I’ve taken a new job, a job that will take all of my time and, even if it didn’t, would clash somewhat with the impartial nature of OD. It’s a terrific opportunity that I am quivering with excitement about, but it’s with a not insignificant pang of sadness that this post is about announcing the (more or less) immediate ceasing of operations at Oh Drat.

Honouring our commitment to our customers is my highest priority, and I want to ensure that nobody feels short changed. With immediate effect, OD Total Music Production is no longer for sale. Technical support for existing customers will continue for a further 60 days, and the membership site will stay online at least until the eventual closure of OD in March 2014.

I am looking into ways to archive our best content following the closure of ohdratdigital.com, and I currently don’t have any plans to remove the videos from the OD YouTube channel. However in March 2014, it’s likely that ohdratdigital.com will no longer be on the internet.

I have had an amazing few years of constantly moulding and reshaping OD into something that I’m proud of and you guys can find useful, and without everyones’ support I’d never have kept it up. Special thanks go to James ‘Rhapz’ Kelly for all his support, and a massive salute goes out to all the manufacturers, developers, distributors, PR companies, and everyone else who has helped and cooperated with us over the years. Of course it’s you guys – the ones reading this now, sending wonderful emails, leaving comments on our YouTube videos, sharing our content on Facebook and Twitter, and just generally being awesome – that are really the stars of the show, and I wish that I could meet with and shake every one of your hands.

Thanks guys.

The post The End of OD appeared first on Oh Drat.

Reloop SHP-1 Review: Specs

• Frequency range: 10 Hz – 26 kHz
• Impedance: 64 ohm
• THD: <0,2%
• Acoustic pressure: 100 dB
• Plug: 3.5 mm stereo jack
• Adaptor: 6,3 mm stereo jack
• Weight: appr. 279 g
• Price: £149/$249

Looks

The Reloop SHP-1 is priced up there with premium headphones, and 100% of the asking price is based on the cans themselves. Inside the box is a pair of headphones, a cable, and a 3.5mm to 1/4” adapter. It would have been nice to see a carry bag in there as many other manufacturers include them, but realistically it’s nothing major. Made of a soft, porous rubbery plastic, faux leather ear pads and a 1980s car seat fabric headband, the shiny Reloop logo on the outside of each cup doesn’t rescue the SHP-1 from feeling a bit cheap.

As you’ll notice in the photos, the porous nature of the matt material is basically impossible to keep ‘clean’ looking, and the construction of the headphones is really nothing to crow about  – although one thing we can’t test in the time we have to do in a review is longevity, a quality that can be quite deceptive. The SHP-1 might not win any design awards, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall apart. Of course, it’s not how studio equipment looks but how it sounds that matters, but the Reloop SHP-1 doesn’t do itself many favours aesthetically – it looks like budget gear that uses the style, but not the materials, that a premium construction alternative might. If you’re looking for a pair of headphones that can moonlight as DJ gear monitors look elsewhere, because (not that they’re designed to, you understand) these feel unlikely to withstand the rigours of frequent abuse in a club environment.

Comfort

Put the SHP-1 on and things take a definite turn for the better though – they’re very comfortable. The large, circum-aural ear pads easily cover my ears and the padding and flex in the headband is just right, making for a pretty weightless feel on your bonce even for long periods. I’ve used quite a lot of headphones that employ a single cable connection from one cup to drive audio lately, and very nearly garrotted myself on multiple occasions when removing the SHP-1 and its connected to each ear cable, but this is just a preference thing and Reloop gets brownie points for making the cable replaceable – with standard connectors, no less. In fact I’m informed that more or less everything in the Reloop SHP-1 is replaceable; ear cups and cable are easily switched by the end user and should they need a repair Reloop can get their hands on the innards, which is definitely a good look for £150 headphones.

Sound Quality

So they’re a bit tacky looking but very comfortable; the most (or perhaps only?) important question, though, is how do the Reloop SHP-1s sound? My worries that there’d be a ‘DJ/producer’ sound to the SHP-1 proved completely unfounded as the sound that greeted my ears was, on first listen, flat as a pancake – a good thing.

Because of the closed back design I was pleasantly surprised to find that bass is very faithful, and sits beneath everything without pushing its way to the front – and sub bass digs deep, alerting you to the fact it’s there without colouring anything else. The same goes for the rest of the frequency range, and there’s a welcome, natural sound to separation – a quality that tends to start to be seen in this class of larger headphone. If anything it appears there’s a bit of a ‘hump’ in the upper mids region where snares snap and vocals crisp out, but it’s actually quite hard to say whether this is simply because this is an all too easy area for engineers (home studio ones, especially) to boost too harshly for presence. My go-to collection I regularly use for testing (a melee of tracks including amongst others joints from D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Anthony Hamilton’s Coming From Where I’m From, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a few guilty pleasures I won’t mention and Kanye West’s All of the Lights – the last one in the vain attempt to find a listening device that can possibly hope to explain how the engineer working on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy could have made things sound so bad and not realise) all sounded completely as expected, as did mixes I did myself and tried on reference systems.

For their price I feel I need to be picky, and despite saying there’s a nice, natural sense of space and separation – there is – it’s not up there with the best in class headphones I’ve tested at this price. It’s not until you start to drive the SHP-1 quite hard that you really get the best from them, and even then they just lack that glistening, ‘everything’s apart, but everything’s together’ quality that lets you know you’re listening to something great. The stereo field is almost too wide as well, a wideness probably due in part to how far each driver sits from your ear due to the thickness of the padding around the cups.

Summary

With the SHP-1 being brand new, I’m sure street price will settle over the coming months. Right now I’d be a little hesitant to wholeheartedly recommend them at £150, but for Reloop’s first real venture into music production gear the SHP-1 is impressive, and certainly worth keeping if they’re added to deals or packs. As always with monitors, be they headphone or loudspeaker, your mileage may vary and you should test them yourself if you can – you might disagree with me and think the Reloop SHP-1 is perfect.

[Show as slideshow]

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Similarly to past efforts, Aeon is a Kontakt Player library (Kontakt not required) split into two main banks – instruments and loops – and then split further within them. Again true to form, Heavyocity have harnessed the power of Kontakt’s effects and scripting engine to open up creative possibilities within the library – Aeon builds on Heavyocity’s existing concepts and represents their most complex work to date. Let’s take a look…

Heavyocity Aeon Review: Information

Price: $399 (also available separately: Melodic $299 and Rhythmic $199)

Format: Kontakt 5 Player

Size: 14GB (around 27GB, compressed losslessly)

Melodic

The size of an instrument library is sometimes overstated, I think. Too often you’ll be told how many patches or samples you’re about to buy – or how much space they’ll take up on your hard drive – but I could record a thousand samples of me spending five minutes scraping a mic across a radiator in 192/32 and it probably wouldn’t sell much. The beauty of Aeon is that the size of the library is directly related to how much time’s obviously gone into it. Just because 27GB is about two thirds of what Native Instruments supply with their Kontakt 5 library – a library that has an entire world of sonic variety from acoustic to electric to electronic instruments – doesn’t mean you’re going to get two thirds of the variety of sounds. What you get with Aeon Melodic is a medium sized collection of meticulously multi sampled sounds, sometimes up to six round robin samples on a key. The difference between the samples is very subtle, but anyone who has ever bemoaned the inorganic nature of sampler instruments will be appeased and then some.

Heavyocity’s methods afford some absolutely killer synth patches. Painstakingly multisampled – velocity, pitch, and round robin – modular analog synths give hold to polyphonic patches that are pretty stunning in their sound. If you are of the opinion that a soft synth is the ultimate in flexibility and any sound difference between it and a hardware, especially analogue synth, is negligible then you might be underwhelmed – until you listen – because sampled synth patches is a large portion of Aeon’s game. It’s that last few percent of realness and quality that Heavyocity are focusing on here, and they do it well.

Don’t expect many ‘basic’ sounds from Aeon Melodic. Don’t expect many dry ones either. You will find piano, hammond organ, rhodes, guitars, strings, and so on, but this isn’t a library to buy for dry sounds. Strip the patches of their effects and modulations and sometimes you’ll get to brass tacks and an ‘in the room’ sound, but to do that you’d be taking the salad out of the sandwich.

Rhythmic

Aeon Melodic is where the meat of Aeon lies when it comes to ‘instruments’, but Rhythmic is a separate bank that contains around 300 loops for you to get straight down to business. Don’t expect drums and percussion from Rhythmic – these are rhythmic (clue’s in the title), largely staccato instrument loops of the same ilk as the sound of Aeon Melodic. You can approach the loops in three ways: load one of five suites (nine if you count duplicates grouped by timbre) with each key in the patch triggering a loop, load an individual loop and rearrange each sliced hit, or load a trio of loops from a list curated to be particularly harmonious with each loop having an octave of pitch.

Modulation

One of the advantages to building a library in Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player is the terrific suite of effects that you can harness. It might be the sample source, recording method, and treatment of sounds that make Aeon’s bare samples sound good, but its the way Heavyocity have tapped into Kontakt’s myriad effects – from filters to bit crushers to saturators, reverbs, delays and more – that allow you to transform those samples and make your copy of Aeon sound different to your neighbour’s. Effects are sensibly laid out and you’re never overloaded with options, so dialling things in is simple – and everything’s key switchable via the top end of the keyboard.

The Twist dial that’s found in Aeon is a ‘big knob’ that controls an LFO modulated tone control, and the other big one, Punish, adds saturation and compression. The difference they can make to a patch’s general feel is tremendous, and I’d posit that Heavyocity chose these two controls to be the big, central ones in patches so that you gravitate towards them to get a different sound before worrying about individually dialing in effects  (and if you’re anything like me, getting lost in weird and wonderful sounds and never creating anything). It’s a definite, positive choice for UI, and it works.

Step Sequencer and Arpeggiator

Aeon uses step sequencers to add automated modulation potential for the effects in their patches. This is a great way to add some extra interest to sounds, and with each effect having its own sequencers for two different parameters (for instance, cutoff and resonance in the filter) creating something that has a life of its own is a cake walk. There is a shortcoming, though, and that’s that the sequencer is always running, and whilst tempo synced it doesn’t restart when your sequencer does… unless you assign a MIDI CC message to the on/off button of the sequencer and send it with your phrase.

In addition to the modulation step sequencers there’s a bank of arpeggiator patches in Aeon, and the arp that Heavyocity have squeezed into the Kontakt Player is very powerful. As well as cycling notes in chords in various ways, as you’d expect, you can also program in steps of pitch, velocity, and length and have them run with the arpeggiator, monophonically or in chords as pressed. Presets for major and minor scales ensure you stay in key during an improvisation session, and you can chain up to eight patterns together to build pretty much an entire track simply by holding down a few keys. It would have been nice to be able to control which pattern is currently playing via a key – that would really explode the live and improvisation capabilities of Aeon.

In Aeon Rhythmic, the arpeggiator is called the Loop Mutator – trademarked, no less – and it works in a similar way except instead of pitch, you select deviations from the slice reference. For instance, a sequence with 0, +1, -1 will play slices 5, 6, 4 if you hold slice 5, and 7, 8, 6 if you hold slice 7. Chords and so on still work, and the Loop Mutator thus massively adds to the value of the loops in Aeon Rhythmic. They might just be loops if you use the audio as is, but in no time at all you can mutate them into something completely different that simply uses the original as a launching point.

Summing Up

I’ve touched on this in previous reviews of Heavyocity libraries, but it’s more the case than ever here in Aeon: some of the sounds are so ‘ready’ that if part of your creative process hinges on spending a good chunk of time running cables (virtual or otherwise) out of a sound source and through a bunch of technical and creative effects to massage your sound into existence you might feel a bit out of a job! When the end result is the only thing you’re focusing on, Aeon might just be your saviour; pressing just a single key will often be so dynamic, evolving, and fill so much of the sound stage that you can pretty much record a MIDI note and call things quits. This is especially the case with the Hits section of the library, which I think is definitely the weakest area of Aeon. It’s comprised of vaguely tonal drones and atmospheres, and whilst perfect for composers scoring video work with foreboding acoustics it feels a bit… soulless. If process is half of what makes music production cathartic for you, you might feel like you’re ‘cheating’. I’m not even sure where I’m going with this to be honest – making sounding great easy shouldn’t be a negative point in a review!

Aeon won’t be absolutely everyone’s cup of tea, and it is definitely priced towards the professional end of the market. There’s a possibility that you won’t ‘get’ the price, but it’s (presumably) there because of the excellent attention to detail and the ready to use nature of the sounds. I’ve not heard anything better for the sounds that Aeon makes – certainly not as an all in one – and I’m looking forward to sitting down and writing with it soon – there are albums worth of sounds and inspiration here and your copy won’t sound like anyone else’s.

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Yep – I’m back on the pun wagon. The Nektar Panorama P1 is a keyboard-less version of the Panorama Reason/Cubase/Nuendo control surface that’s so far spawned the 49 key P4 and 61 key P6 that we first saw at NAMM, and it looks splendid. Aside from the omission of keyboard, pads, and motorised fader, the Nektar Panorama P1 is just as capable of controlling Reason, Cubase, or Nuendo, and I know this makes it the piece of kit that many of you that already have a keyboard/pad controller of choice have been waiting for.

Nektar Panorama P1

Some quick specs:

• 16 encoders
• 9 45mm faders
• 10 assignable LED buttons
• 11 dedicated transport buttons
• 20 preset locations store all settings
• Foot switch (sustain) 1/4″ jack input (pedal not included)
• USB port for communication with computer
• 6 dedicated assignable navigation buttons
• ASCII/QWERTY macros assignable to buttons and pads
• 3.5” high-resolution TFT display
• 4 modes when used with Cubase, Nuendo or Reason switch between Mixer, Instrument, Transport and Internal
• Presets and setup files for major DAW’s and VIs

RRP: $349.99/Euro 289.99/GBP 244.99

Available imminently, the price is already advertised as a little lower than above on some retailers’ sites, and the £220ish that seems to be the price you’ll be able to take one home for should mean there’s space for it in front of many users’ laptops – leaving you to choose a keyboard/pad controller based on core functionality rather than how many functions it can cram into the box.

I’m a big fan of the heads down workflow (for all the amazing features, bells, and whistles of computer based music production, every now and then I still consider paring everything back and using only an MPC 2500 during the creative process) and thus we’ve always been interested in the Nektar Panorama P1 at OD. Hopefully one will find its way into the studio for some testing soon – until then, let us know what you think below and check out the Nektar product page here!

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Wagner Sharp: Free Tube Guitar Preamp VST and AU

Available in 32 and 64 bit flavours for Windows VST and both Mac VST and AU, and featuring automatic stereo/mono switching and upto 64x oversampling, Wagner Sharp is a really nifty plugin indeed. It’s not the prettiest plugin in the world, but as you’ll see above all its controls are laid out in a logical manner – and it’s really the sound that counts, right?!

Wagner Sharp is a free direct download from Nick Crow Lab – click the link, where you’ll also find a donation page…

The post Free Tube Guitar Preamp VST and AU: Wagner Sharp appeared first on Oh Drat.

We’re no strangers to the generosity of Beat Magazine, and neither are we to XILS-Lab. We reviewed XILS Oxium last year and I was very impressed by the sound of the synth, so it’s great to see this freeware for you to expand your sound design arsenal.

XILS 3 Beat Edition: Free Synth

Three oscillators, effects, and a supremely configurable modulation matrix add up to make XILS 3 BE extremely powerful, and its left field interface makes the learning curve just steep enough to stop you going through the same old motions as with every other synth you own – hopefully getting you to generate some interesting new sounds in the process!

Download is simple – simply hit the link below and make sure you Like the Beat Facebook page, then download! Serials are unique and generated just for you via instant registration after download. Oh, and if you haven’t liked the OD Facebook yet please do!

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Ten smooth electric piano and synth construction kits for free – get the link inside!

Free Electric Piano samples: Cross Rhodes

Cringeworthy title aside, Cross Rhodes by Gorilla Loops is a silky collection of electric piano and synth loops – and as much as anything, the synth loops are a welcome addition to this construction kit pack. You might find it a very handy ‘guide’ in terms of chords, electric piano settings, and synth style… and you can chop the included royalty free sounds to your heart’s content too.

download is a simple enough affair – Gorilla Loops also provide commercial sample packs should they tickle your fancy, and Cross Rhodes is a free item in there store. Just add it to your cart, complete the checkout procedure, and you’ll be emailed a download link to the pack!

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OD Music Production Tutorials

Okay I admit it: It’s been waaay too long since the last OD video. This is my little warm up to get back into the swing of things, and I decided to answer the most common questions that pop up on our YouTube channel. Next up we’ll be getting back into some more music production tutorials, let me know what you fancy and you’ll find the links we talk about below!

Creative Commons Sampling

Monkey Banana Turbo 5 Review

Sounds for free download

(please bear with us while we fix broken images – a casualty of the redesign, I’m afraid!)

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FL Studio 11 New Features:

• Performance Mode trigger clips on the fly, with seamless integration with a variety of controllers
• Improved Controller Support with port linking between controllers and software to allow simpler hardware integration
• Multi Touch Support allowing core functions and some plugins to integrate with Windows Touch supported devices
• Sequencer Improvements including playlists doubled to 199, horizontal and vertical locking options when dragging in sequencer and piano roll, monophonic brush and chord strumming modes in piano roll, and mouse scroll controlled note velocity
• Workflow Enhancements with tweaks including right click data entry on controls, new shortcuts for faster plugin handling, and click and hold functions
• New Plugins including a kick drum synth, X/Y pad effects, key mapping for on-the-fly remixing, and a synth and effect channel lifted from Image Line’s Groove Machine
• Updated Plugins with improvements to the Newtone pitch and timing algorithms, Flowstone, a synth maker in the vein of Max/MSP or Reaktor, updates to the Harmor synth as well as tweaks to the visualisation plugin and multi timbral tools.

FL Studio 11 is available for now, with the Fruity edition at $99, the Producer edition at $199, and the Signature Bundle $299. Fruity edition doesn’t include much in the way of audio file sequencing, and Producer edition trims off some of the top end plugins… it’s still slightly too much choice in my humble opinion, but if you’re interested you can head on over for a look – we’ll look into a review soon!

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We’ve had a preview of Reason 7 before back when it was announced, and this video shows that Reason 7′s audio quantising looks like it’s going to be one of the slickest solutions on the market (and that Propellerhead have a… quirky sense of humour!). It’ll be especially handy for those of you that record live instruments, and the bounce to rex option will be a blessing for sample chopping producers.

You can still buy Reason 6.5, and until the release of Reason 7 in a couple of weeks you’ll get a free Reason 7 upgrade if you do.

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