Reason Forum Song Challenge – Challenge IV: VAST

Ladies & Gentlemen,

It is with great pleasure that I can now declare the first of this year’s challenges as OPEN!!

If you’ve been following the teasers, you may have heard the announcement on the SonicState podcast this week. For all of you who joined in the chat room for the live recording, I’d like to extend particular thanks for showing your support. I hope the technical gremlins didn’t spoil it too much and if anyone missed it, you can listen to the podcast here or download it from iTunes for free. I highly recommend subscribing to it as it’s a fantastic weekly source of music tech news and knowledge sharing. It’s full of great people from all around the world, most of which you will become familiar with over the coming year when participating in the challenges!

So, without further ado, here are the details of the first challenge of 2012!

The ReFill

VAST

So, to ease you all back in, I have decided that the first challenge should be similar in format to the last few, in that we give you a limited sound palette to work with. And it gives me great pleasure to announce that this time, we will be using the marvellous sounds created by Tom Pritchard and his VAST ReFill. VAST contains 465 beautiful, highly playable and innovative Combinator patches that push Reason’s Thor synthesiser to its limits. These Combinators make the most of Thor’s modulation possibilities to create expressive, rich sounds that are full of movement and are highly playable. Every patch has been meticulously crafted to sound detailed and interesting whilst sitting comfortably in a useful frequency range, so you can easily drop any of these patches into a mix and get down to writing some great music without having to tweak them. VAST’s Combinator skin fits in perfectly with other Reason devices but is still easy to spot in a complex rack. Check out the demo on his site.

Tom Pritchard

Tom is a synthesiser programmer living in South East England. He has programmed synthesisers for a over a decade.

The Judge

It gives me enormous pleasure to present our judge for this first challenge of the new year. ….

Dave Spiers

For those that haven’t heard of Dave, you will almost have certainly heard his instruments and even possibly used his hardware.

In the 1980’s, Dave started as a drummer/keyboard player but ‘fell into’ programming synthesizers and drum machines during the early days of MIDI when artists wanted technology to be truly transparent.

In the ’90’s, he toured with several artists including Debbie Harry & Shakespeare’s Sister before working as a researcher on several Keyfax Books and subsequently co-founding Keyfax Software. Within Keyfax Software he developed the multi-award winning Twiddly Bits MIDI Sample Library which is still in use to this day with various ‘motifs’ licensed to companies such as Ableton and Yamaha. The Programmer’s Toolkit Twiddly Bits product he devised lead directly to the inception of the Phat.Boy MIDI controller which became the first mass-appeal MIDI controller. Production was co-funded and managed by Chris Macleod who went on to become Dave’s trusted co-conspirator with the inception of GForce on 1st April 2000

Within GForce Chris and Dave continued the production of the Phat.Boy as well as the development of emulations of vintage synthesizers and classic keyboards. The first release, the M-Tron, quickly became one of the world’s biggest selling plug-in instruments and all subsequent GForce instruments (Oddity, Minimonsta, VSM, M-Tron Pro and impOSCar2) have been released to critical acclaim, garnering numerous industry and user awards along the way.

While GForce remains Dave’s day-to-day focus he’s also found time to provide patches to the Spectrasonics Bob Moog Tribute Library, write countless articles and tutorials for various music technology publications from the Japanese DTM Magazine to the UK’s Computer Music and Future Music, as well as contributing Sound Design skills to several TV and film projects, including National Geographic’s IMax release, Sea Monsters. He also provides technical expertise to a very select roster of artists including Underworld (with whom he developed the Underworld iDrum iPhone app) and Ultravox.

He lives in a room lined with vintage synths and keyboards and it’s from here that Dave contributes to the weekly music technology discussion podcast at Sonistate.com. However, his real ambition is a studio with a window!

Good enough credentials to be a Challenge judge? Hell yes!! 😀 Really, really happy to have Dave onboard!

The Rules

To participate in the challenge, you will first need to download the free ReFill which contains plenty of material to create your masterpiece. Your composition must only contain sounds from this ReFill and no other sound library. However, we will allow you to put vocals on and we will allow you to add one other audio track to accommodate things like an acoustic instrument. Also, you are free to use whatever drums and percussion you want. As before, should we need to verify that your entry meets the criteria, we reserve the right to request the song file for verification otherwise we will be reluctantly forced to disqualify your track.

Judge’s decision is final

All entries, once completed, must be uploaded to SoundCloud and submitted to the Challenge group…

http://soundcloud.com/groups/vast-refill-song-challenge/tracks

Please ensure you upload to SoundCloud and then add your tracks to the group page, ensuring you use your forum name so that we can easily identify you. Just to be clear, this challenge is for Reason users only and you will need to have an account at Propellerheads, which is part of the registration process, so if you don’t have one, register your copy now! 🙂 If your copy is illegal, shame on you! Oh, and you won’t be able to enter!

Entries will be judged by our guest judge and there will be one winner who will receive a copy of the full VAST ReFill worth £45.

Tom, Dave and I wish you all the very best of luck and we look forward to hearing your entries. Should you have any questions, please direct them below, but if not, have at it guys and enjoy! 😀