Finish Your Song

Helping you to get your music made

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Rick Wakeman, Jon Lord, George Harrison… and EZKeys?

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There was comment on one of my YouTube videos a few weeks ago that got me thinking.  The video was about using the Cubase Chord Track with Toontrack’s EZKeys, and the general thrust of the comment was “that’s fine for people who can’t play”.

One of the things I’ve set out to do with the songs I’m recording at the moment is, for the most part, to avoid my own clichés and to try to think, (and play), outside the constraints of my comfort zone.  For a guitarist, I’m a passable piano player, but I’m no Rick Wakeman, so EZKeys gives me the ability to record a higher quality piano part than I could achieve on my own, either by playing or simply writing in the notes. [Read more…]

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Moving your EZDrummer2 Library

Having written previously about installing an SSD, (Solid State Drive) as an audio drive on my laptop, the first thing to do was to move my existing Cubase projects and sample libraries to the empty drive, once I’d formatted it.  Moving the Cubase projects folder was a simple click-and-drag operation, (although you do have to confirm the new location of the project the first time you open it in Cubase – hardly a hardship).  However, moving the EZdrummer2 core library and the samples for the various EZDrummer expansion kits was not as simple as the Toontrack website made out…

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Why pay full price?

If you’ve watched any of the videos on this blog or read any of the articles, you’ll know that I have a good selection of virtual instruments and plugins that I run through Cubase.  Whilst I like having these, I don’t like paying full price for anything, (it all seems so expensive).  In this video, I look at how to get perfectly legal copies of your must-have plugins from the manufacturers without paying full price – and on occasion, without paying at all!  And to prove the point, I end by showing you how you can get an effects plugin of any type you want for free.

When I posted the video below on YouTube, there were sales on and, as I post this on the blog, there are more sales on again.  It just goes to prove the point I make in the video, that if you can live without a piece of kit that you want to (eventually) add to your toolbox, you can save yourself a lot of money in the long run.