Hi Big Fish fans. My name is David Das and I’m the product manager behind Electri6ity. While Electri6ity itself took more than three years to develop, the real breakthrough in sampling technology is a culmination of decades of sampler evolution and innovative ideas. Twenty years ago, our concept of sampling was largely, “Stick a mic in front of the violin, let the player play middle C, then play back that recording of middle C when the keyboard player plays middle C.” That’s the very ground level of sample libraries. In a very rough sense, that’s what the famous Mellotron did in the early sixties.
Then the next leap in innovation came as samplers became capable of handling velocity layers (i.e. play a note softly, and trigger a recording of the violin playing softly, which is very different in character from the violin playing loudly). Chromatic sampling increased realism some more, as samplers relied less on pitch stretching (which always produces artifacts). Release layers (the sound the instrument makes upon releasing a note) added more.
Electri6ity takes all of that to a much greater degree. With Electri6ity, we’ve basically deconstructed the electric guitar into its tiniest fragments: pick noise, sustains, releases, and so much more. We’ve found ways to represent playing styles, like vibrato and legato, convincingly. We’ve designed new ways to simulate some of the most amazing details, like pick position and angle, string resonance, amp behaviors, bends, unison bends…all of this so that when you sit down to play any of the Electri6ity guitars, the massively complex engine behind it can effortlessly re-create the experience of playing an electric guitar for you.
Don’t believe me? Watch composer Rich Friedman show you:
Hello everyone, here is this weeks update with our latest and greatest downloads. =)
Drum Drops released quite a bit of material for us this week. Soundsystem Vocals Vol.1, and Soundsystem Vocals Vol.2 are two reggae vocal packs that are really well done. They also expanded on their Fistful of Drummers series by bringing in Fistful of Drummers Vol.2 and they’ve created a new series that I think is going to be great, Drum Drops in Ska Vol.1.
Industrial Strength Records is still a fresh face to our website and definitely a worthy addition. This week they released Analog Explorer and Computer Core. Now Analog Explorer was produced by Xtront (if you don’t know who he is, you might want to) and let me tell you, he did an incredible job with the drums!
Bringing in the tail end of this section is the well known Future Loops. They released House Fragments and Beatbox All-Stars this week and you need to do a drive by listen. Seriously! Beatbox All-Stars is amazing and the talent they got to record with is jaw dropping (all their names are in the product description).
That’s it for downloads this week. Make sure to stop by www.bigfishaudio.com and listen to all the great things we have going on.
In this post I am going to give you my picks of the month and focus on two outstanding guitar loop libraries we’ve recently released. First on my list is Off the Hook Guitars. Off the Hook Guitars continues in a long line of worldwide hits in the “Off the Hook” series. There is something special that can happen to a Hip Hop or R&B track when you add the element of a live played guitar. Whether your looking for licks or leads, rhythm parts, or wah wah guitars you’ll find it all in this jam packed library. These expertly played and recorded guitars are definitely Off the Hook!
My second library recommendation for the month is Studio Guitars: The Michael Ripoll Project. Michael Ripoll is an A level guitarist working in the studio and on tour with some of the biggest names in the industry. Working with Michael on this project was a lot of fun. His range of talent and mastery of so many different styles is astounding. This is truly evident in this library as it contains over 1,000 loops ranging from rock to country, jazz, to funk. This is a must have library that will be an asset in many many music productions for years to come. (Currently Michael is working on a couple new projects for Big Fish Audio, so keep your eye out for their release later this year).
Now that you know my picks of the month go ahead and check them out yourselves. Both of them contain a free sample pack for you to download and try out yourself. On top of that I would like to personally offer our Blog readers a coupon code good for $20 dollars off either of these products for the month of June. Enter BRGPC1 at check out to receive your discount on one or both of these products!
As usual, we like to keep all our customers informed and up to date with what has arrived in our newest instruments, loops, and samples. We’re going to be expanding on that philosophy and start letting you all know what our newest line-up of downloads are.
This week we have a ton of new and exciting sounds and samples from Loopmasters, Nova Loops, and Track Star Entertainment. With Loopmasters, and the brands they affiliate with, we have some extremely well done electronica in their new products such as:
- Dirty Tech House
- Minimal GBox
- Lucio Aquilina Deep House Sounds
- Untold Dubstep Producer
- Bop Minimal Drum & Bass
- Tech House & Deep Minimal
With Nova Loops, a new fresh sound to our roster, brings you Dance Rock Anthems, and Urban Pop Heat. Last, but certainly not least, we have Track Star bringing in their download, Worlds Collide: Exotic Hip Hop.
Be sure to stay tuned and check out our website (www.bigfishaudio.com) to listen or read up on all the latest and greatest we have to offer.
‘…Just one word : STUNNING!…’
K-Slash on KVR
‘…Incredible. Great library! Next on shopping list…’
synesthesia on KVR
‘…I thought sample-based virtual guitar would suck, but boy was I wrong!!!…’
benjamind on KVR
‘…I can’t play keyboard quite that well but it’s pretty amazing what this VI can do on the fly. Once I have the spare cash I will be all over electri6ity for sure. Nicely done vir2….’
dmichaelsmusic on KVR
‘…This is great, I honestly never thought something of this caliber could be achieved in the range of Guitar Synth’s / VST’s. It sounds real. I can’t wait until it comes out….’
kirbyfighter12 on KVR
If you’re wondering what all that buzz is about, it’s about Electri6ity, the brand new virtual electric guitar instrument from Vir2 instruments. I’m Benjamin, one of the developers of Electri6ity and today I want to give you some insight into the development of this massive guitar library. I also want to tell you what makes it so special.
Let me start with some facts about Electri6ity: more than 200,000 44khz/24bit DI samples, eight famous guitar tones (Strat, Tele, P90, Les Paul, Rickenbacker, Danelectro Lipstick, ES335, L4) and more than 50.000 lines of Kontakt scripting.
Sometimes I’ve read that people don’t like advertising numbers when it comes to virtual instruments. Most of the time I agree. For example: I don’t care if a library contains 10,000 patches, if I only like one of them. I also don’t care if it has a million samples, if I can’t use it because the learning curve is too steep. But sometimes the amount of samples and the size of a library does matter.
Let’s start with size: Do you like a 30-second sustain note with natural decay better than a 5-second looped one? I do. At least when it comes to guitar or bass libraries.
Let’s talk about the amount of samples: Of course I agree with everyone who says that the amount of samples doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of a library. That’s true. If a library however is carefully recorded and each of the samples is manually edited and you want to cover all important articulations, the sample count will rise. And in this case it makes sense. Thanks to the new Kontakt 4’s new compression feature, however, we were able to keep this gigantic library at a reasonable size of 28GB.
The reason for the large amount of samples is the concept behind Electri6ity: every articulation is sampled with the same detail. For example: when we recorded a hammer on, we also recorded a muted hammer on. When we recorded a pull off, we also recorded a muted pull off. Same for the single fret slides. Same for the noises. We recorded every imaginable facet of the electric guitar. If you can imagine it, Electri6ity can play it!
Another key concept of Electri6ity is its artificial intelligence. This is very important if you want to emulate a guitar on a keyboard, since those instruments are so different in the way you play them. For example, on a keyboard every note has it’s own key, but on a guitar you have six strings and many notes are available on different strings. Depending on which string you choose, you’ll get a different timbre. And for a realistic performance it’s important you have access to those little nuances, especially if you are playing chords.
That’s why Electri6ity automatically transfers keyboard chords to guitar chords and – by watching your playing – is selecting the right string for you.
To make it short: we wanted to create an instrument which doesn’t need MIDI programming or editing. For my part, I’m a bit impatient when it comes to that. I don’t want to spent hours in the sequencer, tweaking controller changes, adding hundreds of keyswitches or loading patches for each articulation I’m going to use. I just want to write a song, I don’t want to engineer one!
That’s why the artificial intelligence behind Electri6ity takes care of that part, so the performer can concentrate on their creativity. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that you can’t exactly tell Electri6ity what to play and how to play it. You can – but you don’t have to!
I hope you enjoyed this insight into the concept behind Electri6ity and I hope you’ll see why we are so excited about its release after three long years of development.
For more information and demos visit http://www.vir2.com/instruments/electri6ity and http://www.youtube.com/user/vir2instruments, where you’ll find a lot of demonstration videos.
Cheers,
Benjamin
Vir2 Development Team
I met Richard Friedman about 3 years ago at the NAMM show in Los Angeles. This year we were showing Electri6ity and Rich mentioned that he’s looking for a good electric guitar VI. I had one of our guys give him a quick demo of Electri6ity and within a few moments Rich told us this is what he’s been looking for. Last week we had him drive up to our office to check out the beta version of the product. He sounded so good we shot a little video. This is him and Electri6ity, no MIDI editing and no mixing. It’s all live (with the exception of that drum loop near the end). Enjoy…