East West The Dark Side Vst Download

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Symphonic Choirs Gold by EastWest is a Virtual Instrument Audio Plugin and a Standalone Application. It includes, and is therefore 'powered by', Play, which functions as a VST Plugin, an Audio Units Plugin, a VST 3 Plugin, an AAX Plugin and a Standalone Application. Aug 17, 2010 EastWest has released The Dark Side, an unconventional, hip and exciting collection of virtual instruments, some dark and eerie, and some which have been purposely—and skillfully!—mangled, distorted, or effected out of all recognition. THE DARK SIDE provides inspiration for all composers and artists that are looking for unique instruments, designed to work for everything from. 40GB of dark, moody, and offbeat virtual instruments for something different. Created and produced by Doug Rogers (EastWest) and Grammy Award-winning record producer David Fridmann (MGMT, The Flaming Lips etc.), THE DARK SIDE is the first of its kind: an unconventional, hip and exciting collection of virtual instruments, some dark and eerie, and some which have been purposely”and skillfully. Created and produced by Doug Rogers (EastWest) and David Fridmann (MGMT, The Flaming Lips etc.), THE DARK SIDE is the first of its kind: an unconventional, 40 Gigabyte, hip and exciting collection of virtual instruments, some dark and eerie, and some which have been purposely—and skillfully!—mangled, distorted, or effected out of all recognition.

Upon a time, a man named Doug saw a huge, gaping hole. Peering into its murky depths, he neither saw nor heard a thing. Not a peep, ping or wobble-bass. Then and there, he avowed to fill this hole with sound. But not with the pristine timbres of real-world instruments - he wanted something more edgy and with a dollop of bedlam. So began his journey towards The Dark Side - a product addressing a hole in a market crying out for banged-up, distorted, ouchy-sounding sonics. Says our protagonist Doug Rogers, founder of specialist sample-production powerhouse EastWest: “The Dark Side idea came to me when I was mentoring a young alternative group about some demos they sent me. To my ears, the tracks didn’t sound tough enough for their intended market, so I told them they needed to toughen up their sound.” Trawling the sample library market, including EastWest’s considerable catalogue, he couldn’t find the “mass aural destruction” required to finesse the band’s ditties. So, partnering with Grammy-winning producer and famed doyen of distortion devotees everywhere Dave Fridmann, he set about trashing the timbres of traditional instruments in order to achieve full-on sonic mayhem in a neatly organised EastWest instrument.

Multiple processing chains, including distortion, brick-wall limiting and esoteric tube-driven gizmos, were brought to bear in pursuing the dark, the eerie and out-there. The result is a ~40GB collection of processed percussion, bass, guitar, keyboard, strings, ethnic instruments and more, all front-ended by a hollow-eyed, flesh-eating, space-alien, respirator-masked visage that gives you the spooks just looking at it. From the product title and Stygian packaging, you’d imagine deeply dour cinematic hits and sweeps to sally forth - like an ill-tempered Heavyocity or Zero-G library might produce. Well, they do, but there’s something else afoot. The best word with which to describe a fair proportion of the sounds on offer is ‘creepy’.
Perhaps it’s this subtle diversion that won The Dark Side a MIPA Award at this year’s Frankfurt Musikmesse. Before we get onto the sounds and examine how an entire track can be built from a single instance of this Windows and OS X-compatible, 32/64-bit standalone or VST/AU/RTAS plugin instrument, let’s look at the underlying architecture.
As with a number of EastWest offerings, at the core lies PLAY, a software engine that draws upon themed sample libraries and presents them for manipulation via whichever interface is appropriate to the library you've bought. The Dark Side sits alongside such titles as Fab Four, another MIPA Award-winning product, plus Quantum Leap’s Goliath, Gypsy, Ministry of Rock and Voices of Passion. When you buy one of the above, typically from the US and Europe-based internet retailer SoundsOnline, it’s bundled with a license for the PLAY engine that drives them all, and a whacking great load of samples upon which each interface draws. Incidentally, if you’re wondering, Quantum Leap is a division of EastWest set up by Doug in partnership with composer/producer Nick Phoenix and appears to lean more towards high-end sample libraries and the kind of virtual instruments used to score such blockbusters as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. Quality movie-soundtrack stuff, then, and this is reflected in each product's price, although it seems like every week a special offer arrives in my emailbox promising huge discounts on wedges of EW/QL’s product lines. There are also discounts to be had when buying additional licences for products you already own and wish to run simultaneously on additional computers.
Want some money-saving advice? Sign up to SoundsOnline’s email newsletter for notification of special offers. For further details, Europeans click here and citizens of the USA and the rest of the world click your way here. On the subject of moolah, there’s not just the product price to consider. Each library has a licence that’s hosted on an iLok USB dongle, version 2 of which handles 500 licenses, but costs about £35 a throw and you’ll need an iLok for each machine if you’re planning on syncing multiple instruments. On the plus side, if you've already bought a copy of The Dark Side, an additional licence costs only €83.24 - a special offer with no closing date quoted as yet on the SoundsOnline website. You may also need to budget for a high-performance external hard drive. The System drive is no place for The Dark Side’s vast sample library and neither is an external drive with power-saving functionality. So, for example, Western Digital Caviar Green drives are out. With software deployed on a dual-core Intel MacBook Pro toting 4GB RAM, and the library accessible via eSATA from a Western Digital Caviar Black drive using the laptop’s Expresscard 34 slot, multiple patches loaded into the standalone configuration do not trouble the system. Nor does opening multiple PLAY plugins in Logic Pro (in fact, the developer suggests it’s more efficient to do this latter). When budget allows, perhaps a Thunderbolt-connected, 10,000rpm VelociRaptor-equipped RAID 0 should be given a shot, just to see if an insane number of PLAY instances can be pummelled into a sulk.

Anyway, enough with the techie stuff. What about these ‘ere sounds? As mentioned, ‘creepy’ applies to a good many patches and some have you scratching your head wondering how in the name of Jehovah they’d fit into anything. Well, there are some handy sound-sculpting tools in Player mode, but let us first pop round the back to view the Browser, above, and see the degree of alacrity with which a sound can be found. PLAY-driven libraries are listed at bottom left and it’s possible to create custom collections drawn from multiple EastWest titles using the Favorites function. Above is a dialog showing which patches are loaded and on which MIDI channels they’re addressed, while The Dark Side’s seven categories of instruments are listed in a column to the right. Click on an entry to see .ewi files and subfolders containing yet more files and a bit of a missed trick. Interrogating the libraries of such products as Native InstrumentsKore, or Absynth, or Massive, as well as AppleLogic Pro’s Apple Loops, is made all the easier thanks to the facility to zone in on a tone type using keywords. For example, selecting Soundscapes > Heavenly > Synthetic in Kore Player will whittle down a gazillion-patch database to a short list of presets appropriate to the adjectives chosen. In The Dark Side, as with other EastWest titles, some of the .ewi filenames are fairly sensible: Fuzz Bass, Backwards Distorted Guitar and Verb Kit Verb 1 give a reasonable indication of what you’re likely to hear. But Chameleon Morpher, Psycho and Dark Dirt, as labelled in TDS’s instrumentation lists, make finding the right sound something of a guessing game on occasion.
That said, a good many synth developers devise the most curious names for their patches (to what, for example, do Cardiac Truth, Spiritual Bugs and SadButTrue refer in CamelAudioAlchemy’s Factory Pads listing?). Whatever, once you’ve hit on something promising in TDS - ClockworkO.ewi, perhaps, or Mandamadness.ewi - there are some neat tools in the Player interface that will warp your selection beyond the warped imaginings of Rogers and Fridmann having a warpy day in trans-warp drive.
Stereo Double, Delay and a Resonance and Frequency-adjustable Filter reside at left. At right we can see if the chosen instrument has key-switchable articulations (they’re also highlighted in blue on the interface’s virtual keyboard), mess with the Envelope settings (AHDSR, in this case), switch in automatic double-tracking, complete with a Speed knob for chorus effects, and engage a lush-sounding, if resource-hogging, convolution reverb featuring an enormous array of presets.
In places hard as nails, in others subtle as you like; that sums up the soundset for musicians, albeit that EastWest was also keeping soundtrack composers and videogame developers high on its hit list when screwing up the original sound sources. Some processed patches do appear overcooked, especially the odd percussion hit, prompting me to check the clipping indicators on the mixer, and that a disgruntled former girlfriend hadn’t taken a razor blade to my monitors’ cones. And that my bunny rabbit hadn’t found its way into a pan on the cooker’s hob. However, one clever feature is that the velocity sensitivity of some of the presets doesn’t merely govern how loud a note will sound. Certain devices actually change timbre depending on how rapidly you hit the key, and those whose labels are appended with ‘mod’ actually mix between timbres as you manipulate the modulation wheel.
With many of the other sounds available, ModWheel is assigned to a filter sweep, which is rather more adventurous than merely inducing vibrato. And this leads me to a bit of a gripe. The manual is thin on coverage of MIDI implementation. Yes, it tells you which continuous controllers alter modulation, expression, volume and the like, but what if I want to, for example, tweak just the Resonance knob, or engage ADT by remote from a MIDI controller or sequencer? I haven’t figured this out yet and if I’m to post further articles on PLAY-based titles, then EastWest’s tech support and I really ought to be having words.
Doug Rogers puts forward toughening up a pop song’s hook or dabbling in ‘alternative’ (alternative to what, though?) as ideal fodder for casting into darkness. Industrial, metal, progressive, jungle, neo-classical, synth-phonic and more spring to mind. Just bear in mind that you’ll have to exercise patience, not only in installing it (six dual-layer DVDs for the PLAY engine and content, for Heaven’s sake), but in extracting the max from certain of the less instantly gratifying raw presets. In this case, percipient use of the The Dark Side’s sound shapers in Player view pays dividends. It could be, and has been, argued that you could extract similarly insane sounds from a number of soft synths and FX plugins. But when working on a commercial TV or movie soundtrack, adding audio to a videogame, or when creative juices are gushing forth impatiently, time is not on your side. Hence rapid access to a wealth of audio wreckage becomes a must, and this is where The Dark Side scores when you're scoring to a deadline or attempting to keep up with musical machinations gone manic. The instruments load good and quick and, if you've a decent number of cores to your computer's processor, PLAY doesn't make too much of a hit on system resources. EastWest may be better known for accurate renderings of trad timbres, but this step toward the merciless mauling of sound shows that the company is not afraid to embrace its Darth side.

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Distortion, filth, grime and grit abound in EastWest's new library. Rubber gloves at the ready, we go in search of splendour in the dirt.

Though a few die-hards still mourn the day when the clean, wholesome twangings of 1950s rock & roll gave way to the deafening roar of the 100‑watt Marshall stack, most of us would agree that extreme distortion can have a galvanising effect on instruments. We've been enjoying the righteous racket of massively overdriven guitar ever since the first 1960s guitar god stamped on his fuzz pedal; basses and organs were similarly fuzzed up in the '70s, and over time, drums and vocals received the same treatment, courtesy of the influential 'industrial' movement and the acts it spawned. As a consequence of all this, in rock and pop, distortion is a byword for power.

EastWest's The Dark Side takes the idea to its logical conclusion. Virtually everything in it is distorted, messed up or heavily processed in some way, to the point where if one of its instruments sounded normal you'd think something was wrong. The library was co‑produced by EastWest's Doug Rogers and David Fridmann, ex‑bassist of Mercury Rev and leading US alt rock producer. With a list of credits ranging from Flaming Lips to MGMT, the prolific Fridmann appears to have the lucky Gold Rush prospector's knack of finding precious metal in dirt — many of the albums he produced in the last 13 years went platinum, gold or silver in the USA and UK, a satisfying record for a modest, unassuming musician who says his main intention in the studio is to help others achieve their goal.

Ready To Play?

The Dark Side is formatted for EastWest's proprietary Play sound engine, 32‑bit and 64‑bit versions of which are included with the library. There's no difference in sound between the two versions, but the latter can access much larger amounts of RAM. According to EastWest's boss, the PACE iLok driver issues that previously restricted 64‑bit Mac operation look set to be resolved by the time you read this, making Play fully 64‑bit on both Windows and Mac platforms. (For more information on Play, see /sos/mar08/articles/ewfabfourministryofrock.htm and /sos/sep10/articles/ewql‑hollywood‑strings.htm.)

The 37.4GB library takes a couple of hours to install. Noticing the scary, Saw‑like appearance of the user interface, I was concerned that authorisation might entail extricating a small key that some diabolical mastermind had surgically implanted behind my eyeball, but in fact it's a straightforward and painless online procedure that asks for a serial number and then deposits a license on your iLok security key (which you have to buy separately). Before auditioning, I downloaded Play v2.0.21, which worked without a hitch for me, both stand‑alone and as a VST plug‑in.

The Filth & The Fury

Some of the stomp boxes and processors used in recording The Dark Side's instruments.

Six months before BP started its clean‑up operation in the Gulf of Mexico, the producers were happily spraying filth over everything in Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios near Fredonia, NY. The kits in The Dark Side get the full, uninhibited Fridmann treatment: 'Bone Crunch' packs one of the heaviest bass drums I've heard in a long time, toms that groan withpower and a selection of choked crash cymbals for snatched staccato accents. 'Verb Kit Morpher' gives you the authentic sound of a heavyweight rock drummer soundchecking in an empty auditorium, featuring a truly walloping snare and some slamming crash‑cymbal‑cum‑kick hits. The combination of room ambience, heavy compression and (barely) controlled distortion makes these drums sound enormous.

The reverb‑drenched 'Arena Kit' owes its stadium sound to one of the new Acousticas convolution reverb presets included in the library. Not all the kits are rock‑orientated: 'Dark Dirt' (the bass drum of which morphs seamlessly from dry, quiet hits to huge, booming, ambient loud ones) might be a good starting point for a trip-hop track, the relatively clean 'Slamming' kit would work in a pop ballad or even a jazz context, and the processed electronic edge of 'Underground' could find a home in experimental dance music.

In the aptly‑named 'Demolition' kit, the processing has totally shredded the bass drum and toms, while somehow leaving the snare and hi‑hats sounding merely raucous. Some snares are too low‑pitched for my taste (it's an American thing); you can pitch them up a little (or a lot) using pitch‑bend, which in this library defaults to an octave rather than the standard two semitones. Another useful feature is the filter built into all patches, allowing their tone to be softened and darkened simply by pushing up the mod wheel.

I've Got A Fuzz Box & I'm Gonna Use It

Fridmann's trademark distortion is applied liberally to the library's basses and guitars. The riotous slashed‑speaker‑cone snarl of 'Distorted Attack Bass' recalls the early days of UK punk, though its manic, over‑the‑top tone makes the bass sounds of that era seem polite by comparison. If you're looking for something a little more orderly, the more subdued 'Slightly Dirty Bass' has a set of keyswitches that let you specify which string the notes will be played on, while 'Relatively Clean Bass' has the option of short semitone slides up and down to a target note (but unfortunately no full‑length slides).

East West Vst Free

Occasionally the processing completely disguises the original sound source: 'Fuzz Bass' could be a synth tuned in octaves, and the buzzy, Vocaloid effect heard in 'Radioactive' also suggests the original source was a keyboard rather than a bass. Though there are plenty of usable timbres in this section, I missed the classic '70s fuzz bass sound best exemplified by Soft Machine's Hugh Hopper; 'Bass Hemorrhage' comes the closest, but to my ears its timbre is more synthetic than the spiky, buzzing boom of yesteryear.

The Dark Side's guitars range from smashed‑up to spectral. 'Dirt Boy Guitar' took me back to heady youthful experiments with £15 fuzz boxes — but though its extended low range is exceedingly powerful, its fierce, brutal tone and jarring attack won't appeal to everyone. Similarly strident, 'Organic Guitar' offers a nice 'glissando' option incorporating upward tone bends. You can use 'Distorted Lead' to create Brian May‑esque guitar choirs; a nice programming touch has its quieter notes switching to a heavy vibrato when you play louder. In a spookier vein, 'Ghost Guitar' sees the devastated remains of what might once have been a guitar coming back to haunt us, while the disembodied tone and galloping repeat echo of 'Guitars on Mars' would be ideal for a psychedelic cover version of 'Ghost Riders In The Sky'.

It goes without saying that the library contains no easy‑listening guitar options, and in my opinion Quantum Leap's Ministry Of Rock is a better bet for contemporary metal guitar sounds. /mac-boot-camp-network-drivers.html. But if you have a penchant for tough, weird‑sounding processed instruments with a defiantly left-field attitude, these guitars will be right up your street.

Grime Scene Investigation

Play's browser gives a handy overview of installed EastWest/Quantum Leap libraries and their contents.

Dave Fridmann's collection of synths, organs and pianos was also put through the Tarbox sonic wringer. The iconoclastic blasting racket of 'Brain Damage' reminded me of the dangerous organ playing of XTC's Barry Andrews; 'Distorgan' focuses perversely on the cheesiest aspects of the Hammond sound, while the theatre‑organ warbling of 'Bent Funeral Organ' sounds like something out of Eraserhead. Light relief is provided by some rather sweet arpeggiated chords and single notes played on a gizmo called the Suzuki Omnichord, but the mayhem soon resumes with the 'Chaos' patch, which sounds like what might happen if you gave your 10 year‑old brother a soldering iron and asked him to perform a freeform service on your vintage Farfisa organ.

A selection of formerly pristine sounds from EastWest/Quantum Leap's orchestral and choir libraries have deliberately been transformed into ghastly, Mr Hyde‑style parodies of themselves: 'Chorus Strings' sounds like a 1930s film soundtrack choir heard through a defective radio, while the tonal quality of 'Granular' suggests that the choir were recorded on wax cylinder rather than in Pro Tools. Such unusual timbres spark off ideas and are fun to play; I particularly enjoyed the dreamy orchestral quality of 'Dist Org String Thing', though I wished it hadn't been played in octaves.

The Dark Side Crossword

These patches are supplemented by a handful of ethnic instruments: a steely hammered dulcimer and a piercing shenai wind instrument both get the Fridmann fuzz facelift, while a one‑dynamic plucked zither is presented in clean and distorted versions. Seemingly out of place but very welcome nonetheless, an excellent tabla drums patch offers a large menu of beautifully‑played clean hits. Other percussion highlights include 'Perc Sci‑Fi' (Hang-drum samples borrowed from Quantum Leap's Stormdrum 2) and 'Timp Explosion', which sounds like a series of atomic blasts.

The library is rounded off by a large, impressive selection of atmospheric sound‑design timbres and effects: some are mysterious and beautiful, others are rousing, many are completely bonkers and a few have comic overtones. Radiophonic Workshop fans will enjoy the collection of fuzzy bleeps and electronic tones, reminiscent of early computer game noises. These effects span the entire audio spectrum, from lovely, eerie, ultra‑high‑pitched backwards fairy bells down to the seismic rumblings of what sounds like a giant distorted lawnmower engine.

Conclusion

Distortion and processing are a vital part of modern production — even Britney distorts her vocals these days. With so many distortion boxes and plug‑ins on the market, choosing the right one for the job is a shot in the dark for most of us, so we can be grateful to these producers for making a selection on our behalf. The Dark Side's applications are extensive; though it may scare off those of a delicate disposition, the weird, heavy, idiosyncratic, gloriously scrambled and mad noises it contains will bring a slightly twisted smile to many faces.

Alternatives

Few, if any, libraries rival The Dark Side's range. Most titles offering distorted and processed material are loop‑based products aimed squarely at the dance floor, and thus lack its wildly experimental edge. The electronic 'glitch kits' in Soniccouture's Konkrete and Sample Magic's Transmission X (the latter created by veteran UK synthesist Ian Boddy) cover similar territory to some of its processed percussion, and Italian company MoReVoX's overdriven drum samples nudge into the same territory as Dave Fridmann's massively distorted kits. Though contemporary 'cinematic' releases such as Morphestra, Dark Skies and Deep Impact feature the type of sound design textures found in The Dark Side, no library contains such a large collection of processed instruments. There are therefore no real alternatives, but Spectrasonics' Distorted Reality volumes come closest in general style and spirit.

The Dark Side: An Overview

East West The Dark Side Vst Download Free

The Dark Side divides its instruments into seven categories: Drums, Basses, Guitars, Keys & Strings, Ethnic & Choirs, Misc & Perc and Instruments With Effects (ie. effected versions of selected instruments from the other categories). Co‑producer Doug Rogers recalls that over 10 different drum kits were used.

The processing used in this library bears testimony to Dave Fridmann's claim in his March 2010 SOS interview: 'Every piece of gear I have, no matter how nice and pristine it can be, I've figured out how to fuck it up.” The ubiquitous distortion was created mainly by effects pedals and hardware units, including rare vintage valve equipment that Fridmann and Rogers have collected over the years. Software plug‑ins were also used on certain instruments.

System Requirements

The Dark Side runs on PC and Mac as a stand‑alone and plug‑in instrument, and requires 40GB free hard disk space and an iLok security key (available from EastWest). You'll need at least 2GB of RAM, a 2.1GHz or faster processor and a 7200rpm hard drive. PC owners need an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Dual Core processor, an ASIO sound card and Windows XP SP2, Vista or Windows 7, while Mac users require an Intel Core 2 Duo machine with Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or later. For optimum performance, EastWest recommend 4GB of RAM and a 2.66GHz (or faster) processor.

Pros

• A thoroughly enjoyable collection of heavily processed instruments and effects engineered by a master of distortion.
• Weird in a good way.
• Massively powerful drum kits and basses.
• Reflects some welcome experimental trends in modern production.

Cons

• Many samples are distorted — no, hang on, that's deliberate!
• With this library you spend half the time wondering whether your speakers have blown.

Summary

If you feel your music is too clean, adding some of this library's dark'n'dirty samples could give it the all‑important 'grime factor'. Unpredictable, quirky and inspirational, The Dark Side has plenty to offer experimental (or just plain mental) composers, musicians, producers and programmers, and its remarkably heavy drum kits and basses will have a wide appeal.

information

£263 including VAT.

Soundsonline Europe +31 20 4041 687.

$355.50.

Sounds Online +1 323 957 6969.