Once Upon a Time....

Once upon a time (say around 1982), there was a guy that loved to make sounds for synthesizers. He didn't just like to make sounds, no, he truly LOVED to make sounds for synthesizers. Well, this guy has made literally thousands and thousands of sounds at this point in his career. Sound that have been used in commercials, albums and films, sounds that are found in over 25 synthesizers and even more sounds that are provided as support for those synthesizers.

Well, fast forward to 2008 and when you look at creating music, today there are some really amazing virtual synthesizers that are available for your personal computer. In fact, some of these virtual synthesizers (or "Virtual Instrument" as they are generally called in "the Industry") are more complex and capable of doing things that don't even exist on a hardware based synthesizer.

Well, back to the story. See, this sound making fellow has noticed that there is very minimal support for these virtual synthesizers..... they are capable of doing so much, but do most people that use these synthesizers know all the cool things that they can do ? NO. Most people call up a factory preset, and use it to write a song without ever diving deeper than the browser window or the default patches....

Well John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl wants to change all that.... soon there will be a web site where you can go and download free video tutorial on how a certain plug-in works. Skippy will personally show you some of the cool abilities and explain how to use them - and it will be easy to learn because you will see and hear the review/tutorial instead of just reading text that makes your eyes glaze over. Watching someone do something is the best way of learning new things and there are lot of new things in all of the Virtual Instruments to lear. So these tutorials will be FREE to view and even download so anybody can also learn and start using the amazing abilities of these cool virtual instruments.

On top of this, Skippy will provide you with a link to download 10 free kick-butt patches for each of the plug-ins that he reviews. If you like those, there will be a link below the free one to purchase 50 more patches for $30 US dollars. The goal is to keep the price down so that nobody feels they need to give these away. Everybody can afford to have their own copy of these sounds and will hopefully tell all their friends to get their own legal download of the sounds. If enough people do this, then Skippy can keep creating reviews and sounds for other cool plug-ins and the world will hopefully be a slightly better place than it was before.......

First up is Native Instruments amazing FM8 - this plug-in has taken one of Skippy' favorite forms of synthesis (FM Synthesis) to new worlds and the 60 patches that have been created will help make this seem like a totally new synth. After this is a ton of new support for Spectrasonic's Stylus RMX including new drum kits, New Multi and MIDI files that re-invent tons of the included grooves and a ton of new Drum Loops in Recycle or native Stylus RMX format !! On top of this the "LIVE" Multi that has Tons of synth parameters, Chaos parameter and even Effect Parameters that change via controllers will also be made available .

Stay tuned !!