Solo String Shootout: LASS and Spitfire

LASS: First Chair library and Spitfire Solo Strings each boast features representing a significant leap forward in solo string instrument plugins. SCOREcast’s Guy Rowland looks at both in a side-by-side comparison.

SCOREcast 2011 Holiday Deal Guide

The holidays are here, and there’s a plethora of deals and discounts floating around the Web for composers. Here’s our list of the best ones, constantly updated with links and details!

2011 NAMM: Vienna Symphonic, Synthogy, and more

Take a grand tour of five hot new plugins from the 2011 NAMM Show floor!

POLL: GEAR OF THE YEAR – 2009

Despite the long tail effects of a sharp economic downturn here in America, 2009 seemed to be a barn-burner year for music production software. Many companies delivered on promises made at the 2009 NAMM Convention back in January by coming through with products that have advanced the composing game a few steps ahead yet again. Although it is difficult — if not impossible — to whittle the year’s releases down to a small group of five, we’ve given you what we think are the top five most important releases of 2009, based solely on sales data from one of the leading musical instrument retailers in North America. Cast your vote in our GEAR OF THE…

DSP cards and the Universal Audio UAD 2

In keeping with this month’s theme of “Gear and Software”, I wanted to talk a little more about my number 1 “My Perfect 3″ find: The Universal Audio UAD2 DSP Card. DSP cards for use in DAW’s have been around for a while now, predominantly starting with Digidesign and ProTools, then later came the UAD-1 card from Universal Audio and TC Electronics released the Powercore card around the same time. The Digidesign DSP cards used a proprietary TDM architecture that ran only in ProTools hardware and software. For the rest of us who did not have a spare 10-15K lying around to get into ProTools, we were left out. When Universal Audio and TC Electronics…

December Theme: GEAR AND SOFTWARE

FACT: Composers love gear. It’s like we are born with a gear gene or something. Or a sickness… depends on who you ask! That’s why this month at SCOREcast we are talking all things gear and software. Other than our continued coverage of the Los Angeles composers unionization effort, everything you see at SCOREcast for the month of December will be gear-centric. Suggestions, tips, tricks, hints, warnings, praise, criticisms, and of course… deals (as evidenced by Houston Haynes’s very useful post this morning). We’ve even asked our contributors to weigh in with their Top 3 gear finds and why they like them, and throughout the month we’ll be bringing those to you in an ongoing…

SCO GEAR POST (Free TC Electronics Plug-in)

TC Electronics has just offered up their M30 Reverb plug-in for free until Wednesday. Available for both Mac and Windows platforms, click HERE and grab it while it lasts!!

Collaborating with Technology

For this month’s column regarding collaborations, I was thinking about all of this great technology these days, the Internet, and how people have – now more than ever – the ability to collaborate at many levels and from any location in the world. Songwriting, Arranging, and Scoring can now have many different authors if you so desire. We have the ability to leverage the talents of session players, arrangers, musicians, producers, et cetera to help create great sounding music. At first you might not embrace this, especially if you don’t want to split credits, publishing, and royalties. So lets assume for this article we are beyond that and you need or want to collaborate, either…