The most common question I get is, “How did you get started making and selling loops?” When I was in school I met Nile Rodgers and he explained the use of loops from old records in making many of his disco hits. I was fascinated and ran out and bought an Akai S1000. Right out of college I got a great job selling orchestral sample libraries for the Synclavier. My friend Chris Lang and I produced “Drum Loops Volume 1 by Prosonus” and we sold quite a few of them. My boss was convinced and turned the whole operation over to me so he could focus all his time on his music. Since then, Big Fish Audio released hundreds of loop libraries and distribute many more.
For years I played the role of “A&R” but others do that now. I still sit in on all the A&R meetings and I highly appreciate everyone who submits material to Big Fish Audio. We get some great material and we get some that’s not quite ready yet. But I can always tell that a lot of hard work has gone into the submissions.
I have always used our loops to make my own music and enjoy hearing our loops in movies, TV and many top-charting records. Last year I got a kick out of hearing a construction kit from “Notorious: Hip Hop and R&B” in Slumdog Millionaire. I’ve had some of the greatest hip hop, RnB, rock, house and even jazz producers reach out to me just to say thanks for the inspiration and for keeping it royalty-free and not requiring crediting or disclosure. (We all have our secret weapons.)
Tom Meadows
President
One of our most popular partners, Cinesamples, just announced that they’ve got a new series of percussion libraries up their sleeve for release later this month. Those of you who enjoyed Drums of War should have a lot of fun with their new offerings! They tell us there are extensive dynamic layers and round robining, three mic positions, and tempo-synced crescendo rolls that’ll benefit the suspended cymbals and snares. As a composer myself, I’ve gotten great mileage out of Cinesamples‘ huge action drums and meticulous attention to sonic detail, so I can’t wait to get to work with these.
Congratulations to Michael Clark for being the grand prize winner of the Big Fish Audio 2009 Product of the Year sweepstakes! Michael won all 20 nominated products.
At Vir2 Instruments we use the Kontakt Player engine to drive all our products. Many new customers ask us why we use this plugin sample engine. We actually chose the Kontakt player for several reasons. It’s a very stable sampler engine that is both memory and processor efficient. It can run in standalone, or as a plug-in in any of the current DAW applications available on the Mac or PC platforms. It’s well known and widely used by many musicians, composers, and sound designers. The biggest reason we chose Kontakt is because of the powerful scripting engine; the scripting engine allows us to program real-time, performance enhancing features that make our instruments more musical and more enjoyable to use.
In the mid ’80s New England Digital added Polyphonic Sampling option to the Synclavier. This was a huge step forward in the development of samplers. Others like the Mellotron and EMS had been developing samplers, but the Synclavier was the first to provide the technology to create virtual instruments that could convincingly recreate real instruments. In 1986 we recorded the world’s first commercially available orchestral library, the Prosonus Orchestral Collection. At the same time a handful of composers contributed material to NED which was packed as a library from NED but this library was more of a mismatch of material which was primarily used to help sell the Synclavier. The Prosonus library was sold in two parts, strings in one volume and brass, woodwinds, percussion and misc in another volume. Each was packages on a 12″ Winchester platter and sold for a bundled price of $10,000.
In the ’90s we repackaged the library for the Akai platform and the product skyrocketed in popularity. The String portion of the library was bundled with the Roland S700 series samples and the library was featured on the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audio Card.
Later we recorded a critically acclaimed orchestral percussion library called London Orchestral Percussion followed up by London Solo Strings and First Call Horns. In 2006 we teamed up with producer Vir2 Instruments and began development on a new line of next generation instruments.
This promotion is a little self-indulgent. We enjoy collecting this kind of data internally and usually run some sort of pool, betting on the winner. The products were nominated by 15 people, mostly LA based producers. Anyone who votes gets a coupon code for $10 off coupon toward the purchase of any of the nominated products. (Vote on the Big Fish Audio homepage at the bottom of the page. Vote here) If you haven’t purchased any of these products yet listen to the demos to help you choose your favorite. But the best part is that we are entering everyone who uses the coupon into a sweepstakes to win the Grand Price, all 20 products! This is a $3089.00 value! The winner will be notified via the email in February.