PC and Music News

Sweetwater Sound Inc., the third-largest music instrument and pro audio retailer in the world, has launched a donation campaign designed to provide music gear and instruments to people of limited means who have a genuine interest in music. Sweetwater regularly receives requests for donations of gear from soldiers overseas, disaster victims, foster parents, and nonprofit organizations. Named GearGift, the donation program encourages musicians from across the country to donate old instruments and recording and performance equipment. Sweetwater plans to refurbish the donated gear and ensure that it finds a new home with a deserving individual.

Those making donations to the program will be encouraged to designate the kind of recipient - a soldier, a child, a nonprofit, etc. Recipients, in turn, will be asked to respond with a thank you note and a photo or two. These responses will be forwarded to the donor.

For more information, please visit :

Waves has just released a collection of free presets for the SSL E-Channel plug-in. All these presets were made by Chris Lord-Alge, the well-known mixing engineer who has worked with famous artists such as Green Day, U2, Ray LaMontagne, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, or James Brown to name a few.

The Chris Lord-Alge presets are available for free at :

Beilfuss unveils the worlds first step synthesizer.

Unlike any analog or digital synthesizer's controls, the patented tone control consists of sixteen steps simply outlining the waveform as set by the Signal Controls you see at the left of the control panel. Similarly, the envelope and filter contour transients and their time intervals are also set by the Signal Controls for rhythms or extended notes. You may easily add prompted, parallel voicings, combining settings of both sides for complex notes.There are 32 controls and 142 pushbuttons for direct programming. Dedicated LED pushbuttons always read out their side of the full eight octave, split keyboard. Five octaves of transposition are possible.

Price and availability TBA.

QuikQuak has announced the release of version 2.0 of its freebie UpStereo plug-in.

Changes :

• Completely 3D user-interface
• Retains usability of traditional 2D design
• Movable camera and light - alter the mood of the plug-in
• New metallic GUI.
• Overdrive option for saturated distortion effects.

UpStereo v2.0 is available for Windows and Mac OS X in VST and AU plug-in formats.

Here's a new Pro Tools Corner issue by our VIP Moderator Brian White from audioMIDI.com. This time he focuses on the new MIDI editor in Pro Tools 8.

"The MIDI editor in Pro Tools 8 is one new feature that has certainly been turning heads, especially those of other "sequencer heavy" DAWs. While many users have been making comparisons to Logic's flavor of MIDI editing, the Pro Tools MIDI editor features a few unique tricks that are sure to speed up your sequencing workflow. This week at the Pro Tools Corner I will walk you through the basics of the MIDI editor and help you unlock the true sequencing power of Pro Tools 8."

if you have a Pro Tools related question that you would like Brian to take a shot at answering or have any feedback, please post-it in our Mac ProTools Forum or Pc ProTools Forum. Brian will do his best to select the questions that seem to stump the most people.

According to FutureMusic.com, Propellerhead will use their upcoming Producers Conference on May 9th to announce a new Digital Audio Workstation product.

This will not be an update to Reason, which will retain its own product category, but will be a new standalone product that will have full-on audio recording capabilities.

Wait and see...