in the name

Sonic Academy Kick 2 - a serious upgrade on the original, which was already pretty very good.

Toontrack Dream Pop EZX. What you expect; drums, foley and hybrid percussion

Best Future Nightmare – Big Fish Audio Cyborg. A collection with a dark and twisted side, full of drones, atmospheres, crunchy guitars and effects

Fancy a piece of the dark side of the moon?

The Abbey Road Studios EMI TG12345 MK IV console used to record Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is going up for auction in New York later this month.

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EMI TG12345 MK IV console - used on Dark Side of the Moon

The EMI TG 12345 MK IV console has been referred to as the greatest console ever constructed due to the collaboration with Abbey Road and EMI engineers, with the production of every component being built to military precision.

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EMI TG 12345 MK IV console faders

Abbey Road studios was the recording studio of choice for experimental and progressive artists to use throughout the 1960s-1970s and is still a busy venue today. The sound recording of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon is testament to the superior engineering of this recording equipment.

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EMI metering

Due to be sold as part of Bonham’s ‘TCM Presents…Rock and Roll Through the Lens’ event on 27 March, the desk was housed in the facility’s iconic Studio Two between 1971 and 1983, commissioned as an update for the MK II model and one of only two consoles custom-made by EMI engineers for Abbey Road.

I suspect you will need a very friendly bank manager.

Update - it was sold for $1.8 million

Viola Organista

Nearly 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci sketched his plans for a musical instrument he dubbed the Viola Organista, Polish concert pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki spent more than 5,000 hours making da Vinci's idea a reality. This is an amazing instrument.

The first CD album of the viola organista solo recital out on November 3rd, 2015!! More about in English here: http://www.violaorganista.com See also: https://www.facebook.com/ViolaOrganista First performance of the viola organista made by Sławomir Zubrzycki. INTERNATIONAL ROYAL CRACOW PIANO FESTIVAL 18TH OCTOBER 2013, Aula Florianka.

There is a Kickstarter campaign to make a recording of the instrument that you may be interested in joining.