Reviews written on my phone while on vacation in the UK. I listened on ear canal plugs so I may have missed some finer details or gotten some things wrong altogether. I'll listen again when I get home if you want me to. As always, feel free to ask for more details about any of the questionable thing...

I can send you stems for some of my old songs if you like (I'll be home in a week or so)... any genre you're particularly interested in?

What I can't do is send you stems for an unfinished song, because I need the mixing practice myself.

In with three chords (if you don't look too hard). Could have used a few extra hours of polishing but I didn't have the time, so here we go.

The Way It Isn't by Jan Krüger The realm of tears, I've left it all behind A world of fears, put it out my mind Look at the skies, count the clouds No time for the ins and outs of the world No compromise, don't let nobody pull me down Don't respond, just make no sound Looking at the world inside Th...

I like Massive for, well, massive and unreservedly synthy sounds. I haven't tried X yet and I'm fairly sure I won't until the next version of Komplete is released. Don't really feel like getting every single major upgrade separately when getting 2-3 major upgrades at once costs the same.

I can kind of understand wanting to do that if you're using EQ for multiple different purposes on a single track and want to keep it all separated so you can still make sense of it later. Or if you want to do EQ, then feed it into another plugin, then EQ the result of that... That said, his idea tha...

I just went through my complete review history to answer this question properly. One thing I consistently got comments on was the vocals, naturally. I addressed this by taking up singing lessons in 2009 - and I'm still at it. I keep making progress, too. Singing is surprisingly difficult to do prope...

I'm sceptical about the very idea behind this plugin. I like understanding what's going on. I know what a compressor does, for instance. I may not know some of the fine details like which shape its attack/release curves have, what kind of RMS windows it uses, and so forth... but by and large I can p...

Just wanted to point out that if you install Komplete Kontrol, even if you don't have any of the NI hardware which you'd normally use it for, you can use it to browse all sounds and get instant audio previews of what they sound like - just have to install the preview bundle from NI's installer tool....

I wouldn't bother with Ultimate Collector's unless you plan on getting semi-serious (or demi-serious, depending on your budget) about symphonic stuff. I did get full Symphony Series separately, during a sale, before they introduced Ultimate Collector's... so I do have a small bit of experience with ...

Of course brick walling vocals makes everything easier, and it seems to be all the rage in current pop music anyway, along with almost robotic autotuning... but I don't care for current pop music, so I'll stick with more subtle compression, thank you very much. :} BTW gain reduction is one thing, bu...

Yeah, I think it makes way more sense to upgrade Komplete only every 2-3 years, because the upgrade price is the same for upgrading 1-~3 versions at a time (upgrade from K8-11 to 12 currently). IMO you have to be doing quite a bit of symphonic work for the full Symphony Series to really make sense t...

When choosing editions I'd ignore the "expansions" altogether, along with most of the products that are basically just pre-recorded patterns and licks (Action Strings, Soul Treasures etc.) Things that are in Komplete but not in Komplete Select that may be worth looking at, from my perspective (each ...

What used to bother me about the lines is that it was rather easy to click them by accident, so I changed it so that you can only adjust the line when the item is selected. Customization!

I saw that plugin in a video about production and immediately thought, hey, that looks like another Waves plugin. They sure have a lot of useless junk. :) Personally I think a plugin can never replace your own artistic judgement. I mean, how should it know which sections you want louderized, and whe...

Finally someone is taking the initiative.

Apparently this has been going on for a while but I learned about it just now: Cakewalk (formerly Cakewalk SONAR) was sold off by Gibson Brands and now lives with BandLab, who have decided to make it available for free, with no limitations (except I think some third-party addons were removed). Liter...

Stealing Titles

brb adding more weirdness

So in case anyone else has been missing the "new posts" link near the top, it's still available using the "quick links" menu right below the logo.

Lydian has its place. Not in my music collection, though... I was trying to find an example but I don't have any. Here's a real song written in Lydian (with brief intermissions that depart from it): SINl5JY7LhI IMO it works best as a temporary mode to contrast against something more straightforward ...

To be fair, in the two hours I spent on it I probably could have recorded better vocals, too. I have the luxury of being able to go back and forth between recording and engineering, unlike most "serious" productions.