adammonroe

I do believe the Logic stock B3 does sound nice compared to many plugins; whoever engineered that one knew what they were doing to make it sound that good and be light on resources! Everywhere I go, people really seem to dig the IK B3 - it's nice, authentic, sounds fairly comparable to what you will get out of a modern Hammond keyboard, ect. It was a bit overpriced on release, but they keep cutting the price; at $70 currently, the value is definitely there. It can be a little hard on the CPU but then so is my plugin (IMO, programming a realistic sounding Leslie/B3 SHOULD place demands on the CPU). GSi is still a good general purpose plugin, but IK is undercutting them at that price point. Most of the plugins out there still lag a bit when it comes to distortion - usually simple ATAN algorithms and such - so for that particular use case, I prefer my plugin and the vacuum tube simulations in there. I also believe that there can be a slight difference between a beautiful sounding plugin played solo and something that sits nicely in a mix without a lot of effort. Not that you can't EQ or engineer one to fulfill the purpose of the other, but I think sometimes we get a little carried away with thick, beautiful, layered, detailed, wide plugins when, if you listen to many recordings, if the organ isn't the main event, then it's often sitting into the background or adding ambience. There are a lot of beautiful, detailed sounding plugins out there, but when I'm writing music, sometimes I just want something that sounds like a dirty old natural recording, and this is why I still give the Logic Organ props; to me, something like that can sound a bit more natural at times, and when I was making my plugin, that's more the kind of sound I was chasing, but to each their own. As far as business practices go, not a big fan of most software companies these days. A long time ago I made the decision to steer-clear of DRM, subscription models, markdowns/sales and all that other nonsense; probably bad for business and my livelihood, but I think the world would be a nicer place if people charged a fair price for things and if you outright owned the things you pay for (like in the pre-internet days). Perhaps have a look at my blog, or better yet, my B3 shootout video, where you can directly compare the sound of each organ - the Waterfall isn't in there as it wasn't released yet, but I will likely make a new video soon. At the end of the day, these are all just different hammers that will hit the nail in slightly different ways...

Might be difficult to market at this point. Trademark trolls have acquired the Wurlitzer trademark after Gibson abandoned it by doing nothing with it for decades. The new trademark holders are threatening to sue anyone who even mentions "Wurlitzer" unless they are paid a licensing fee - total trolls, they have no products and no intention of releasing products, definition of trademark abuse at its finest. I think this will likely deter anyone from making Wurli or Wurli-like products for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I personally don't like it much but I have a ton of libraries that use Kontakt. The performance of the player itself is fine, but Native Access is quite a pain for me personally - activating and reinstalling libraries can be a huge hassle...but that's a lot of software companies these days I suppose. Another downside is the backwards-compatibility issue. Newer developers will just build with the newer version of Kontakt and these won't work with older versions of Kontakt, which means you are constantly having to upgrade it - I actually have 2 or 3 versions installed, because upgrading can cause issues with older libraries, or make them impossible to install...and at the end of the day, Kontakt is middleware that doesn't really need to exist. It got the industry pretty far when it was mostly just musicians sampling stuff who didn't know how to program, but more and more, companies are moving away from it. Native Instruments was so early to the game, and so many people associate Kontakt with sampling, that I'm sure it will be around for decades to come. The number of emails I get where I have to explain to users that they don't need Kontakt and can instead load my plugins directly as VST or AU are quite a few.

I also think the Scarbee sounds quite good. I also like Acousticsamples VTines. If you need a simple library that plugs directly into your DAW and doesn't cost much, have a look at my Rhodes sample library. It's not the smoothest sound, but a little more natural/raw, and I have programmed Vacuum Tube Sims into it, so it does the distortion/driven sound better than most plugins. But if you need the "smooth" sound, maybe Scarbee. To be honest, if you need to do DSP processing in your plugins, Kontakt is fairly limiting, with only a few built-in effects you can script, so buying libraries that bypass Kontakt isn't a bad idea if you are looking for plugins with unique sound design/distortion/reverb/effects/ect. I also have a Rhodes shootout video on YouTube with all the major players. Scarbee is absent, but I have a separate review video on it as Scarbee was kind enough to send me a copy for review. And also a Rhodes blog.