Yeah, from the beginning of the band, Laiho have used passive EMGs on his guitars. And we all know passive pickups aren't EMG's strength at all! In fact, most of them suck


Friendly advice - go check out Iron Gear pickups!

I never heard before of Iron Gear pickups,if i'll have the possibility,I'll give them a try.

They're really a small company, dedicated to their work. UK-based. Awesome quality for the money (usually you can get 2 pickups for the price of one single DM or SD! )

I'm just reading their site,it seems Guitar Buyer gives to their products 5 stars,the feedbacks from users are positive too.

An update: we have a working portamento script! This is highly customizable by the user. By default, you will trigger portamento by playing legato and hitting a lower velocity range. The user can turn this on and off, and specify the exact range. By default, it's 1-69. So, if you're playing higher velocities legato, you'll get hammer-ons and pull-offs, while if you play at a lower one, you get a portamento slide.

The timing components of the slide can be adjusted as well, depending on how snappy you want the slides to be. Our default values sound pretty good but you can adjust things like transition intro fade time, sustain fade out time, destination fade in time, etc.

Sounds Great. I can't wait to abuse it

Here's a little thing that will be nice for everyone. With some libraries, you hold down a keyswitch to force, say, stroke direction or string preference. With others, you tap the key once, and it 'latches' - you have to hit another keyswitch to change the one you're using. In Shreddage 2, you can pick which mode of keyswitch selection you want to use with a simple button. Just one of many usability features we think people will appreciate. But remember, keyswitches are absolutely NOT necessary to access the vast majority of featuers + sounds of the library!

great news Zircon!
Then,what about feedback? or if you aren't planning to add this new feature now,will it be possible to have it in future updates as well as other interesting sounds (eg amp cable noises and other fx) ?

Hi Zircon - will unison bends be included in the script?? I tend to play "live" as opposed to using keyswitches so that would be a really useful addition... I

Sorry - what I meant to say with the unison bends is a) press two notes on the keyboard, e.g. D/E together, then b) move the pitch bender up so that it doesn't bend the E but bends the D up to the E - hope this makes sense!!

No feedback or unison bends yet - not to say we won't have them though. It's a matter of figuring out the best way to implement it. There are many many note possibilities for unison bends, and it seems unrealistic that we could be able to sample all possibilities. Most likely, a scripted solution would work better, but we have to think about exactly how. Worst case scenario, you have two instances and bend one, not the other.

I don't like having an instrument folder with a lot of oddly named presets or a instrument with a lot of other esoteric peculiarities. I have a lot of instruments and more than likely will spend little or no time trying to learn new ones in any great detail.

I really like how Cinematic Strings have approached their product CS2.

5 main 'presets' with a ton of possibilities. The organization is great imho.

Not sure if I made sense. Anyway, please see how they've laid out their interface for ease of use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF2eQKx8JtA

My 2c.

Unison bends should be scripted - it works good enough, and doesn't require more sampling.


I agree with Aloysius with the interface organization - having it all in one NKI would beat giant multis that were the main part of the original Shreddage.

I think it would be a good idea to improve the new Shreddage library over time,so if its not possible to have a feature like unison when it will be availible,maybe we can have it with updates (also payement updates depending on how big the update is,something like that...).
Zircon have you ever thought about this possibility?

Aloysius / EvilDragon - agree 100%, so far we're doing everything in one patch and it works quite well. The one reason we might need to do another one would be to support double tracking, maybe. The solution I'm thinking about though would just involve loading two instances of the patch and clicking a "Double Track" button indicating the second instance is to be used for another output.

All of the features in the library are thus far accessible via one UI with tabbed pages. I'm not sure how fancy it will end up looking; probably a nice skin, fretboard monitor, but we may roll with Kontakt standard buttons/knobs (for now). There's also hover help text for every single control so ideally you won't even need to reference the manual... not that it's super complex to begin with, that level of depth is for people that really want to get advanced

metalheart - I can definitely foresee updates based on user feedback. For example, we recorded powerchord portamento slides, but it was so much work to put in the standard portamentos (literally thousands of individual samples!!) that we might hold off on powerchords for now, so that we can focus on other things like great-sounding release noises, chord stops, and easy-access controls.