That sounds fantastic!! Did you use Cherry Bass aswell?

Yeah, it's Cherry Electric Bass, with the muted fingered articulation. I layered Iconic Bass Jaco an octave up for that octaver type sound.

What drums did you use? I'm loving that snare with the long decay in the second half.

Loving the guitars too, of course, but I'm really jealous of all the beta testers so I'm trying to keep my mind off of that for now.

Knowing Greg, he used Addictive Drums.

The acoustic drums are indeed Addictive Drums, using the jazz brushes. I just picked up the brushes and sticks with their buy-one-get-one-free deal, so now I have all the Adpaks except for the electronic drums. I know I've said this before, but Addictive Drums is one one of those drum libraries you just keep coming back to. It's very flexible, sounds great, and loads super fast. It's really a dependable plugin too, at least in XP and Windows 7--never run into any bugs or anything.

But to address your question about the snare in the second half, I used the electronic drumset from the Cakewalk TTS-1 General MIDI plugin in Sonar X1. It's been included in Sonar for a while now, and it comes in handy from time to time. For that long decay snare sound, apply a reverb (I used the Sonitus reverb in Sonar X1) that has a bunch of predelay. Make sure the reverb room size is set high as well as the diffusion to insure that the reverb is as smooth as possible, like a plate reverb. Then apply a hard compressor on top of the reverb. It's similar to a gated reverb, but for that you'd use a send for the reverb and gate, so that the gate only affects the reverb and not the dry signal of the electronic drums themselves.

Of course, they're not the first band to do it, but the long decay drum sound was inspired by Wildlife Control's song "Ohai (Do I Know You?)". They do a pretty cool mix of live instruments and purposefully synthetic-sounding (in the digital sense, even) instruments.

Cool, thanks for the tips! I might try using that in a future track.

Are we any closer to the update being released?

Thanks

I should finish tuning the last of the samples today, so the next step is uploading everything for the beta testers! Although I made several tuning passes with the original release, I noticed that there were still a few out-of-tune samples, so I gave it a thorough run-through using a spectral tuner.

Cool! Can't wait!

Ok wicked. Will the beta just be for electric guitar users or acoustic as well?

Cheers

Initially the electric guitar, but as soon as it's done, I'll be working on making the acoustic guitar version--which will no doubt have its own beta testing, though I don't expect that to take very long since ideally the engine will have already been worked over during the electric guitar beta.

Quick update: the beta testers are now hacking away on it. There'll be some things I need to fix, but after nearly a year of working on this, it's cool to finally be in this stage.

Great news, Greg!

WOW! Great News indeed,looking forward to this!

Hi Greg,

I just bought Strawberry yesterday, and then saw this thread. So this just a new engine you're working on? Will it be a free upgrade for me?

Thanks,
Pat