Dear Mr Godfrey, sir,
Am I right in thinking that your new abode-a-wee is quite near to Bath?
It is just that Steve Howell, erstwhile maker of synthipoo librarian noises and someone I know you know, had no idea that you have moved (and yes, he DID have a Mellotron, a Wurlitzer Piano and a fabulous ARP Axxe back in the late 1970's when he and I used to do proggy-esque type music for school plays and the like). He is not so keen on the genre now but I blinkin' am and feel that you probably could be one of the saviours of the universe (and quite often my underpants).
Just thought I'd mention that.
Joth Gambold :lol:
I have only this last week been chatting to Steve. Genius that he is. To the uninitiated, Steve is the brains behind Hollow Sun.
http://www.hollowsun.com/ (http://www.hollowsun.com/)
We met when I submitted some samples of my old (now defunct, see Sound On Sound) Emulator 2 and since then we've been firm friends. Steve also was the brains behind the cool add on packs that were available for the Alesis Fusion, a synth that should have taken over the world...but why it didn't is a story for another time.
Anyway, on the up side, Steve has recently released a set of samples aimed specifically at us lot. The "Prog Pack"! :D
In Steve's own words...
"CP70, Trons, String Synths and Taurus plus Wurli EP200, Hohner Pianet
(Banks's original e.piano), RMI ElectraPiano and some steaming Hammonds with
easy panel control of 'drive' and Leslie in one download ... all for
$100!!!!"
One hundred dollars!! Available for EXS24, Kontakt, Reason and a whole bunch of other platforms. All that for 100 bucks. You can't really argue with that. Needless to say I've got it and it's f*cking fantabulous.
Steve's one of us - an artisan musician and music enthusiast doing his bit to keep us all going. For his efforts he is regularly awarded 5 star reviews for this libraries by the guys at Sound On Sound amongst others. He's the real deal, he's not out of some giant software house and works his arse off to make a living doing this with nary a complaint. So if you can, I would really urge you to support Hollow Sun if at all possible, we need Hollow Sun to survive. :D :D
Check out the website certainly. Of all the good guys, Steve is one of the goodist. :D
Steve is indeed a genius. I got to know him through the Fusion forum he moderates - because as Jem intimated the Fusion is the synth that should have eaten all other synths, particularly with Hollow Sun's freepacks which are just amazing, and SOOO good for prog - his 'Tape Watcher' nails Tony Banks' Watcher of the Skies intro sound perfectly.
What Steve does really well is create almost faultless recreations of classic keyboards in a few hundred MEGABYTES (sometimes a few TENS of MB) of samples, where other samplists seem to need several DVD loads of material running to multi GIGABYTES!
His most recent magnum opus is the meticulous sampling of a reconditioned Hammond Novachord - the world's first polyphonic synth from 1930 - //http://www.hollowsun.com/HS2/products/novachord/ and features in this month's SOS
I can only re-iterate what Jem is telling you - Buy Hollow Sun stuff! It's great!
very cool! lots of nice freebies, too!!