Show Stratosphere used in popular song cover?

[bill45]

Greg, Are they posted yet?

[Gregjazz]

They aren't posted, I still need to edit the videos. They'll be posted along with the Kontakt Player update for Evolution Stratosphere.

[driverdave63]

Ooooh, I'm downright GIDDY with exsight . . eggsyt . . . excite . . me happy!!!

P.S. On an aside, theres this defeatist side of me that nags at my subconscious, telling me that Greg's in video narration will be in this nearly unwatchable, nasal monotone delivery, sounding EXACTLY like actor Ben Stein in the classic movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", LOL!!!

Of course I'm kidding, I'm certain they will be excellent G, and anticipate they will be quite helpful and popular with your customers.

Thank you again for taking on the additional workload I sorta put on you, I do feel a little guilty, with how overworked you seem to me at times. I've always been sincere when I say 'You rock, bro!!'

[Gregjazz]

P.S. On an aside, theres this defeatist side of me that nags at my subconscious, telling me that Greg's in video narration will be in this nearly unwatchable, nasal monotone delivery, sounding EXACTLY like actor Ben Stein in the classic movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", LOL!!!

Hahah, maybe for next April Fool's.

[soundbylaura]

Were these videos ever posted?

[Gregjazz]

Not yet--they're uploaded and ready to go, though! Hoping to get the Kontakt Player edition of Evolution Stratosphere and all these new videos (45 minutes worth!) released in the next couple of days, though.

[Scara]

Not yet--they're uploaded and ready to go, though! Hoping to get the Kontakt Player edition of Evolution Stratosphere and all these new videos (45 minutes worth!) released in the next couple of days, though.

Faith, lose, etc, etc, etc.

I'll go back to Impact Soundworks. better response times and less bull.
Cheers.

[Gregjazz]

Sorry to hear that! I realize the big Evolution Stratosphere upgrade has taken much longer than estimated. The video tutorial series is tied to that library, so we can't release those until the new Evolution Stratosphere edition is out.

In the meantime, we just released our new Evolution Rick 12 electric guitar sample library, have another Evolution guitar library coming out at the end of this month (in fact, our song contest winners already received copies of this upcoming library), and several other libraries close to completion. So far we've released several new libraries already this year as well as countless updates for existing libraries. Hopefully that helps explain some of the delay with Stratosphere and the promised video tutorial series.

[soundbylaura]

Well I'm not going anywhere.

[bill45]

Neither am I! Take your time and get it right.

[driverdave63]

Hi Greg,

See you've been hella busy with the new samples (the Rik is a dream come true, got some saving to do), but still you haven't posted those videos. Out of respect for your time, I don't suppose I could convince you to send 1-2 my way unedited just so I can move ahead here? I'll be hush hush about it, promise (signed and respected more than my fair share of NDA's, truthfully)?

Also, now that I see you guys have pulled off a successful 12 string emulation, would I be correct in expecting a 12 string acoustic coming soon? Hmmm?

Anyways, thanks for all your dedication and sacrifice timewise helping out constantly pushing customers like myself, really. I'm going to post a thread looking to try and see how big my demographic is (late 40's, 50-60 something old school rockers that can play actual physical guitars), I'm telling you, my gut is assuring me its a much bigger market than believed. If I'm correct, it would be nice to see a 'rededication' by OTS to this demographic because the current content (just like all the other Co's., why not be the trailblazers?!) sorely lacks in translation of 'geek speak' to laymen's terms, glaringly so, especially in the manuals. There's no real details or explanations from an actual guitar players POV on power chord sequencing/piano roll application, palm muting, ghost notes, string droning (a clear example of this would be the bridge/intro to the solo on the classic 'Red Barchetta' off Rush's Moving Pictures album) (string droning is used in hundreds of charting songs of the 70's-90's both distorted, clean, and especially acoustically, hugely in classical), chicken scratchin, harmonic pick pops (made popular and almost overused by Alex Lifeson in his mid-late career) programming/sequencing both picking and strumming in the same song (do you use 2 separate incidents in your DAW or is it possible or practical to use just one?), etc. etc.

You know Greg, I'm a 'not by choice' long-term unemployed commercial driver most recently employed by the largest live concert lighting provider in the world, and also a life long guitar player with an incomplete Journalism degree, and far too much free time on my hands. Would it be out of the question to at least consider utilizing me as an unpaid consultant to assist in establishing and/or opening a dialogue between the programmers and laymen like myself of your existing customer base that paved the way that got us to this point? It might even help take some pressure off you and your time stresses.

Well, I didn't start this reply with any agenda in mind other than that of the videos, but clearly this idea has been cooking on the subconscious back burner for some time, for all I know you and your staff (and your customers as well) might find my proposal laughable and/or even conceited and self serving. Let me try and graciously exit out of here by assuring you my motivations are honest and almost entirely selfless. I appreciate your time either way Greg, sorry about the length!

[Gregjazz]

See you've been hella busy with the new samples (the Rik is a dream come true, got some saving to do), but still you haven't posted those videos. Out of respect for your time, I don't suppose I could convince you to send 1-2 my way unedited just so I can move ahead here? I'll be hush hush about it, promise (signed and respected more than my fair share of NDA's, truthfully)?

I'll PM you, maybe we can work that out.

Right now all those videos use Evolution Stratosphere, and I realized after creating them that a video tutorials series that uses a different Evolution guitar library every video could be much more valuable, rather than constraining the videos to a single library. That way it also demonstrates how each guitar uses the same engine, and techniques you learn with one library can be used in another. That's the route I want to head when it comes to the video tutorial series. It also makes it easier to add videos as we implement additional features in the Evolution guitar engine.

As a side note, we're also looking to move all our documentation to our website. That way we can easily make changes and add to the documentation. Of course, you'll still be able to download a PDF from this live online documentation or print it out.

Also, now that I see you guys have pulled off a successful 12 string emulation, would I be correct in expecting a 12 string acoustic coming soon? Hmmm?

Yes, just got the audio for that, so that's on its way.

Anyways, thanks for all your dedication and sacrifice timewise helping out constantly pushing customers like myself, really. I'm going to post a thread looking to try and see how big my demographic is (late 40's, 50-60 something old school rockers that can play actual physical guitars), I'm telling you, my gut is assuring me its a much bigger market than believed. If I'm correct, it would be nice to see a 'rededication' by OTS to this demographic because the current content (just like all the other Co's., why not be the trailblazers?!) sorely lacks in translation of 'geek speak' to laymen's terms, glaringly so, especially in the manuals.

Just by using virtual instruments on a computer, you're already pretty much in geek land as it is. That being said, I usually expect the need for translation to be on the guitar side of things, explaining fretting position, chord voicings, etc. What sort of tech translation do you feel is needed? I'm genuinely interested, since that will give me better direction when it comes to both the written manuals and video explanations.

I think the main thing lacking is practical application of the features in the Evolution engine. The documentation goes over everything, and there are little tidbits here and there. That being said, it's more of a reference guide. It'll explain how controls work and how to technically use them, but it doesn't answer questions like, "how do I approach getting ___ guitar tone", or "what's the best way of achieving ___ guitar technique". That's better suited towards the video format, of course.

There's no real details or explanations from an actual guitar players POV on power chord sequencing/piano roll application, palm muting, ghost notes, string droning (a clear example of this would be the bridge/intro to the solo on the classic 'Red Barchetta' off Rush's Moving Pictures album) (string droning is used in hundreds of charting songs of the 70's-90's both distorted, clean, and especially acoustically, hugely in classical), chicken scratchin, harmonic pick pops (made popular and almost overused by Alex Lifeson in his mid-late career) programming/sequencing both picking and strumming in the same song (do you use 2 separate incidents in your DAW or is it possible or practical to use just one?), etc. etc.

For the most part, I think the simplest approach is the best when it comes to using the Evolution guitars. There's a lot of options in the interface, but the factory presets give you a good starting place. In fact, when making the audio demos I usually just load a factory preset, and only tweak its settings when needed. Otherwise I just load the preset and record the part.

Remember, all the features are there to serve you with extra capabilities when you need them. Ultimately you can just load the library and play in the notes for the guitar part you need. Afterwards you can start fine-tuning that part. Say you want one note to be played with a pinch harmonic--you could assign that articulation to a keyswitch and then insert the MIDI note to your track to make that note played as a pinch harmonic. After recording the guitar track live, I usually spend some time fine-tuning the track, tweaking velocities, changing articulations as needed, etc.

You know Greg, I'm a 'not by choice' long-term unemployed commercial driver most recently employed by the largest live concert lighting provider in the world, and also a life long guitar player with an incomplete Journalism degree, and far too much free time on my hands. Would it be out of the question to at least consider utilizing me as an unpaid consultant to assist in establishing and/or opening a dialogue between the programmers and laymen like myself of your existing customer base that paved the way that got us to this point? It might even help take some pressure off you and your time stresses.

I'll send you a PM so we can discuss that further.

Well, I didn't start this reply with any agenda in mind other than that of the videos, but clearly this idea has been cooking on the subconscious back burner for some time, for all I know you and your staff (and your customers as well) might find my proposal laughable and/or even conceited and self serving. Let me try and graciously exit out of here by assuring you my motivations are honest and almost entirely selfless. I appreciate your time either way Greg, sorry about the length!

Your proposal isn't any of those things. In fact, a lot of the changes and additions to our libraries were due to requests and suggestions right here on this forum over the years.

[driverdave63]

Cool, thanks for the time you took being so thorough in your response to this. Clearly your passionately dedicated to finding a solution to whatever may be handicapping your customers and keeping them from enjoying their purchases to the fullest. Thats class. I'll check my email after this regarding the pm's you mentioned.

Let me throw out here some of the very first roadblocks I encountered. First, I walked into virtual music reproduction/DAW's filled with the confidence I earned from 40+ years of self taught guitar playing, confident those years of musical theory, song structure and chord progressions would avail me a distinct advantage over a newcomer to music creation. Boy was I wrong!! If anything, it genuinely seemed to be a handicap. I continually kept 'overthinking' everything, my knowledge seemed to get in the way (I'm sorry I can't really elaborate here, it was just a very strong feeling of confusion and having lots of 'eureka' moments when I uber simplified my approach).

AS I said before in this thread Greg, what would have been a GODSEND, and would have rocketed my understanding, my ability, and my enjoyment of this or any virtual guitar vst would have been a simple 20 min video of someone 'sequencing' (absolutely NOT playing it live/realtime!) into a piano roll a well known rock song, I think 'Back in Black' by AC/DC would have been about perfect as this tool. Heres where the very first, unexplained issues started: What do I set the BPM at? How does the BMP effect song playback? How long should I draw the 'cells' in the piano roll? And do I remember correctly (this could have been a Shreddage 2 issue I'm confusing in) there was a midi/keyswitch issue early on regarding where to have the middle C (C3) setting in Kontakt (like octave 1 or octave 2, you know where it displays as many of the colored keys on the virtual Kontakt keyboard?) Anyways, thats also a point of confusion.

Your know Greg, I'm beginning to see a pattern here, aren't you? Most of these frustrations are centered more around sequencing problems, not necessarily a problem with the VST software. Right? But in fairness, aren't my complaints above the exact type of problems your receive almost daily? This could really explain the reason why theres so much of a communication frustration, the developer thinks they're not providing adequately assimilated usage info, and the customer is confusing DAW/sequencing issues with
software/engine issues. Am I on to something here???

I've got an idea, let me do some quick research online and i'll get right back to you amigo . . . I might have a graceful solution