Instruments - Loops - Sales & Promotions

Presidents Day Sale! Up To 30% Off Every Order At Big Fish Audio!

We’re celebrating Presidents Day with up to 30% Off sitewide! Save on every shopping cart at Big Fish Audio! Only here for six days, so get saving now! The deals last through February 15th, 2021.

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General - Instruments - Interview

Studio Kit Builder Preview – NAMM 2012

View Studio Kit Builder Product page

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Instruments - Interview

Comments from the Producer of Q

QWhat is Q?

The idea behind Q was to create a virtual instrument that composers, producers, sound designers, and music editors could use to quickly generate film, television, trailer, and advertising cues in a wide range of musical styles. Unlike many other virtual instruments, Q doesn’t focus on one musical particular instrument or genre. Instead, Q was created to cover a number of styles; in particular, some of the more exotic and eclectic genres that are increasingly employed in modern cinematic music. A few examples of this are the Hong Kong Cinema, Middle eastern, Spaghetti Western, Ambient, Pulp Surfer, Horror, and Film Noir kits.

Many exotic and unusual instruments were recorded for Q, including Chinese drums and flutes, waterphone, tank drums, bowed electric sitar, and prepared piano. Where other VIs focus on detailed multi-samples, the emphasis for Q was live-played loops and phrases, which capture more of the authentic character of these instruments. Well over 95% of the raw sample content used to create Q was derived from organic instruments, materials, and live performances.

The harp, cello, some of the percussion FX, prepared piano, and the female soprano were recorded in Athens by my friend and collaborator on the Symphonic Maneuvers series of sample CDs released by Big Fish Audio, Kostas Varotsis. For the prepared piano recordings, Kostas inserted various materials between the piano strings, including rulers, wine glasses, elastic bands, and necklaces. Other FX oriented instruments like the Pedal Steel FX were recorded by detuning the instrument and “playing” it with keys, coins, picks, rubber mallets, and a credit card.

Q also features a large collection of sound design elements, from massive hits, fireballs, and swooshes to eerie metallic and instrument effects. Some of Q’s metallic sound design elements were created from raw samples that were made by tapping on or scraping a collection of huge metal sculptures that were on display in a corporate park in New York. These samples had to be recorded very quickly, before a security guard kicked us off the property.  The raw samples used to create some of the other metal effects in Q came from a variety of unusual sources, including wrought-iron railings, a 20-yard dumpster, an aluminum bridge, a steel utility pole cable, approximately 60 pounds of scrap metal bought from a salvage yard, and a metal Salvation Army donation box with a fantastically creaky hinge. Elements like these are really useful when creating trailers, promos, and cinematic cues. I collaborated with Ric Viers to produce the cinematic sound effects for Q, after I discovered a book on sound design that he wrote, called The Sound Effects Bible. Ric came up with some excellent contributions.

So that’s a quick overview of Q, and what it can do. I hope you’ll let us know what you think of Q, good and bad, so that we can continue to improve it in the future.

Thanks –

Steve Sechi

Producer for the Q sessions

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Instruments - Loops

Best of 2010

As we look back on a productive year of loop library and virtual instrument releases, there are a few that stand out. We’ve picked the top ten products based on sales, reviews and customer feedback. Here is a look at the top products for 2010.

 

Electri6ity

 

 

Kings of the South: Dirty Crunk Kits

  • #1 selling loop product in 2010

 

 

Detroit Soul

 

 

Ambient Skyline

  • Top Five selling loop product in 2010

 

 

MOJO: Horn Section

  • Top Five selling Instrument in 2010

 

 

Studio Guitars: The Michael Ripoll Project

  • Sound On Sound 25th Anniversary Award Nominee
  • Top Five loop product in 2010

 

 

R&B Swagga

  • Top 10 product in 2010
  • #1 R&B product in 2010

 

 

Cinematic Percussion

  • Sound On Sound 25th Anniversary Award Nominee
  • Top Five loop product in 2010
  • #1 loop product three months
  • 5/5 Sound On Sound

 

 

Impression Jazz Construction Kits

 

 

Violence

 

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Instruments

The History of our Virtual Instruments

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.

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