I'm busy working on a new Refill project that I'm super excited about. We're going to try something new and a little different here on EWI Reason Sounds. Instead of creating one giant ReFill with a gazillion sounds, we are going to create a series of small boutique ReFills for a small price. We call them mini-packs, but there is nothing mini about the sound!

Each mini pack will contain a series of patches centered around a theme. We want each combinator to sound awesome out of the box. We want you to enjoy playing each and every patch. By keeping the number of patches small, we can really concentrate on only letting the best ones out of the lab. The benefit to you, the artist, is the price for each mini-pack will be under $10, letting you get only the sounds you want.

The first mini pack will focus on analog style sounds using actual samples from the analog hardware. I spent a lot of time making it easy to use and personalize, and the feel of these patches is just incredible. 

I sincerely hope you like it and have a lot of fun with it. Coming soon...

One thing that I have really come to appreciate about Rack Extensions is that it has given room for all sorts for niche devices that the Props would probably have never bothered with. One category of niche devices is that of CV processors, so we will be having overviews of some of our favorites coming up. As EWI players, wrangling the continuous controller data is critical to what we do. Converting it to CV and being able to manipulate it can really bring your sound design to another level. That being said, one tool I really like is the Revolt CV Processor. The main thing that I like is the big dial that shows the CV data coming into it.

To see the breath data you can hook up the breath output of an RPG-8 Arpeggiator to the CV 1 input of Revolt. Select both devices, right click and select 'Combine' to put them in a combinator. Now, just start  playing your wind controller.

I find it quite enlightening to see how I am articulating on the EWI every couple of months and I adjust the breath sensor to be more or less sensitive:

Since the display on the ReVolt goes from -127 to 127 and the EWI outputs only positive CV values, the dial will go from the middle of the display to the far right. To make it go from the far left to the far right, just set up the ReVolt as in the picture below.

• Scale: 2.05
  
• Add: -64
  
• Polarity: Bipolar

The Revolt CV Processor is $9 in the Propellerheads Rack Extensions Shop. Check it out.

This post is a real quick tip, but I have been using it lately to geneate all sorts of cool percussion patterns and grooves. If you are stuck for rhythmic ideas, or just want to add some variety to a simple drum loop, try sending some drums or percussion through an Alligator Triple Filtered Gate. Here what I will typically do:

1. Create a ReDrum
   
2. Right click on the Redrum and from the pop up menu choose Creative FX -> Alligator Triple Filtered Gate.
   
3. Click on the Redrum, then choose Edit -> Randomize Pattern.
   
4. Press Play on the Redrum.

Try turning down the Delay on the Alligator and using patterns in the 30's and above. You can make some cool grooves. Here I am just experimenting with different patterns layered on top of a basic rock beat.

And here is the Reason 6 Song file so you can see how it is all set up. Happy filtering!