Lost in 70s plugins.

[John Isige]

Hi all.

I thought I'd let people know about some free plugins I found.

https://lostin70s.com/home

I started with Harmonus 300, which they describe as a harmonium, technically true, but if you grew up in the 70s/80s, you'll know it better as a chord organ. It's a Magnus even! It generates chords, though not all, just major and minor, but you can either set a chord split, so part of the keyboard is melody and part is chords, or turn that off and get full melodic range on the keyboard. You can also set the split point. There's an AU version and the controls seem accessible in Logic. Well, I haven't tried setting a different split point yet, but it's there in the table.

There's also Hanon, another organ, think sort of like a Hammond B3, and Keysoft. I'm not sure what Keysoft is because that one doesn't make sounds for me, so if anybody tries it and gets it working, do let me know. I might have to contact them about it. It mentions tines in the table, so I assume some sort of electric piano.

They also sell some plugins and have some effects and amps. Looks like interesting stuff and so far as I know should be accessible. You just unzip and put the files in /library/audio/plugins/components, at least for the three free ones. They've got at least one more free thing I haven't grabbed yet. I still wish I could find a real reed organ outside of Kontakt, but the two organs are pretty cool.

[Dave Leo Baker]

Hey,

First, thanks for this, I downloaded the harmonium / Harmonix and saved a default I can use to do some of my India-based harmonium work in projects.

To use the Keys plugin you need to get the samples, then place that folder in 

/users/shared/RKsamples

So I found using VOCR. Works for the most part in controls View though the program slider mutes the keys, probably supposed to set something, leave it at 0 and you have the most basic MK II more like 60s suitcase in mono, the builtin epiano emulator is so much better IMHO with better options. 

I haven’t tried their tube amplifiers etc. as those aren’t anything I need.

If you do want to interact with the keys editor outside of controls view it’s going to be VOCR.

But again thank you personally as I’ve been trying to find what I believe to be a decent harmonium, I can at least stack / transpose it to make the dual / triple reed sounds, and it’s sounding quite authentic. It attacks really slow which is what the real Harmoniums from India do, but I barely remember the Magnus organ from the 60s. Didn’t test the chords, I just unchecked the split feature since the chords would be useless to me doing Eastern drones with it, but here is why I love love love Logic and what we have now! We can just do all this, it actually talks for the most part, use Logic stock plugins on top of the instrument to make up for what it doesn’t do, and make some really interesting cool stuff with it.

The reverb is very 70s / not so much spatial like those of us coming of age in the 80s are used to but still has a down home feel. Very nice for what these instruments do, and I imagine the pay stuff works for what people are after making new yacht rock / 70s vintage sounds, quite lovely actually. 

Again thanks and HTH   

Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls
https:artist.link/daveleobaker

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[John Isige]

So you're going into the plugin window and doing OCR and that let's you download the samples?

I find the Logic E-piano kind of eh. Most of the other ones I hear have much more presence. Plus at least for me, maybe I have something set wrong, I feel like some of the notes don't react the same, some of them just have a different timbre. That's not just the velocity imparting it, as is normal for those instruments.

Absolutely agree about Logic. I think you can do quite a lot of that in Reaper too, and there are some great resources for it. But for whatever reason, I just seem to get on better with Logic. The nice thing is, it all carries over. SO if I find out that say, Ableton Live let's me do sequence-based improv stuff way better/easier than Logic, well, whatever I'm learning about editing and such will apply, barring differences in keyboard commands/workflow, naturally. Same with Reaper.

I really need to get money straightened out and sign up for the Youtube channel soon. I'm getting some stuff down on my own but I feel like the courses will help and also some of the other stuff, e.g. from what I'm seeing things like the drum designer are also the step sequencer.

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[Dave Leo Baker]

One more thing on the Harmonix organ:

Expression is done via the mod wheel, and you can’t control it via Modifier or from within the plugin. However, if you plan to use it as a harmonium, a traditional harmonium player plays with one hand and controls the bellows with the other. The seasoned performer makes it sound smooth without too much false tremolo,  but the instrument has a sort of breathing type sound just based on how the bellows work. So using the mod wheel we can achieve this.

I made a patch which is a stack of 3 instances, one called bass, the second male and the third female. That is the nomenclature common to the naming of the reeds in the harmonium. There is a tuning / transpose slider in controls view of the instrument that lets us control this but it’s rather a strange one, it doesn’t describe things in half steps or cents. Anyway, then we can increase or decrease the volume of each of the reed sets. 

Again thanks for this, I don’t need a harmonium often enough to get the expensive harmonium VSTs ,, and the stock accordions weren’t quite there for this use case. I know they were emulating the Magnus chord organ, but the principles inside are largely the same when it comes to the reeds. The main difference the adults used to complain about when I was a kid in the 70s, was that it’s a blowing fan that blows the reeds, so there’s no natural dynamics like a pump organ or a harmonium would have. I had forgotten all about those Magnus organs until I saw a video on youtube a few years ago. 

Anyway this is as far as I have found, we’ll see if or when it makes it into one of my projects. But again thanks.

Dave

[Dave Leo Baker]

You have to go back to the Lost in 70s plugin page, and find the keys, and then next to that next heading is the samples. Download those samples and unzip that, it’s a folder. Keep that folder structure and put it in the  /users/shared/RKsamples folder.

I’ve heard some pretty spectacular things about ableton and accessibility but I haven’t tried, and I do know Reaper is catching on in the music production communities I’m aware of — I used to hear it called Rapper because it was thought of as a tool for SoundCloud rappers and their beatmakers. Basically I use Logic because it’s what I know, what I have, and if I have a problem it’s often either me needing to learn something, or me needing to get a new plugin for something. I guess I subscribe to the idea the best DAW in the world is the one that lets you get your work done most efficiently / meet any project deadlines etc. Which would mean it’s probably different for everyone. I was very comfortable with Logic before Logic Magician but now with LM I’m finding so many things are so much more efficient. Simplest is managing regions, and no need to mute speech when mixing, etc. But I don’t spend the time DAW-shopping the way a lot of people at the universities out here do. 

As to the EPiano in Logic I get you, but my MkII from the 70s I gigged with in the early 90s was such a beast in real life, some of the notes just wouldn’t voice quite right even with careful attention to adjustments. I’ll say what I appreciate about the EPiano is it’s very like the originals in that you control the tremolo etc right from within the plugin. The 70s keys from the Lost in 70s would probably rank 5 out of 5 EPiano plugins that I have used. But that’s just me. And it may be because I couldn’t figure out how to adjust certain elements from within Controls View, and I only use VOCR when I have to, like for my Omnisphere plugin before I save the presets so I don’t have to anymore. 

Dave 

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[John Isige]

Yeah, I need to find a pitch and mod controller, the keyboard I'm currently working with doesn't have one. I didn't even think about that because chord organs don't really have expression. They have the melodic keyboard, usually 37 keys from F-F I believe, and then some number of chord buttons, sometimes with a set of single reed bass notes.

Mind sharing your patch? I'd love to play with it.

I actually own a harmonium, an Indian one, as well as a reed organ from 1908, big piece of furniture, and a "portable" one made in 1960 that was IIRC a chaplain's organ used in Vietnam. I put portable in quotes because the thing weighs like 90 pounds, the Indian harmonium is around twenty. Both the 1908 and the 1960 one are the ones with foot pedals, as opposed to the hand-pumped Indian instrument derived from them.

I should really chase down a working chord organ at some point.

Thanks for all of the help BTW!

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[Dave Leo Baker]

Ok first I rarely do give out patches for third party plugins because I forget who has what etc, but this community is insanely more gracious than other places I’ve drunk-posted patches to, usually you get pushback from people who want it but don’t have the plugins they depend upon.

To that end here’s the link to the patch:

I didn’t do a readme for it or nothing because you already now the plugin and in fact introduced it to me, so I kinda owe you one lol.

The only plugins I added to the stack are Chorus, Echo which is bypassed and Quantec Room Simulator. I was torn because I’m very partial to Space Designer for acoustic instruments but this one is kind of based on a hybrid acoustic / electric, being those organs.

I turned off the splits, and fooled around with their internal effects but turned those off also. Their reverb seems to only echo out the left channel which I respect is kind of a 60s early 70s thing but I used Quantec to handle that.

So without having the mod wheel, if you have one programmable fader, you could make it perform the mod wheel function, say if it’s at cc07 volume you could have it routed to cc01 modwheel you do that using the Modifier plugin. Whether the Through checkbox is on or off is irrelevant, since this plugin doesn’t obey 007 or 11 Expression. Most organs play with 11 pretty nicely because like your OG pump organ, the swell shades knee lever dampens the high frequencies when soft, and opens those up when the shades open / it’s louder. That’s why Hammonds do it, originally started in pipe organ days. 

I don’t know if I’m just hallucinating, but I believe Steve has a modifier tutorial on his Youtube channel for anyone who hasn’t messed with that lightweight plugin. BTW you could even route pitch bend to mod wheel, just don’t bend down since continuous controllers don’t do negative numbers, only PB does. 

Awesome for you having these period pieces. The 1960s Vietnam War one in particular is one I’ve heard of but never played. 

Back to this harmonium though I think the rotor cabinet under modulation group for inserting a plugin might be quite interesting. 

Anyway thanks for the intro of this stuff, pretty cool! Have you bought their organ? I didn’t because I already have what Logic has, and for when I want to relive my younger days in a Doors cover band, I have Martinec’s Combo F, kind of a cross between a Connie and a Farfisa, Connie being Ray Manzarek’s organ. But if you go get it, tell us how it sounds. Hammond is of course king for jazz, rock, and even churches, but IMHO transistor organs have played their parts in everything from Hollywood to the B52s.

Dave

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