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It would have been hard to believe that KSP would come along and enable us to be inventive  with the way samples & instruments behave, as well as the way they sound, but that’s what happened. We learnt to make GUIs that not only enable creative flow, but which visually evoke the magic of the instrument too.

Today the sampling industry is more exciting and vibrant than ever. We’re very proud to be a part of that, and to have assisted so many of you in making great music.We’d like to thank each one of you for your support, and we hope that the next 10 years is just as exciting for us all.

James & Dan

Download Abstrakt Vol.1

historis

Which may go some to explain why we hadn’t made one before. Plus, there were all those Hang drums, glass armonicas and the such-like to do first.

But, this year, we did. We spent some considerable time thinking about pianos, and looking for the right one to record – we thought about Bosendorfers and Faziolis a lot, but in the end we were drawn back to where many people begin (and end) with pianos – Steinway. A model D.

But aside from the complex, rich tone, we had another reason for selecting a Steinway piano. We had located, in the UK, a very rare thing indeed – a model D grand piano with MIDI (smaller steinways with MIDI systems are quite common, but few dare to besmirch a Model D in such a way). How did this happen? Apparently, sometime in the 1990s, a rich banker with far too much money decided he would retrofit a PianoDisc MIDI system to his Steinway. We felt strongly that with a MIDI playback system we would be able to create very precise, smooth velocity layers, consistent from key to key. We would also have a perfectly silent room when recording – no shuffles, coughs, sniffs from the player to listen out for and compromise the recording. It would also enable us to run the recording solidly all day and well into the evening with having to allow for the player to rest, eat and all those other annoying interruptions.

BRITISH GROVE STUDIOS, LONDON

Once we had the piano (now located in Giller Pianos Suffolk barn) – we needed a studio. Peter Henderson, our engineer for the project, had long been singing the praises of British Grove Studios in Hammersmith, West London – Mark Knopfler’s no-expense-spared exploration of how to combine the state of the art with the vintage. www.getmetaz.xyz A 48 channel Neve with rack upon rack of Prism conversion, in one of the cleanest sounding rooms we’ve ever experienced. But with 5 solid days recording time, it’s just a shame the rates weren’t particularly ‘vintage’.

The Kontakt Instrument

There will be two versions of this instrument – a full ‘Pro’ version with 6 mic channels, weighing in at 50GB on disc (compressed), and a smaller LE version with one or two mic channels. Both versions have 21 velocity layers, intelligent anti-repeat, and a full set of real sustain pedal samples. Available Q1 2015

UPDATE: Available now!

After many requests to update Geosonics with DAW-friendly automation parameters, and then some procrastination on our part – due to the size of that job – it has now been done.

So now you will get you a nice clean, labelled automation track in your DAW without any need for any additional fiddling around.

Maschine users will be pleased to hear that it is now very Maschine-friendly, with 9 character naming for parameters etc.

Registered Geosonics users can login and download it from their account > Updates

In other Geosonics news – I will be discussing Geosonics 2 with Chris Watson on Thursday 16th October after he performs at  A New Age of Surround Sound in Guildford, UK. More news when we have it..

Ryan Lott / Son Lux emailed me with a niggly NI Service Center issue which we won’t go into here. I googled him, and found the Lorde track, Easy (Switch Screens)

It caught my ear because of its stripped down, angular yet tribal beat. I said to Ryan I liked it, and he told me it was done with Soniccouture’s Conservatoire Collection and Samulnori Perucssion kontakt instruments.

Ryan says: ” Lorde tracked her vocals over the instrumental of the original version of the song Easy, which is on my record Lanterns. Then I adapted the song in response, and I knew it needed to be meaner. Her attitude on it was incredible. She did almost all her own vocal production, creating double and triple layers that were pitched-down and crazy-sounding. I was so inspired by it, I did most of the new version in a single sitting in the tour van between Berlin and Köln back in January. It was actually between the first and second shows ever (I didn’t have a band until recently)! I love the dusty, primitive and simple quality of the percussion in the Conservatoire Collection, so I started there. Those sounds have a lot in common sonically with the skins in the Samulnori stuff. I hacked into Kontakt and messed a bit with the tuning of the individual drums get the right tonal quality. On one of the drums, I did some extreme pitch manipulation to double the sub kick in special moments.”

Hear it here :

Available as a single track on itunes