Apologies for the lack of tips lately - I have been completely snowed under with various projects so have been short on time.
I will soon be putting up some more parts for remix so keep watching for those...
In my studio news I have recently bought a few new bits and pieces and tried out some nice demos. I got D-Cam Synth Squad (http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=62) a couple of weeks ago and have been putting it through its paces. Some of the the patches make my ancient (1.5 year old!) Core2 Duo processor struggle a bit - this is the first synth I have tried which has made my computer crap itself so there must be some decent processing happening under the hood of this synth. I am dying to get one of those new i7 processors, however will wait to see what happens with Windows 7... ("GET A MAC" I hear you cry).
My initial impressions have been very positive - I won't do a full review on here as there are people far more qualified than myself to give a detailed rundown. However, just simply it is three synth in one which can be combo'd in a similar fashion to Korg's Legacy Synth. I won't attempt to say whether it sounds genuinely "analogue" as claimed by the maker, however it just have a nice gritty sound with a kind of 'analogue' flavour - don't ask me to try to qualify what I mean by this as I have no idea. The best I can do is say that some of the patches (especially pad & string) sound similar to what you could hear on a Prophet 08.
Also tried a demo of the new Largo soft synth by Waldorf (http://www.waldorfmusic.de/en/products/largo). The demo is fully functional for 30 days which is plenty of time to work out whether it is for you or not.
This is also a really cool synth - very different to Synth Squad. Largo has a shiny FM-style sound - a little like NI FM8 but also with its own character. Very tweakable and great for big fat synth basses and shiny pads.
I also downloaded a demo of Camel Audio's Alchemy (http://www.camelaudio.com/Alchemy.php). This sounded really promising however it kept crashing Cubase for me so I had to uninstall it. Not sure if this is a problem unique to me or not. Will maybe look at a future release/update or when I update to the new version of Cubase (I am still on 4).
One other cool piece of news is that you can buy selected Arturia Synths for half price at the moment and then you get a free upgrade to the new versions coming out soon. I bought CS80-V and Prophet V which arrived today so looking forward to having a play...I got mine from Audio Midi (www.audiomidi.com) but I am sure you can get them elsewhere too...
Stay tuned for the next tip - some more guest tips are coming too - so you may actually get some information from someone who actually knows what they are talking about....
