WORLD OF MUSIC ; PORTABLE KEYBOARD - Latest Portable Music Keyboards, Synthesizers and Music News

The Swedish plugin developer Klevgrand has released its latest instrument, OneShot.

Klevgrand has trodden the percussive path with several of its previous instruments – the likes of Slammer, Borsta, Ting and Skaka – but with OneShot, its new sampler, it’s promising its most capable drum tool.

A smooth and complete workstation for drum samples, OneShot is packed with handy features to give any drums a more organic feel, like humanize settings, velocity layering and round robin.

OneShot is a designed to be percussive workstation, specifically designed for hosting and playing one-shots samples (single strike samples) with each ‘Slot’ of these having its own mixer channel. This means that every sound can have its own effect, level and routing settings, and be sent to its own channel in your DAW. Every detail in the workflow design and sound quality has been given a lot of care and consideration, making OneShot a percussion powerhouse that is both fun to play, excellent sounding and stuffed with purposeful and easy to use features.

OneShot also comes with more features like choking, filters, envelopes, an extensive effects system, and multi-out routing. But even with these features, developers say, OneShot is still easy to use, flexible, and intuitive, offering an extensive hub “for all your drumming needs.”

Each Slot can have two insert FX, with options including EQ, compressor, bus compressor, distortion, algorithmic reverb, convolution reverb, stereo widener, bitcrusher, delay and finalizer. There are also two parallel FX busses, each of which has its own FX insert slots and volume control.

OneShot comes with more than 8,000 samples and in excess of 200 preset kits in acoustic and electronic styles (additional presets are available to purchase on the Klevgrand website). You can drag-and-drop your own samples, as well, and there’s ‘smart sorting’ when you import multiple samples, so you get an immediately playable instrument.

OneShot is available now for Windows and macOS in VST/AU/AAX formats for the introductory price of $99.99 (regular price $149.99). Find out more and download a demo on the Klevgrand website.

Additional information about OneShot is on the Klevgrand website.

With so many of your credit and debit cards available digitally these days, you might be wondering if you still need a physical wallet, but if anything’s going to convince us to hold on to ours, It is MakerProducts’ MIDICard.

MakerProducts makes tools for Makers based in Los Angeles, California, United States has introduced MidiCard, a credit card-sized USB C PCB Midi controller.

Said to be ‘the world’s smallest MIDI controller,’ this 18-note keyboard is barely any bigger than your Visa or Amex, but with its class-compliant USB-C connectivity, can be plugged into pretty much any device you like (iPad, iPhone, Android, PC and Mac) and play anywhere.

The tiny 3.5 x 2 x 0.25 inch footprint has been achieved by putting the keys and other controls directly onto a PCB board. As well as being able to play notes you can also trigger modulation and sustain, as well as choose from three different velocity levels. Should you need to extend the range, there are octave up/down buttons. This is truly a full MIDI keyboard in your wallet.

MIDICard V1 generates MIDI information to use with any DAW such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro, or Garage Band. MIDICard V1 does not generate sound on its own.

The first batch of MIDICards has already sold out, but another batch is expected to land on 26 February. You can pre-order now for £50 (£60 if you want the Lightning cable version) via the MakerProducts Etsy page.

Sampling audio from your browser to use in your DAW is not as quick and easy as we would like.

SoundPaste offers an even easier way to sample from your browser than audio routing programs like Blackhole.

Now, a new macOS app called SoundPaste promises to streamline the process even further, making it possible to effectively copy and paste sound from any application and drop it directly into your DAW.

Once SoundPaste is installed, it sits in the background as a menu bar app. When you want to sample something, you can begin recording audio from applications like Safari or Spotify with a single keyboard shortcut. Once you’ve stopped recording using the same shortcut, simply open up your DAW and use another shortcut to ‘paste’ the sample to your DAW’s timeline.

This could be a time-saving game-changer for those who like to sample audio from social media platforms or sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, making a speedy alternative to the somewhat laborious process of copying a link to an MP3 conversion site, downloading the resulting file and opening it up in your DAW.

Samples recorded using SoundPaste can also be accessed via a menu screen which also offers the function to manually hit record or specify an additional input source such as your computer microphone. Here you can specify where your recordings will be stored and customize your keyboard shortcuts.

Priced at $9.99, KLOYTools SoundPaste is available now on the App Store. Find out more on KLOYTools website.