New Tracks Written for 50/90

Each July 1st, a worldwide collective of musicians, producers, lyricists and music fans gather on the innernets to create music for a project called 50/90. The idea of the project is for each group or individual to create 50 songs in 90 days. This year, it's being run by the folks from FAWM, who bring you February Album Writing Month.

We knew this was going to be pretty much impossible, but creating 50 songs for us wasn't the goal. The goal was really to participate in the community aspect of it all - to interact with friends made in February, hopefully get some inspiration, and write some music.

Well, so far, not bad. We've finished a total of six complete songs, contributed to djx's excellent Solar Sails track, and have made and received many comments.

Here's a link to our work:

http://5090.fawm.org/fawmers/looprication/

The only bad thing is that 50/90 shuts down after a while, so the whole thing disappears sometime before the end of the year (we're guessing). All the demos will probably live in perpetuity on looprication.com but it's cool to see all the constructive criticism on the 50/90 site.

You can go to the site to see who we're following, but if you're lazy, just check some of these links:

djx - a frequent collaborator, excellent electronic producer, and fellow r-hole (Reason) dweller
caterwauler - we're hoping to collaborate with this ethereal voice soon
heavyhedonist - not many demos (which we have razzed her about endlessly) but the lyrics stand on their own quite nicely

Latest track as of now - Abduction - get it here:
http://5090.fawm.org/songs/3579/

or here:

http://www.looprication.com/tracks/abduction.mp3

The whole thing ends October 1. We'll do our best to keep the music coming.

Native Instruments Komplete 6

I knew it was coming. Native Instruments has announced Komplete 6, which is as they claim the best value ever as far as the Komplete bundle is concerned.

I'm pretty much ready to line up for this one, if for only the Absynth 5 update. I pretty much swear by Absynth 3 for my basslines, and I've used A4 for a lot of ethereal sounds, so I'm curious to see what they do with this one. Also, I think Absynth is the only product they have that's not built on Reaktor. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just sayin'.

As far as Kontakt 4 and Guitar Rig 4, I'm not as excited. I'm sure they've done amazing things to those two applications, but I don't use them much. Just GR for some send effects through Live, which has actually been a great thing. OK, yeah, I should be more excited for GR4. And as far as my lack of enthusiasm for the next version of Kontakt, I plead ignorance.

So yeah, here we go. And for the suggested upgrade price of $169 (US, which isn't worth shit these days but it's alls we gots), that's a fantastic investment.