Photo from the meeting
Synth Freeware; the first thing on the agenda was going over the "Freeware You'll Actually Use" section of Beattie's website. This page includes freeware VST and AU plugins from all different manufacturers hand-picked by Beattie. Some notable ones that Beattie demoed are Spitfire Labs, Dexed and Nils K1v. Spitfire Labs is an acoustic-based sampler that has very nice quality sounds. The sounds are meticulously sampled to capture the full tone and vibe of each instrument. Dexed By Digital Suburban is an emulation of the world-famous Yamaha DX7 FM Synthesizer. It also comes built-in with thousands of presets that can be accessed on the "Card" page. And finally, Nils K1v. Nils K1v is an emulation of the Kawai K1 vector Synthesizer. The Plugin also comes with nearly every expansion card available totaling over 1,000 presets.
Freeware Demo; After going over each plugin, Beattie showed off how each plugin works in his DAW of Choice Logic. Each plugin has a totally different workflow, and Beattie showed off his favorite effects and manipulated MIDI to really capture the subtle to large differences between each different instrument's workflow.
Resource sites; After going over the plugin section of his site, Beattie showed off a ton of good websites that could be great resources for students attending CRAS. These include but are not limited to gearspace.com, KVR.com, and scoundprogramming.net. Beattie also went over a few interesting subreddits including r/plugindeals and r/foundthepreset
r/foundthepreset; After going over the resource sites, Beattie decided to demo a few presets off of r/foundthepreset. The entire premise of r/foundthepreset is if ever you stumble upon a preset that you recognize in a synthesizer, you can make a post on r/foundthepreset and list the synthesizer and the name of the preset along with the song and maybe even a timestamp. Since it's such a popular plugin, lots of presets in Omnisphere show up on this subreddit, and since Beattie owns Omnisphere, we decided to have a bit of fun. Beattie started pulling up famous presets and playing the melodies on his MIDI controller. It ended up being quite funny, since every once in a while, someone would recognize the song and get confused.
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