Hollywood, CA (December 4, 2017) – EastWest has released PLAY 6, the latest version of EastWest’s advanced sample engine, and includes a number of fixes, improvements and new features including:
New Instrument Database enables users to search and load any of EASTWEST’s 10,000+ Instruments in seconds!
Unified Navigation Bar for Main Menu, Settings, Browser, Mixer and Player buttons
Collapsable Instrument Sidebar with access to advanced instrument properties
Integration for Akai Professional and M-Audio VIP 3 supported Keyboards
Integration for Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol Keyboards and Maschine software (go to the SUPPORT CENTER > Software Updates > NKS Support Installer)
New and improved Convolution Engine for better performance with Reverb and Amp FX
Many other improvements
If you are a ComposerCloud member or purchase Hollywood Choirs you do not need to purchase PLAY 6, it will be available for download in the Installation Center.
About EASTWEST
EastWest Sounds (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for almost 30 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer with more industry awards than all of its competitors combined. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
EastWest MIDI Guitar Series Receives Electronic Musician "Editors Choice Award"
Hollywood, CA (February 5, 2018) - The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series has been the recipient of the Electronic Musician "Editors Choice Award."
"Although the art of playing synthesizers with a guitar has improved, the hurdles in setup from guitar to computer to synth have been daunting. But that’s over now: Fishman’s TriplePlay system tracks like a dream, and EastWest has done the heavy lifting on the DAW and synthesizer side of the equation with its MIDI Guitar Instruments Series.
EastWest has rolled some of its best sounds into Fishman’s TriplePlay standalone and plugin app, offering five themes: Ethnic, Guitar and Bass, Keys and Perc, Orchestra, and Soundscapes. EastWest’s Play VI obviates the tedious track-to-string, pitch bend, and additional controller mapping that comes with MIDI guitar territory. With the MIDI Guitar Instruments Series, you simply instantiate the plug-in, load a patch, and play. It’s not only easy, but also it sounds and plays great.
It’s difficult to pick any individual library as the standout—they’re that good. But if you already own a Fishman TriplePlay system, you can get a sense of their breadth by downloading the free EastWest MIDI Guitar Teaser Pack and experiencing the state of the art in MIDI-guitar control for yourself."
"The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series opens up a whole new world for guitar players who have been waiting for technology allowing them to use their guitar like a synth without having to compromise playability or sound quality. It's a break-through technology, and we are honored to be nominated for this innovation," says EastWest producer Doug Rogers.
By teaming up with Fishman, maker of the multi-award winning TriplePlay Wireless MIDI Guitar Controller, EastWest was able to develop a series of virtual instruments specifically for MIDI guitarists, optimized and designed to take advantage of the complex and unique waveforms produced by a guitar's vibrating strings. Currently, the company offers five volumes: Orchestra, Ethnic & Voices, Soundscapes, Guitar & Bass, and Keys & Percussion.
About EastWest:
EastWest (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for more than 29 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
EastWest MIDI Guitar Series Receives Guitar Player "Editor's Pick Award"
Hollywood, CA (February 5, 2018) - The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series has been the recipient of the Guitar Player "Editor's Pick Award."
"With the EastWest MIDI Guitar Series and Fishman Tripleplay in hand, you can deliver almost any sound imaginable.
I’ve been using computers to compose music since the early ’80s, so I’m a devotee of synthesis in general, and guitar synths in particular. In fact, I built my first system in 1980 out of an Imsai 88 8-bit computer that controlled a Serge modular synthesizer, and I can tell you this right now: I LOVE the EastWest/Fishman partnership and what it has done for guitar synthesis.
I know it might be strange for a reviewer to start off with a conclusion, but, you see, as a guitar player, I’ve been somewhat frustrated by guitar synths over the years—even as Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers have made great strides with some wonderful products. This is totally due to my personal playing style, but if you’re like me, you want an easy-to-use guitar synth that tracks performance gestures accurately and without glitches, and that allows you to strut around freely with all the “guitar star moves” that attracted you to the instrument in the first place.
The Fishman TriplePlay Wireless Guitar Controller—reviewed in the December 2013 issue of GP—remains a gamechanger in that it doesn’t ball-and-chain your urge to dance around and rock hard. But what really makes this system a sensational synthesis synergy is the EastWest MIDI Guitar Series. EastWest has produced brilliant sound libraries for years, and now the MIDI Guitar Series brings those incredible samples to guitarists with everything arranged and optimized for seamless integration, and virtually imperceptible latency, with the Fishman TriplePlay.
THE PRICE OF ADMISSION
Assuming that you already have a guitar and a DAW-based recording system ready to go, the EastWest collection is currently arranged in five volumes—Orchestra, Ethnic & Voices, Soundscapes, Guitar & Bass, Keys & Perc—costing $149 (street) each. A Fishman TriplePlay goes for $399 (street). So newbies can dip their fretting fingers into guitar synthesis for as little as $549 (a TriplePlay and one EastWest volume), or sound zealots can go all in for $1,144 (a TriplePlay and the complete EastWest collection).
GETTING TO WORK
There’s not much of a learning curve here. Load your selected Guitar Series patches into the TriplePlay software, and the virtual instruments are automatically configured with recommended function settings such as touch sensitivity, vibrato, and pitch bend. Although your personal approach may require you to tweak some parameters to match your performance needs, this “auto configure” feature gets you started right away.
Although users must load the EastWest instruments from the Fishman TriplePlay software preset menu to access the special programming for this series, the EastWest Play software inside is a system wide “mission control” for modifying the EastWest instruments, and there are tons of options (see Fig. 1). An 8-channel mixer lets you stack different sounds for tremendously cool textures, and the FX routing for each channel is so comprehensive your head just might explode. You get an SSL channel strip with EQ, compression, a transient shaper, and a noise gate/expander, as well as an SSL stereo bus compressor, an amplifier simulator, and a convolution reverb. It’s pure bliss for producers and audio-engineering geeks, but even if you’ve never messed around much with studio signal processors, the sound-sculpting options should make you dizzy in a good way (see Fig. 2). Just twist those virtual knobs and have fun!
Fig. 1—The Play window is your “mission control” for accessing the power of the EastWest/Fishman MIDI Guitar partnership.
Fig. 2—Look at all the toys you get in the FX window!
SESSION TIME
The EastWest Guitar Series volumes—excepting some brand new electric and acoustic guitars—are collections of previously available sounds. Yes. The computer-music nerds got them first, but all the patches are astounding with richly nuanced timbres, life-like animation (in an aural sense of ambience, attack, and decay), and cinematic impact, so once you start playing parts with your guitar, you’ll cease caring about anything else but the wondrous sounds you’re constructing.
For example, I am currently scoring an indie Web series about gangs in Asia and San Francisco called Gold Mountain (ikeibifilms.com), and I need a lot of ethnic instruments. Using EastWest’s Ethnic & Voices volume, I not only found a guzheng and a shamisen (from China), as well as a tar (from Iran), I was able to blend the sounds together and use guitar vibrato to produce strange, yet organic underscores for the series trailer (which you can see at guitarplayer.com—just search for “gold mountain”). In addition, I found some taiko drums that I layered to produce a huge percussion part that really shook my innards. In the five volumes currently available, I wasn’t stumped for a sound once, and being able to add amp sims and aggressive EQ to, say, cellos and marimbas, is really inspiring.
CLOSING NOTES
As an independent composer and producer, I am often burdened with limited budgets from independent film and television clients who want a massive orchestral score, but who don’t have the money to hire an orchestra—or even a string quartet that could be layered and overdubbed. With the EastWest libraries in hand, however, I can deliver almost any sound imaginable—from large string ensembles to solo cellos, sitars to didgeridoos, astral pads to Gamelon boxes and Moroccan darubakas, nylon-string guitars to fuzz basses, and Mellotrons to glockenspiels—and create sonic visuals all on my own. And, of course, all of this happens with a guitar in my hands, which makes me a very happy composer. soundsonline.com."
About EastWest:
EastWest (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for more than 29 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
EastWest Releases Hollywood Choirs
Hollywood, CA (December 5, 2017) – EastWest has released Hollywood Choirs, a ground-breaking new vocal virtual instrument. Produced by Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix, Hollywood Choirs is the epic follow-up to 1999’s Voices of the Apocalypse and 2005’s Symphonic Choirs, the best-selling and most awarded virtual choir of all time.
Hollywood Choirs features a blockbuster choir made up of male and female sections that will instantly transform your next project into a cinematic masterpiece. The women sound angelic, dramatic, and ethereal; the men sound deep, rich, and thundering. Together they combine to deliver unprecedented dynamics and shocking realism that will make your soundtrack sound like the next nominee for Best Original Score.
Hollywood Choirs features an improved WordBuilder plugin. WordBuilder allows the composer to type in any word or phrase and have it sung by the choir. It also includes 110 new pre-built phrases in English, German, and Latin unique to Hollywood Choirs, which can be effortlessly dropped into your mix or be used as a starting point to create even more custom phrases.
Hollywood Choirs Diamond Edition includes a 13 microphone-user-controllable setup (including a Neumann Dummy Head) designed for surround sound and virtual reality, which is particularly attractive for film, TV, and game composers. The Gold X Edition, included in ComposerCloud X, features Main and Surround mixes. All purchasers of Hollywood Choirs and all ComposerCloud subscribers will also receive a free license to PLAY 6, the new and improved generation of PLAY that includes an instrument database search engine. This brand-new search engine will help you quickly navigate all of the award-winning instruments in EastWest’s massive catalog, by instrument, genre, and style, and allows you to save your favorite instruments and create your own custom descriptions.
“Hollywood Choirs is the third choir EastWest/Quantum Leap has sampled,” says EastWest producer Doug Rogers, “we learnt a lot from the previous productions and Hollywood Choirs is the culmination of that experience. In particular, the choirs’ ability to sing any word or phrase has been significantly improved resulting in much more realism; and there are many more sound options to enable the user to sculpt the sound to their requirements.”
“In the past 12 years, there have been many attempts by others to improve on what EastWest/Quantum Leap achieved with Symphonic Choirs," says EastWest producer Nick Phoenix, "Small improvements were made to various aspects of choir sampling, but the emphasis has been on pre-recorded and severely limited phrases. If composers are not tired of hearing the same faux Latin phrases repeated over and over, those listening certainly are. No single choir virtual instrument has managed to deliver a fluid, intuitive and great sounding choir that was capable of singing any words in any language, soft or loud ... until now.”
Hollywood Choirs delivers the powerful, blockbuster sound that all composers are seeking and opens up new 3D soundscapes that will help create incredible and emotional journeys for your audiences for many years to come.
EastWest Sounds (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for almost 30 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer with more industry awards than all of its competitors combined. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
EastWest Announces VOICES OF THE EMPIRE featuring vocalist Uyanga Bold
Hollywood, CA (September 7, 2017) - This fall, EastWest/Quantum Leap will release VOICES OF THE EMPIRE, a brand-new product perfect for epic film/TV/game soundtracks. Featuring the raw, primal vocals of Uyanga Bold, VOICES OF THE EMPIRE will make the perfect companion product to the highly-anticipated blockbuster HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS.
Uyanga Bold is a unique talent, melding the ethnic musical traditions of Bulgaria, Serbia, Mongolia, and beyond. She is a trained opera singer with perfect pitch, fluent in Russian, Mongolian, French, English, and German. It's East meets West like you've never heard before. Her voice is beautiful, pure, otherworldly, haunting, unsettling, powerful, genuine in its ethnic flair and world class in its precision.
Uyanga Bold has taken the world by storm since she appeared on the scene, recently touring with Hans Zimmer with his live performances of the score from The Dark Knight. Forbes Magazine wrote "her voice harkens back to ancient civilizations" and she has been nominated as "Female Singer of the Year". She has appeared internationally on television, radio, and in live performances, reaching over 25 million views across all platforms.
Dozens of Mongolian, Bulgarian and Western-style, multi-sampled vocal instruments
Dozens of expressive phrases in every key
2 unique Mongolian legato vocal instruments
1 traditional legato vocal instrument
Expressive vowel multi-sampled vocal instruments
VOICES OF THE EMPIRE will be a must-have virtual instrument for composers and musicians looking for that haunting cinematic vocal sound for their next project.
Produced by Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix, it will be available for purchase and as a free addition for all members of ComposerCloud (soundsonline.com/composercloud), EastWest's multiple award-winning subscription service that has revolutionized the virtual instrument industry since it was first introduced in 2015.
About EASTWEST
EastWest (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for more than 29 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
EastWest MIDI Guitar Series Nominated for NAMM TEC Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement
Hollywood, CA (September 27, 2017) - The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series has been announced as a nominee for the 33rd Annual NAMM Technical Excellence & Creativity (TEC) Awards in the category of Outstanding Technical Achievement for Music Instrument Software. Presented by The NAMM Foundation, The NAMM TEC Awards are bestowed annually in celebration of the pro audio community by recognizing the individuals, companies and technical innovations behind today's sound recordings, live performances, films, television, video games and other media.
"The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series opens up a whole new world for guitar players who have been waiting for technology allowing them to use their guitar like a synth without having to compromise playability or sound quality. It's a break-through technology, and we are honored to be nominated for this innovation," says EastWest producer Doug Rogers.
By teaming up with Fishman, maker of the multi-award winning TriplePlay Wireless MIDI Guitar Controller, EastWest was able to develop a series of virtual instruments specifically for MIDI guitarists, optimized and designed to take advantage of the complex and unique waveforms produced by a guitar's vibrating strings. Currently, the company offers five volumes: Orchestra, Ethnic & Voices, Soundscapes, Guitar & Bass, and Keys & Percussion.
The NAMM TEC Awards will be held in conjunction with The NAMM Show on Saturday, January 27 in Anaheim, California. The event begins with a reception at 6:00 p.m. followed by the awards ceremony at 7:00 p.m. Event tickets will be available for purchase in late September by visiting www.tecawards.org. A variety of event sponsorships are also available by visiting https://www.tecawards.org/sponsorship-opportunities
About EastWest:
EastWest (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for more than 29 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer. Find more about EastWest at www.soundsonline.com.
About the TEC Awards
Presented annually by the NAMM Foundation during The NAMM Show, The NAMM TEC Awards recognize the individuals, companies and technical innovations behind the sound of recordings, live performances, films, television, video games and other media in 31 Technical and Creative Achievement Categories. The Les Paul Award is given at the event in tribute to musical artists and others whose work has exemplified the creative application of audio technology. Through its Hall of Fame, The TEC Awards also honors the pioneers of audio technology and the music industry's most accomplished producers and audio technicians. The NAMM Foundation's TECnology Hall of Fame celebrates innovations and ground breaking technical achievements of the past. For more information, visit www.tecawards.org
About NAMM
The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) is the not-for-profit association with a mission to strengthen the $17 billion music products industry. NAMM is comprised of approximately 10,300 members located in 104 countries and regions. NAMM events and members fund The NAMM Foundation's efforts to promote the pleasures and benefits of music, and advance active participation in music making across the lifespan. For more information about NAMM, please visit www.namm.org, call 800.767.NAMM (6266) or follow the organization on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Now Available: EastWest MIDI Guitar Instruments
EastWest and Fishman Collaborate to Unlock Guitar’s Potential
Hollywood, CA (May 22, 2017) - EastWest, the most awarded virtual instrument developer has teamed with Fishman, creator of the multi-award winning TriplePlay® Wireless MIDI Guitar Controller, to develop a series of virtual instruments specifically for MIDI guitarists.
The new EastWest MIDI Guitar Instruments series is different from the current EastWest virtual sounds, which are optimized for keyboards, in that they have been selected and designed to take advantage of the complex and unique waveforms produced by a guitar's vibrating strings.
Current Fishman TriplePlay users will notice the EastWest instruments do not have to be loaded for each string. EastWest included a system that loads the instruments on all strings at the same time, greatly reducing the computer resources required, and especially if the instrument uses SSL EQ/Compression, Ohmicide multi-band distortion, EastWest Convolution reverb, or EastWest Amp Simulator, included in the EastWest PLAY software for each collection.
The EastWest MIDI Guitar Series has been released as 5 volumes: Orchestra, Ethnic & Voices, Soundscapes, Guitar & Bass and Keys & Percussion.
Fishman’s TriplePlay Wireless MIDI Guitar Controller now includes updated v1.4 software with a newly designed interface that features an improved look and feel, enhanced DAW compatibility for faster performance and a better user experience, an optimized sound library, full 64-bit compatibility with plugins, and maximized foot controller functionality.
"We have been testing MIDI guitar systems for years, and the TriplePlay is the best in class," says EastWest Producer Doug Rogers. "EastWest and Fishman worked together, re-programming the instruments and adjusting the software specifically for the Fishman TriplePlay. In fact, it opens up a whole new world for guitar players who have been grappling with decades-old technology. I know many of our users consider themselves to be guitar players first, so they will now be able to compose using their preferred instrument, instead of a keyboard."
Fishman founder and president, Larry Fishman adds, "The opportunity of collaborating with EastWest is very exciting, not only for our two companies, but also for guitarists who are looking to explore new avenues of creativity and sound. EastWest virtual instruments are the choice of top music, film, TV, and gaming performers and composers."
EastWest (www.soundsonline.com) has been dedicated to perpetual innovation and uncompromising quality of Sample Libraries and Virtual Instruments for more than 29 years, setting the industry standard as the most critically acclaimed sound developer. Find more about EastWest at soundsonline.com.
About Fishman:
Fishman is dedicated to helping musicians of all styles achieve the truest sound possible wherever and whenever they plug in. Our ongoing commitment to professional sound and quality has helped our company grow to become an industry leader in amplification, effects, and pickups for acoustic and electric instruments, MIDI control, and other product categories.
The loyalty from our extended family of players, technicians, repair professionals, and instrument manufacturers, is really a result of our loyalty toward them. This bond goes beyond product alone, but also extends to our customer service, interaction and support.
After 36 years, you still have our promise that Fishman will always endeavor to be the best at what we do, but most importantly… to make you sound your absolute best.
