Earth Moments is a team of producers, musicians, and engineers based in Chennai, South India. They offer world-class high-quality sample collections of instruments that you just can’t find from anyone else. We’re proud to partner with them, and equally proud to announce that there are five new Earth Moments sample packs available for Studio One! If you’re getting a little tired of bass, guitar, and drums then you will definitely want to check these out. Check out the descriptions below—and further below, we’ve got a couple videos on the making of the Laya Project, as well as audio demos!

Click here to visit the PreSonus online shop.

EarthMoments Hamsa – Arabic Percussion: 300+ samples of traditional and nontraditional ethnic and Oriental grooves and beats from various countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Israel and Greece. The samples are divided by instrument AND performance style, and includes percussion instruments like the Darbuka, Doholla, and Rick, performed in no less than seven styles.

EarthMoments Laya Project – Producer Collection: An exceptionally high-quality bundle of rare recordings from the award-winning production Laya Project, a journey of music and visual discovery through six countries affected by the 2004 tsunami. Contains authentic and organic folk instruments and vocals, recorded in the remote villages of Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and Maldives using warm Neve and SSL preamps.

EarthMoments Oriental Orchestra – Producer Bundle: An unmatched, top-end quality bundle of live strings recordings recorded in world-class studios around the world using warm Neve and SSL preamps and Neumann vintage tube mics. Recorded on metronome clicks, the live strings – without any keyboards or digital inputs—link to the rules of western music, allowing music producers coming from any style or genre to easily use these complex orchestral lines in their music. Oriental Orchestra Bundle contains 3 types of string sections: Quartet, Octet and Ensemble.

EarthMoments Tribal Vocals FX: An amazing pack of tribal vocals FX from the Indian Ocean countries such as: India, Indonesia, Reunion, Madagascar, Mauritius, Balkan and the middle east. This unique package presents a mix of west and east, acoustic and digital, and organic and synthetic—pasted and processed to fit perfectly in electro, tech, dubstep, trap, drum and bass, house, or any production that needs that extra spice.

EarthMoments World String Series – Celtic Harp Bundle: The Celtic Harp, also known as folk harp, is an ancient instrument that dates back over 4000 years. While the Celtic Harp brings to mind the Celtic green isles that have influenced Celtic culture and music through the centuries, the harp developed in many variations in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Asia. Traditionally a popular instrument with medieval bards and troubadours, classical music composers through the ages have been inspired to create music that does true justice to the harp’s spectacular range of sound and tones.
Click below to hear audio demos of these samples:

Check out these videos on the making of the Laya Project:

Looking to get up to speed on the latest tips ‘n’ tricks in Studio One? If you live in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, or Chicago, come on by IMSTA FESTA and learn from the best! You’ll have the chance to learn from longtime PreSonus regulars like: KATFYR, Johnny Geib, Marcus Huyskens, and David Vignola. Click here to register.

KATFYR: All-around bad-to-the-bone EDM producer, DJ, songwriter, and longtime Studio One advocate. KATFYR has done some NAMM demos for us over the years and has had some hits over on BeatPort that he produced in Studio One.

Johnny Geib: Anyone who has even skimmed our forum at one point or another over the past decade has probably learned something from Johnny Geib. Johnny is one of our longest-running and most vocal advocates, and a good friend. When not doling out seasoned answers to forum newcomers (and vets), Johnny runs HomeStudioTrainer.com, where he doles out even MORE answers.

Marcus Huyskens: An editor at Studio One Expert and Producer/Mixer/Engineer at Bad Cat Media Group, Marcus is a freelance Sound Recordist & Mixer for music, television, films, and web. Marcus also has an extensive knowledge of Pro Tools for those using both or making the switch to Studio One, and has created amazing training videos for Studio One Expert and specializes in advanced audio editing techniques for Studio One.

David Vignola: The Main Man behind Vision Recording Studios, where he has been a professional audio mixing and mastering engineer for over 15 years. He specializes in an “in-the-box” workflow that yields warm, analog-like results. Don’t believe it? Listen for yourself here. He’s also responsible for Home Recording Made Easy, where he has tons of great training videos for Studio One.

Click here to visit www.imsta.org, where you can learn more info and sign up! Hurry, space is limited—be sure to get your seat ahead of time.

• Los Angeles: May 14. Presenter: KATFYR
• Chicago: July 23. Presenter: Johnny Geib
• New York: Sept. 24. Presenter: David Vignola
• Toronto: Oct. 15. Presenter: Marcus Huyskens

Russ Hughes, creator of the “Expert” sites for both Pro Tools and Studio One, has created a series of videos to help Pro Tools customers get up and running fast with Studio One. He covers everything from you need to know from the ground level, including Getting Started and Audio Set up, all the way to Event FX, Stem Exports, and Bouncing. And don’t forget—Studio One lets you use those familiar Pro Tools key commands!

Check out the video series in its entirety below.

Also, it just so happens that we’re offering a significant discount on crossgrades to Studio One in the month of April. If you own a qualifying DAW, you can save a bundle. Click here to find out how much you could save! 

Betcha didn’t know we made monitor pads. SURPRISE! And what better way to introduce these squishy li’l buddies than to give them away? From now until June 30, 2016, you’ll get a free pair of the ISPD-4 Monitor Isolation Pads when you buy a pair of R65, R80, Eris E44, or Eris E66 monitors.

I know what you’re thinking. “OK, great, PreSonus makes monitor pads. But why the heck would I need a pair of those? It’s not like my monitors complain about being uncomfortable.”

In a word: decoupling. Speakers transmit their vibrations to any surface they are resting on. That includes your desk, and once it gets moving, it’s likely to have a resonant frequency or two—turning your desk into something of a speaker in its own right. This will most certainly lead to louder bass in your studio—which may sound cool to you, at first. But fact is that this resonance results in an inaccurate portrayal of your mixing work in the worst of all possible places—your studio. A recording that might sound great in your studio sans isolation pads will render thin and without much bottom-end when played on other audio systems.

All you need to do is provide this rebate form signed with proof of purchase. Get a set of ISPD-4s with our newest monitors, and start making mixes that you can trust. The monitors may not thank you, but your clients will.

• Click here to find a dealer in the USA
• Click here to find a dealer outside the USA

Tune in to PreSonus LIVE on March 31 at 2pm CST to learn all about PreSonus hardware and software integration: remote preamp control of the Studio 192 and StudioLive RM mixers from Studio One, remote Fat Channel control, and using the StudioLive CS18AI to control up to 64 channels in a StudioLive Mix System.

This show will also feature a ton of special guest interviews (see right) as well as a live performance from critically lauded Baton Rouge post-sludgecore doomsters THOU.

Click here to watch the show on March 31.

Need to know the showtime in your time zone?  Click here.

Need a reminder? Just pop your e-mail address into the form below to receive a reminder e-mail on the day of the show! Hooray, no more Eventbrite!

The brand-new ULT Loudspeakers are currently on the shelves of select dealers in the USA! American Musical Supply, Full Compass, ZZounds, and Sweetwater have received portions of the initial shipment. If you want to be among the first to own a set of ULTs, click the links below to get a hold of them!

ULT means Ultra-Long Throw—these loudspeakers boast a tremendously focused vertical dispertion that projects your sound to the back of the hall for maximum intelligibility throughout. Designed with our partners from WorxAudio, the ULTs feature the Pivot X110 horn, a rotatable driver that allows you to get the best out of the ULTs in both horizontal and vertical configurations. The ULTs strike a balance that champions versatility; they’re sturdy but not unreasonably heavy, so they’re ideal for either permenent installations or mobile rigs. Generous I/O and convenient DSP presets round out the offering.

Interested? Contact a dealer by clicking below!

[This just in from Scigor of SFGames. He has been using Studio One Prime in the development of a forthcoming game, and is doing some fascinating things with it!]

I’m Scigor, a Tokyo based Creative Visual Artist.

And I’m the (crazy) mastermind behind SFGames, an indie games development team made of creative waywards.

SFGames is a team of artists and professionals joined together to work on various projects, starting on our first game with the working title of “Operation Cerulean Dew”—an action survival/horror game with sci-fi elements. We are lucky enough to be part of OSVR (Open Source Virtual Reality) partnership, so in addition to our main game, we have the chance to make new projects exclusively for Virtual Reality. We grabbed a great opportunity to develop an educational project for the Centenary of the Great War. And we have another cinematic VR project in the pipeline, a fantastic journey about human imagination and the spark of creativeness.

Illustration and character design are my main activity but I’m also a 3D enthusiast, passionate about video games and animation, and interested in many others artistic fields like music and cinema; a kind of “factotum” artist. But I’m not a pro musician; my approach is very self-taught and by ear. So why do I take care of sound design by myself?

Because I’m fascinated by how any forms of art are inextricably linked—creative ways to express emotions and ideas. For any idea that I write, every illustration that I paint, or melody that I record, I cannot think of these as separated things. If you’re creative, you can develop anything with the right methods and skills—but you will also need the right tools!

All this led me to a new approach to sound design and scoring, since these projects represent VR experiences addressed to a much more cinematic style in a “real” 3D space. While Francesco (our musician) has been working with Pro Tools and Logic, I’ve always tried to get by with free software as GarageBand, Ardour, and Audacity—but non of them offered enough. A couple of years ago I came across Studio One, which I found amazing from the beginning, mostly due to its great sound engine, so I was immediately convinced to use it in my work. It’s one of the very few programs that I was able to use right away without reading the manual!

I must say that are many artists like me with the need for a friendly and intuitive interface like Studio One, and while some state that the user interface doesn’t matter when you make music, I believe otherwise. Complex and hard-to-use interfaces become boring over time, and we are forced to waste too much time to learn how to use it, rather than create.

I’m working in a Windows multi-monitor environment, with a Wacom Cintiq tablet with touch screen as second monitor, and because this setup makes it hard use a standard keyboard (my tablet is huge), I mapped the most used key commands to a programmable Logitech G13 gameboard. Studio One works perfectly with my tablet, and it’s so responsive that I can “paint” music!

Even if Francesco is the one that works on the main soundtrack, I also have ideas that sometime I want use in our games. My workflow starts with a simple idea or direction to follow, a main theme using my simple template for scoring. So I basically rough out what the theme should sound like: add some instruments (a free orchestral library), some textures and colors, just to blend and fill the sound. And Studio One helps hugely on “sketching” quick ideas.  Once I’ve reached my technical limitations, I send everything to Francesco who provides a professional rework of my ideas.

When it comes to sound recording and editing, I start with recording foley and sound effects on my own, if I have the right gear available. When I cannot do this by myself, I send some samples (sometimes made with my own voice on a webcam, as a guide) to Francesco: I give him a sound assets list and he records all needed sounds with extra variations. I remix everything in Studio One, and once I’ve finalized the sounds, I export the stems as sound cues for Unreal Engine.

I like that Studio One Prime is almost a complete DAW per se, very important in the Indie world! I find it very user friendly and works smoothly on any platform; I can still use it on my five years old MacBook Pro, and I don’t notice a difference in performance.

Also, I cannot work without the visual workflow and tool palette that Studio One provides me. Intuitive, simple, direct. What I need and in the right place. And scratch pads! I never get tired to say how useful they are for someone like me who doesn’t have knowledge of reading or writing musical notation, but has a lot of ideas to remember! And last but not least, I have never had a crash. 

There are still many things I want to explore and experiment with Studio One, like the powerful macro system and the Mix Engine FX , very useful to give emphasis and personality to a set of sound effects all at once. As I said at the beginning, I’m not a professional musician, but Studio One fits my workflow naturally, and makes me feel as I’ve always use it. It simply sounds better!

I recommend Studio One 3 to indie developers and artists on a budget who want to start with a free yet powerful DAW, and later can move to more powerful versions for cheap.

SFGames is:

• Scigor: Game Design, Art, 3D Modeling, Sound Design
• Francesco Tresca: Music and Sound Design
• Marco Frisan: Art, 3D Modeling and Programming

We are still getting off the ground, so follow us on! It would help a lot if you can spread the word!

• Follow SFGames on Twitter
• Subscribe to SFGames on YouTube

Jessie Kol and Perry Sorensen recently had a great experience tracking their newest single on the Studio 192, and they sent us this great video about it!

Sounds great, you two—and that studio is gorgeous, BTW!

• Learn more about the Studio 192 here.
• Keep up with Jessie Kol here.
• Perry Sorensen is also the head of Mastering at Naxos, where he uses the Sceptre S8s. More on that here.