So much new stuff!!

My day job now has me flying all over the world and eating into what little spare time I have so things seem to be accumulating on the back burner for me to review or just simply comment on. So, here’s some of the stuff that has happened recently that I hope to get around to spending a bit more time on in the coming weeks…

First up, Reason 7!

I was on the beta test team and so had a good chance to play around with this before it was released. Suffice to say, it’s one of the best and most significant updates to my favourite music production application since its inception. We now finally have MIDI out, so I’ve been hooking up my Korg Prophecy, Alesis Fusion and other hardware to it, letting Reason’s copious amount of tools have their wicked way with my dusty hardware! I also finally bought PX-7, Propellerhead’s excellent FM/DX style synth. I wasn’t at all disappointed and the release of a single ReFill that contains every known DX patch known to mankind means I’ll never be bored of using this synth.

In addition to PX-7, I’ve also bought a number of Rack Extensions from the developer Ochen K. including his A-Range modular synths and Repeat Looper. These are both great sounding and educational. And of course, there’s Korg’s latest addition to the Reason rack, the Mono/Poly, which I bought without even trying, knowing how good the VST/AU was and how awesome the hardware original could be.

My friend Matt Black, aka Jiggery Pokery, is about to launch some awesome new Rack Extensions, namely Ammo, Battery and Re-Arm. More incredibly useful utilities for the burgeoning Reason rack.

And then there’s Propellerhead’s Thor for iPad, a superb semi modular synth based on, and fully compatible with, the Reason instrument of the same name. Probably the best £10.49 you’ll ever spend on an iOS synth.

Then we have UVI‘s “UltraMini“, the French developer’s take on what might have happened if a Minimoog and a Moog Voyager XL had they been allowed to incestuously fornicate. Review of this baby is incoming, right after I’ve done a similar task with their Digital Synsations product.

In other news, MOTU, makers of what is, in my opinion, the best software sampler out there, MachFive 3, have now released 30 day full trials of their DAW, Digital Performer 8, on both Mac & PC. I’ve been dying to find out what all the fuss is about, so I’ll let you know 😉

So, once time allows, I’ll be letting you know what I think of all this stuff! 🙂