MOTUnation.com

I'm one of the many victims of the disappearance of Bitheadz. Unity DS-1 was the first (and only) soft sampler I've dealt with.
I forgot about the whole thing while I was focussing more on my live band, but since recently having some of my compositions rejected by band mates as being too much work, too cerebral (and probably too much of me, me, me), I've been thinking more about getting back into constructing tunes by myself, alone in the basement.

What I'm looking for is:

Simplicity. I won't be doing my own sampling. I just want to have great sounding drums and bass. And horns and keys. I don't care too much about strings, but it could happen. I have no idea what "envelope filters" and that kind of stuff is. But I know what eq, compression and that kind of thing is.

Style ranges from jazzish, bluesish, to some sort of rockish and acoustic countryish stuff. (Afraid of commitment...?)

I use a guitar with a MIDI pick up and a MIDI keyboard to input MIDI stuff. I also construct drum tracks in DPs drum editor. And (blush) I sometimes take drum or bass tracks from BIAB and then tweak and fart about with them in DP. I want to be able to access great sounding drums, bass, keys and horns to trigger with the MIDI created parts of my tunes.

So I'm looking for something that will integrate nicely with DP, that won't require a rocket scientist to figure out, that will play all sorts of sample formats, and that won't hog the CPU of my PowerBook. Something that will let me take advantage of great sample libraries like First Call Horns and the like.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

There's a lot of stuff out there, but I've found Mach Five to be an intuitive, reliable, and functional workhorse.
http://www.motu.com/products/software/machfive

Cheers,

Geoff

I use Mach Five too. It definitely works fine in a DP environment. And it's easy to use.

Another popular choice is Native Instruments Kontakt 2.

Either of these soft samplers will work for you.

Well, if you don't intend to do any sampling, there are a bunch of "Romplers" out there - synths based on (gigabyte) samples of real instruments etc.

Go Google. Check out sweetwater etc.

chrispick wrote:Another popular choice is Native Instruments Kontakt 2.

Native Instruments also has a cutdown version called Kompakt that is supposed to be quite good if you don't need all the bells and whistles of Kontakt.

http://www.native-instruments.com/index ... kompakt_us

Reviewed here:

http://remixmag.com/computer_production ... i_kompakt/

<snip>

It's refreshing to see a product that delivers the goods for musicians while not requiring an advanced degree. Also, it would be an oversimplification to describe Kompakt as watered-down, because it produces high-quality results, irrespective of its lack of deep parametric controls. The bottom line: It's easy to use, but it's not sophomoric. Overall, if you need a powerful compositional tool, Kompakt is where it's at.

<snip>

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I know you are thinking of a sampler but a combination of Reason, Recycle, and some good loop cd's might be a cosideration. Being a MIDI guitar user since 1986 I have gone through many combinations of romplers and find the above choices a good quick combination for writing and works bullet proof in DP.

dosuna11 wrote:I know you are thinking of a sampler but a combination of Reason, Recycle, and some good loop cd's might be a cosideration. Being a MIDI guitar user since 1986 I have gone through many combinations of romplers and find the above choices a good quick combination for writing and works bullet proof in DP.

This is a good idea actually. I'd go as far as saying you could get by with Reason alone. It has a sampler (with access to plenty of library material), various synths, effects, drum machine and loops.

It certainly integrates well with DP and is pretty ease to use.

I also use mach five but when i use it in my powerbook i can only get about 4 to 5 tracks until i get the audio playback will disable to continue or change my buffer size. Its a 1.5 powerbook with 1.5 gigs. Also i t has an i lok so if you dont have a usb port open on your powerbook you'll need one.I bought a usb hub but if i dont plug it staight on the powerbook it reacts funny.Im using dp 4.6 but if my powerbook didnt come stock with tiger which for some reason wont allow 4.12 id still be on 4.12 I also have a single 933 g4 with 2gigs of ram and mach five runs fine. It'll have all the bread n butter sounds you seek and then some. It also comes with UVXTRACT witch allows you to convert almost any format you'd like seamlessly to mach five.

YES!!!! REASON is really the way to go. I use it almost all of the time for my music production with recycle. I was thinking of a sampler only, but this is the TOTAL PACKAGE!! and it costs about the same as mach five and no I lok...