Hey everyone,
 
My next review is up on my site. This time I'm doing a double review of Applied Accoustics Systems' Lounge Lizard & Ultra Analog. I got a lot of great feedback on the last one I did for Omniverse 1 & 2, so I'm looking forward to hearing how people like this one. I've got 2 more still in the works as I continue to try to mold this thing into a solid direction and a weekly or at least bi-weekly feature for my site.
 
Check it out at the link and I'd love to hear your feedback.
 
http://www.bydavidrosen.com/2014/01/23/thing-rules-lounge-lizard-ultra-analog/
 
David

I applaud anyone with the guts to put their honest thoughts out there on products. What I liked is that you included an actual sound demo you created in a song context. This helps a lot more than the marketing fluff descriptions often seen in the reviews. What I do think would help make the review more useful is if it had more actual review. This is more like an endorsement than critical review. That's not a bad thing and in some ways your approval of product tells me more than detailed tech babble. In any case thanks for sharing. Will check out some f your other posts.

Thanks for your response! I suppose in a way my style of reviewing is more of an endorsement kinda, that's a good point, but I do try to at least cover the range of what's available, the interface of the VST, and of course my overall opinions of the software. I purposefully don't dig TOO deep though with the words and instead let the music sample speak those extra paragraphs that would otherwise be typed out in big descriptions of the sounds and whatnot :-)
 
Also on a side note, my "hidden agenda" so to speak is to force myself to write new music to post on a regular basis because over the last year, I was constantly posting tracks that were meant to be on my album I recently released (Echoes In The Dark, available now! haha). So this way I have lots of new stuff to post for my listeners that's not album/project related, and the review part just felt like a cool way to discuss all the new stuff I'm using.
 
Anyway again thanks for the response!
 
 

Keep up the reviews!  It is a good way to drive traffic to your music and as i stated, your example tells me a lot more about the product than even the most wordy descriptions.  Have you compared LL to other Rhodes emulations?  I found it interesting that you would use a hip-hop type production as an example.  It demonstrates practical value since so much top 40 music is either hip-hop or music that uses similar production techniques.

Keep up the good work, David. Lounge Lizard's been gathering virtual dust on my disk for years. Your review has inspired me to revisit it.
 
Suggestion: as you're composing your demos, rather than choosing one or two nice sounds from the instrument, see if you can't represent more of the instrument's range. Even the one-trick Lounge Lizard is capable of more variation than is apparent at first glance. Imagine, for example, using LL in place of a guitar or synth lead, with distortion and pitch pends.

I'll take that into consideration for future reviews, a little more comparing to other versions of similar things. I definitely felt like Lounge Lizard had some of the richest Rhodes sounds I've heard from the various software I've used. There's something just very playable and fun about it. And that interface makes it so quick and easy to dial in little changes.
 
The hip-hop came from trying to figure out something I could use both in the same review. I've got a lot of new stuff over the last couple months (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Xmas, New Years... haha), so I wanted to find a way to double up with them since its the same company. And I've done a lot of hip-hop in the past before I started moving into film scoring.

Glad you liked it :-)

Good idea. The hip-hop idea while cool for mixing these 2 different instruments together, also kind of restricted how much room for movement I had. I love adding things like iZotope's Trash2 to keyboards for cool new sounds (did that a bunch on my album) and I'm sure it would sound great on some of these LL patches!
 

I don't have full LL but I have always been impressed with AAS products.  I have been using The Addictive keys Rhodes and the rhodes presets in Dimension pro for such sounds

LL is and has been on at least 80% of my projects since it's inception.  I adore it.  And, like Bit alludes, I don't always use it as just an "electric piano".  One of my favorite things to do is get a great soft Rhodes sound and then put Camel Space on that track and use one of the rhythm presets to create just a pulsing in sync pad.  Killer Diller.
 

Ooh that sounds cool :-)