Sonic Reality

BERFAB · Post by **BERFAB** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:29 am

Seems that we have you and the boys to thank for 45 brand-spankin' new instruments in the new Cubase 4.5.1 release.

So...THANKS!

This is a very pleasant surprise, but I guess given SR's relationship with Yamaha/Steinberg, I guess this was kind of inevitable.

Rattling around in the back of my head is something about your involvement with Motif, though I can't seem to connect the dots.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, perhaps you can give us the background on this?

Cheers
-B

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:32 am

Definitely want to hear more about this. Being a Cubase user, I was happy to see the update (well, I suppose many weren't happy with it but seems like good stuff to me) and was surprised to see the Sonic Reality name in there. Congrats, Squids & Co and fill us in if you can.

Reverend Rhythm · Post by **Reverend Rhythm** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:05 am

I remember Dave being featured in a Motif ad. I believe SR also contributed to the Kontakt sample content.

BERFAB · Post by **BERFAB** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:34 am

Yeah, he definitely went Hollywood there for awhile. The ad was cool, but they had to really work hard to Photoshop out the extra tentacles.

Squids · Post by **Squids** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 5:12 am

They did Photoshop that a little bit. They actually made a poster of that and sent it to us. So we have it up on the wall in the hallway in the office. My "gone Hollywood" moment! haha. Bizarre. That was actually Yamaha's first ad for Cubase combined with the Motif (a two page spread even). I had no idea they were going to do that and in so many mags for so many issues. It was almost embarrassing. But also really cool. Good cred! After that other companies wanted me to use their keyboards too... and I am a gear slut so... you can imagine. Uh, yes, I'd like a Phantom please and ummmm the Kawai MP8 is nice and uh... the OASYS is really COOL and well I love those NORDS. The Nord Wave we actually did samples for as well by the way and I LOVE that keyboard. Secret weapon for live gigs with that flash ram in there.

But, as far as Yamaha goes we've always had a great relationship and they're really REALLY cool, the guys I deal with over there. They bend over backwards to lend you anything you need for NAMM and they have a lot of respect for what we do. I remember the US guys introducing me to some higher ups from Yamaha Japan once and they said they knew who we were and that Sonic Reality had a very good reputation in Japan. We did do that Concert Grand Piano sample library with ILIO that featured ONLY Yamaha grand pianos and I did an interview for their magazine once raving about them... that was YEARS ago. But ironically at that time we had done a lot of the sounds for Alesis Q Series and also some sounds for the Roland Vintage Expansion Boards (really for their sample library through Eric Persing and then they ported it over). But, then we did a little bundle of sounds for the Yamaha EX5. That really started us doing stuff together. After that they called us in one time to do the programming on their main piano in the S90. Then patch programming for the original Motif factory bank. Very few people know we worked on that but we used to do all kinds of stuff besides just sampling and licensing.

More recently though we created a product called "OneSoundz" which was the very first third party sound company to do sounds that work with HALion ONE. You can't just make HALion ONE sounds, they have to be made to work with the dongle and authoring stuff by them. But, we were part of a bundle Yamaha was doing called X-Factor (which is still available with a lot of Yamaha gear) that included a bunch of cool stuff from Sonic Reality, IK, FXPansion, Garritan and others.

At the same time I've made friends with some of the guys over at Steinberg and even came to visit them in Hamburg once which was a lot of fun (I found a fish market that had LIVE Alaskan King Crab which I had never seen!!! I need to go back and try it. I was by myself and didn't splurge but wish I had just to taste that! Must have been awesome. I am a seafood nut... naturally being a Squid and all). So, anyway, we had been talking about doing all sorts of cool stuff for a while and this finally happened. There are supposed to be some follow up collections coming as well. Nothing official to announce yet though.

BERFAB · Post by **BERFAB** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:45 pm

Very cool.

As you know, Steinberg has announced a hardware companion to the C 4.5 update, but nothing about the follow up collections you mention. Just as well. The 2 gig content download is a real time killer--especially since you have all of Cubase Nation trying to get to the server at the same time.

I'm not sure that any of the announced features in 4.5.1 will change my life in any measurable way, but I AM definitely looking forward to the content.

Cheers
-B

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:57 pm

Good stuff Squids. Honestly, I'm not usually interested in installing Cubase updates when they are first out and you can see from other posts that I'm, um, less than a fan of HalionOne but your sounds make me want to download the update and try using HalionOne again. Very tempting!

Jokari · Post by **Jokari** » Fri Aug 29, 2008 6:10 pm

Finally got my hands on the update

I was really excited to hear that SR had made some sounds so I was anxious to try them. The basses are pretty good, but I'm afraid I didn't care much for the rest... I won't comment on the drums since obviously they're not in the same league as dedicated samplers like BFD or AD. The acoustic guitars are very nice at higher velocities, but at lower velocities the attack envelope is completely unnatural and totally kills it. As for the pianos they're usable but the basic Sampletank pianos sound much more natural to me -- this one is more a matter of taste I guess.

So it was kind of a disappointment, but that's probably just because my hopes were set too high, having a high opinion of SR and all that.

And hey, can't exactly complain about free sounds now can I

Oh and Squids do you know if there's a way to keep just the bass sounds, or is it an all-or-nothing thing?

Squids · Post by **Squids** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 3:01 pm

I don't see how anyone can not like that piano. It's really nice and also very similar to the one we did in SampleTank and similar to the $100 piano we sold through M-Audio's Premium series. Sometimes it can even be the difference in the way a sampler sounds. It is a taste thing. The acoustic guitar is nice. Don't know what you mean there either. That was taken from the Acoustic Guitar Capsule which most people really love (never heard any complaints). But to each their own. It's just that with these being free and us normally selling these sounds with no complaints I just find it odd that anyone would complain now in this situation. Comparing the drums made for a stereo-only HALion ONE to multi-channel drums in BFD is way out of wack for expectation. But those drums are taken from our Studio Drums Capsule and Eclectic Drums Capsule and again people have loved those two titles for years... why all of sudden with a selection for free anyone would complain is baffling to me. Those are musically useful sounds. Tried, tested and albums have been made with them by lots of people already (maybe not in HALion ONE format but it is just a format). Whether you can use them in your music depends on you and your style of music. These are just meat and potatoes instruments but they're recorded well and sit in the mix nicely like most Sonic Reality sounds. They're not meant to be the END ALL selection of SR sounds but like I said we're planning on additional expansion and this is a nice added value taster.

Jokari · Post by **Jokari** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 6:02 pm

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Perhaps I should have made this clear, but I really didn't intend to disparage your work: just to share how I felt about it and see if others felt the same way. I'm in no way a professional user so don't worry too much about my opinon

For the piano, it's really a matter of taste: I simply don't like the Yamaha sound. For the drums, it wasn't a criticism, just that I wouldn't find it useful, but I'm sure someone without a drum vsti could use it -- by the way, the big issue for me is not that it's stereo-only (that would just make it less flexible, not less musical), but that you got only two velocity layers and no alternate samples. But, I'm not criticizing: that's the kind of tradeoff you're forced to do in order to cram 20 drum kits in a few hundred megabytes.

Now for the acoustic guitars I think it should be much less subjective, so I did a little audio comparison: http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/agshootout.wav . Default settings, no EQ, some reverb. There's a simple arpeggio, played by the following instruments:

Piano
Sampletank2 "Fingered 2"
Cubase4.5 "SR Premium Ac Gtr1"
Cubase4.5 "SR Premium Ac Gtr2"
Cubase4.5 "SR Premium AG FngrSld"
Cubase4.5 "SR Rosewood Gtr"
Sampletank2 "Picked"

Velocity switching makes the high E sound really bad compared to ST2 (the velocities of the high E range from 98 to 108). And at lower velocities the attacks have that weird "thing" to it, I'm not sure how to describe it. It doesn't sound completely natural, although it might do fine in a mix.

The velocities were not chosen to make the SR sounds look bad: I just recorded one MIDI riff, and copied it to all the tracks. No velocity tweaking. Now of course you can work around the problem by carefully crafting what notes should be above or below the threshold, but it makes the whole process much less natural. When playing live, it would mean I would have to carefully avoid anything close to 105 velocity: I would have to either play softly to stay below 95 or bang the keys to exceed 115. So, to me, unless I need the extra articulations (slides and mutes), ST2 appears to be a no-brainer. But maybe I'm wrong and it's just a matter of habit?

BERFAB · Post by **BERFAB** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 6:19 pm

Still downloading here...

At this rate, I won't have all the content for another day or so. There's actually a couple of .rar files that I can't even access yet just because the servers are still swamped.

In any event, I did manage to get that actual DAW update downloaded and executed. Installation was not a problem, but it will be sweet to have the content.

But from what Squids says, I probably already own (and use) much of the content on offer.

Regarding the drums, I actually routinely swap in drums from ST to substitute for stuff in AD that I'm not completely satisfied with. I just did this a couple of days ago, using a kit from the drum capsule to layer on top of an AD kit. Gives it much more punch and effect IMHO.

I assume that the new piano is NOT one of the previously offered pianos. Squids is already responsible for my favorite pianos: SS2's "the ONE" and ST2.5 Accoustic piano 3. Definitely looking forward to that.

And the deluxe studio accoustic guitar from SS2 (with the the 1/2 tone bend articulation) is probably my all time favorite sound. So, what could be bad, eh? (Oh, yeah...and FREE!)

Cheers
-B

Squids · Post by **Squids** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:27 pm

Berfy you probably have almost ALL of the sounds. But, we're trying to reach new people with HALion ONE direct Cubase support. It's convenient to have them in H1 though. Hard to support that format because it has to go through Steinberg to do it and everything. However, I use Cubase myself and I love Yamaha pianos and keyboards so we're into it. Not to the exclusion of doing drum kits in Kontakt, BFD, DrumCore, SampleTank and Reason but it's up there in our "want to do" list.

We've got some more stuff planned and yes at the end of the day it's hit and miss what one person likes vs. another. Sometimes a light version of a sound isn't as good as its larger version and that may very well be the case with a few of the sounds on this taster. Still usable but we may have other versions one would like better... either could be in HALion 3 format on one of the 6 Sonik Capsule libraries we have on www.esoundz.com or it could be in another format. Pretty soon though we'll have tons of sounds available in every popular sampler format... and then you can pick and choose what you want and in FOR what.

buscemi · Post by **buscemi** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 11:38 pm

I have a lot of these sounds, now I wonder not only how the pianos stack up against the existing SR pianos but my Yamaha digital piano which is my go-to for composing and I really like the sound. I'll have to use the Yamaha as a controller on the ST2/SS2 and now H1 piano sounds to see how they all stack up.

Jokari · Post by **Jokari** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 12:06 am

Squids: Oh, so it would be a light version of the sound? That explains it I guess. The demos of the Acoustic Guitar capsules sound nothing like what I posted...

Squids · Post by **Squids** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 6:40 am

Jokari wrote:Squids: Oh, so it would be a light version of the sound? That explains it I guess. The demos of the Acoustic Guitar capsules sound nothing like what I posted...

It's a taste. Sometimes when you do a light version you leave out some samples and that can make a certain range of the instrument not QUITE as good as the original. I forget which one we used for this (probably the Taylor 910) and there's a more elaborate version on the Acoustic Guitar Capsule. Although my favorite is the one Berfab was talking about. Hmmm, although we might have done a finger pick velocity which could be a factor as well. We actually did this a little while ago for Yamaha for a bundle called "X-Factor" and have worked on so many things since that off-hand I don't remember which one was used. But, either way, this is suppose to be a taste of Sonic Reality sounds. That's all. Not meant to be a complete guitar library or drum library or anything in specific. Just a nice set of sounds to get started with and there's at LEAST the 6 Capsules right now for HALion 3 to use (or other formats) while we work on our HALion ONE sound content which will be a variety of instruments. Nothing officially announced but it's in the plans.

Sonic Reality

KVR Audio

Hey! Squids! (Cubase 4.5.1 content)