All your favorite virtual instruments took a visit to the other side and came back a bit darker, eerier than before. The new EastWest collection, The Dark Side (Mac / Win), features 40 GB of virtual instruments that have been purposely mangled, distorted, or effected out of all recognition.
Produced by Doug Rogers and David Fridmann, The Dark Side provides unique instruments designed to work for any kind of musical genre, from alternative, dance, electronica, and hip-hop to symphonic rock, film, television, and game music. You’ll get processed drums and percussion, basses, guitars, ethnic instruments, keyboards, strings, and effected instruments, all organized into instrumental groups.
Doug Rogers, the founder of EastWest comments, “The Dark Side idea came to me when I was mentoring a young alternative group about some demos they sent me. To my ears, the tracks didn’t sound tough enough for their intended market, so I told them they needed to toughen up their sound.” He continues, “I looked around for sounds that could accomplish this and found absolutely nothing, even in our own vast collection. I saw this huge, gaping hole in the market that needed to be filled. Then and there, I decided to make it my next project after my recent pristine orchestral productions, a complete aural turn-around.”
Rogers partnered with Grammy award-winning record producer David Fridmann (MGMT, The Flaming Lips, Weezer) to add to this collection a “no rules” style of production.
The Dark Side’s more distorted and mangled instruments are intended to be used with cleaner instruments to make them really stand out in a mix, or to disturb the senses. According to EastWest, with today’s brick-wall limiting, distorted instruments may be the only product trick left to make an instrument stand out in a mix — a successful production technique used often by the likes of Radiohead, Muse, and Nine Inch Nails.
The new instrument collection comes with EastWest’s PLAY 2 software, which can operate standalone or as a plugin inside major DAW hosts that support VST, Audio Units, and RTAS formats.
The Dark Side is now available for $395 (MSRP).