DMS Chilled Out Chords

I've done a new MIDI pack for DMS - it's available here.

Imaginary Cities

Future State are gearing up for the release of Imaginary Cities and I just got an advance listen to one of the remixes.

Absolutely fantastic and a big difference from the original - I'll give you more details when I can.

Gareth Emery "Let it Flow" Remix

This just absolutely great - I hadn't picked this up before, but it is simply a fantastic piece of work in the Emery style.

Cooking up some things

I have a new tune which is basically done - it's called Wonderful Information and you can hear a clip of it in my lovely Soundcloud player over on the left hand side there.

This track is going to be debuted soon by Mr Ville Lope who along with Andy Tau from Future State has given me a load of help getting the mix sorted out - cheers to both of them. It's looking for a release and I will of course let you know when I know on that front!

There may also be some other stuff in the works which will make next year a pretty exciting time - I will talk more as and when.

More MIDI

Currently working on a new MIDI pack for DMS - something slightly different this time - I'll keep you posted.

Epic Chords Vol 2 Out Now!

Epic Chords Vol 2 is available to buy from DMS for £30.00 - there's now 40 midi files in there, so you'll never been short of a chord sequence again! Have a listen to Pete's amazingly epic demo for a taste of the...epicness.

Thoughts of an 8-bit wannabe

I have been seriously considering the purchase of a MIDINES, but as I'm about to move house I don't really want to accumulate more nonsense that has to travel around with me.

I do have a Gameboy with a copy of LSDJ and - although it's capable of some truly astonishing noises that emulators still can't touch - I hanker after proper, simple MIDI control so I can actually use it. Like most people, the time I get to spend producing music is pretty limited: I have to be on-target and not messing around for most of it, so a lot of the more wacky sound-design things I'd love to do get sidelined.

Here is what I would actually like, and I'm serious about this: an accurate NES or Gameboy-emulating VST. Sure, there's Magical 8-bit Plug and Pooboy, but they don't allow things like running tables, messing around with waveforms, arp-based sounds or indeed any of the stuff that makes programming a vintage chip-based system so awesome.

Gwem, Jellica, Dubmood and I can argue about this forever, but I think that 90% of what goes into chip music is the sound that the chip is making, and 10% is the use of the retro hardware itself. Of course, there's the wonder and romance of someone bashing out a fantastic track on a Texas Instruments Calculator or whatever, but for the rest of us who care about sound, there's only vague approximations of those wonderful tones.

Fact: none of the existing emulators out there can do half the stuff that LSDJ or Nanoloop can. By far the best chiptune VST is gwem's YMVST, but since he lost the second version (gwem, you're a great dude, but seriously...losing an entire version of one of the greatest VST's ever?) there's not much hope for progress from that direction.

So come on VST-hackers - get busy on a 100% perfect Gameboy emulator - I demand wavetable editing and arps!