Finally decided to get around to another music equipment review. That being said, this time around, I'm reviewing another old-school sample CD made by Spectrasonics shortly before they switched to VST's: Bizarre Guitar.

This CD, available for Akai and Roland samplers, was a collaboration with new age musician Peter Maunu. Needless to say, this is not a conventional guitar sample library: the influence of New Age truly does show in most of the samples, as the CD is dedicated largely to the more ambient uses of guitar processing.

Bizarre Guitar is also an oddity among Spectrasonics libraries: it's not dedicated primarily to loops, but the last section of the library includes loops that makes use of a format that the company calls "Groove Control", a custom looping technique that improvises to different tempos instead of needing to manually adjust pitch to change tempo like with older loops. This Groove Control was taken to its limits later on with their Stylus and Stylus RMX VST's, the latter offering expansions that included some of the material from this section of the CD.

While the rest is recycled almost in its entirety in Omnisphere, it's still worth use on its own for reference of early 2000s soundtracks especially. Its sounds, while often used to death in that area, were amazing for their time.

It's been a while since I wrote on this blog yet again, and I do apologize for that.

First, I express my condolences to those both in Paris and in Lebanon. It's really a shame to see just how extreme humanity can get sometimes.

If it lightens the mood somewhat, some personal issues have made me feel it best to change my habits a bit, focusing less on promoting on sites that generally aren't interested in my work and more on actually making new material, including a new album that, while lacking an official release date at this time, is all but finished where the music itself is concerned.

Speaking of new work, I've also shifted gears slightly in the past month. While I still enjoy and occassionally make synthwave-style music, I've chosen to pursue another few game mod projects, including for the recent game SOMA. Contributions are not limited to music; it turns out that I do have some good use of my older equipment where foley effects are concerned, especially my Akai S2000's floppy drive, the S2000 itself to be reviewed later.

Also released a single called "Shattered", those of you who missed it. Will be updating the Music page of this site with a link to it tomorrow, but those of you eager for it now, here is a plain link.

https://python-blue.bandcamp.com/track/shattered

This track is particularly interesting because I wrote most of it for the intention of singing original lyrics. While the end result for the public is instrumental, I will be including the lyrics later on the page, and possibly throwing in my own singing as a bonus.

In the meantime, take care everyone until next time!