I’ve been so busy with work for the past few months, I’ve barely had any time to play, so it’s with great pleasure that I have an empty week. This took me a couple of days to write. Read more..

This month has been quite fun for new gear. Apart from a Mackie Control and a Line 6 Variax 500, I’ve just taken delivery of this handbuilt Universal Audio 1176LN clone, and boy does it sound SWEET. Anyone who tells you that software plugins can sound just as good as hardware needs their head (or more probably their ears) checking. You can’t go wrong with it, even at extreme settings it just adds warmth, punch and that indescribable analog magic. I might stick some audio examples up if anyone cares for it.

Gotta love the blue VU meters too!

Here are some audio examples. In each of these you will hear a dry loop for 8 bars, then light compression for 8 bars, then heavy compression for 8 bars.

Pop Drums
Electronic
Percussion

Here’s a set of sequences that I programmed for AudioRealism’s BassLine Pro. You can actually hear most of them at work in the mp3 demo over at the product page, but they never made it into the installer, so i’m throwing them up here instead.

This is a damn fine plugin. I recommend it to anyone looking for a raw analog sound. My one complaint though, is that the sequencer is AWFUL to program. It’s modelled fairly precisely on the TB303 seqeuncer. Fair enough, you might think, but why recreate the inflexibilities of old hardware? The TB303 wasn’t exactly a joy to program in the first place. I can only imagine how much more fun a plug like this would be to program if it had a piano-roll type interface for the sequencer.

Download the sequence patches here