Imagine what your songs could sound like if you had access to 9,000 instruments and more than 1,000,000 sounds. The creative potential would be endless. Well, that possibility is not some farfetched fantasy. It’s actually a stone-cold reality.
A new cloud-based subscription service called “Composer Cloud” offers access to an amazing array of virtual instruments, sounds and textures. A high-quality suite of professional tools, it is the largest collection of its kind on the planet and has garnered 70 international awards as well as a 2015 NAMM nomination for the “Technical Excellence & Creativity (TEC) Award” as the Best Musical Instrument Software.
This series of instrument and sound collections, with 51 titles and counting, was years in the making and is currently valued at over $12,000. Produced by EastWest (EW)—an industry leader in the production of large, meticulously detailed sample libraries—it has been used in many cutting-edge movies, video games and television shows. In fact, the EW catalog is considered to be the gold standard across all musical genres. A major player in the sound library and virtual instrument markets for many years, EW’s offerings lean towards the film- and video-scoring world, but the company also has products for rock, pop, hip-hop and other types of music production.
The collection is the brainchild of Doug Rogers, a true pioneer in the field of samples. Before EastWest was formed, Rogers and a few other engineers and producers were collecting their own samples of drum sounds, generally using original recordings of their own to enhance a drum track. Rogers relates, “I thought that if I found a need for such a thing, other people probably did too. But, the process was very time-consuming and laborious.”
Because of the enormous effort and time needed to collect samples, Rogers believed that if he could create a comprehensive high-quality collection of sampled instruments and sounds, it could become a profitable product. Consequently, in 1988 (27 years ago), he formed EastWest around a single product: “The Pop-Rock Drum Sample Collection,” the world’s first commercial drum sample collection—on a then relatively new CD format.
Since then Rogers has followed his muse, creating an impressive number of sound collections with an all-star lineup of celebrity producers, engineers and musicians. “That’s what really sets our product apart from other sample libraries on the market,” he states. “I only work with the top people in the business.”
Indeed, Rogers partnered with a number of superstar musicians to produce his award winning collections, including members of Aerosmith, Billy Idol, Public Enemy, Prince and more. In fact, his products introduced a new concept called “construction loops,” which enabled users to mix and customize each loop to fit their music. Finally, after years of research, innovation and technological advances, Rogers established a software division for EastWest and developed the first 64-bit virtual instrument that has become the standard today.
