It’s been an exciting summer round here, with some new hardware arriving in the lab and some old favourites being refreshed and revitalised. Nothing beats a happy week of re-capping vintage synths đ We’re hoping to get you some quirky and cool machines in the next few months, so definitely watch this space for more on that. We’re also looking at overhauling some of our prices, particularly the drum machines in the Beat Room, which have been sitting there at…
We have good pals over at Bedroom Producers Blog, who do a sterling service pointing folks around the web at cool freeware VSTs. In the past we’ve collaborated on the award-winning Commodore 64 Sessions Deluxe, and now we’re having a bit of random fun by offering a cool 33% off all Laboratory instruments if you use the coupon code BPB on checkout. The offer’s good until the end of October 2022, so if there’s something juicy in the Lab that’s…
Thank you everyone who submitted a review to the site for our recent competition. It really does make choosing a new instrument so much easier if you can read what other people have thought of it, and done with it. Thank you also for the consideration and detail that the reviews showed: you guys are the best đ The lucky winners fumbled out of Mongo’s Dodgy Hat are: HypersonicNinja, who reviewed Contamination Terry, who reviewed Drumulator Plus Phil, who reviewed…
For many of us, the past year has been complex and difficult and at times pretty disheartening. Something that’s been genuinely inspiring for us here in the lab is hearing from those of you who have been using music, and making music, as a means to lift your spirits, deal with loss, deal with frustration, offer something back. Here in Spain we’ve heard people playing music for their neighbours from their balconies during lockdown â both live, impromptu mini-concerts and…
After some frustrating website issues over the hols, we’re back up and running â and are keeping the Winter Sale going for a few more weeks so you can grab any Kontakt bargains you missed during our exciting unplanned outage. Take a look a the Hot Deals page to see what’s particularly tempting right now. We’ve got some big plans for 2020, including Dark Machine â an epic, extremely unstable Kontakt instrument which will be the culmination of months of…
In many ways this isn’t really new news, because we’ve been eco-friendly for years now; but we thought it was a good idea to let the world know that the sparking, crackling walls of electrical kit throbbing away here in the lab are all officially green and planet-friendly. You can find out more on our Green Robot page, which even has a handy tip to help you plant trees in your underwear. No, really. In other news: nearly done on…
Welcome to our cool new site! Don’t touch that, the paint’s not dry yet. What can we show you first? Okay, well: we’re responsive now, so you can read us on your phone or tablet. We have MongoMoney which you can earn in several ways and which redeems for hard cash off purchases. (It’s seriously cool.) We have new instruments (hurrah!). VAT invoices are now provided as standard. We’re SSL and https secure. And we’ve switched all our prices to…
This is really exciting. The lovely people over at Syntaur have agreed to license us the original Ensoniq Mirage factory soundset in all its 8-bit glory, and we’re right now in the process of sampling each and every patch into Kontakt. To do this we’re using the same workflow we developed for the Emulator II UOS libraries â which is to say, we’re sampling every note of every patch, chromatically, and often at multiple velocity levels as well, all from our much-loved…
We’ve had so many gremlins and web issues and general disaster over the past few days, we thought it was worth putting up some Good News instead. So here goes: The website is fixed! Hurrah! California Keys is half price until the end of May! Hurrah again! Mongo is certified parasite-free and is back at work! Hurrah! SH Poly is off the lab bench and into its patch creation phase, so not long to wait there. Double hurrah! Thank you.…
Hi folks, We just updated our eCommerce package and, hurrah, it’s spawned a whole load of irritating issues. Most of them were ‘behind the scenes’, and most we’ve managed now to fix, but there are at least two that are still persistent and which we’re relying on the eCommerce tech support guys to cure, since it’s their bugs that are causing the issues. They are: The User Area > My Account page has gone blank and is useless. The Emulator II…
Yep, we’ve finally tracked down the 500 errors that have been plaguing the site, and killed them off. (We sincerely hope.) Thanks for your patience if you’ve been clicking around and kept hitting blank pages. Talking of bugs, we once had an actual bug crawl out of a rackmount sampler which had just arrived from America. We’re still not sure who was most surprised, us or the stinkbug itself. It went straight back into the floppy disk slot and we…
Some scumbag broke into the lab while we were trick-or-treating (Mongo doesn’t need a costume, of course) and nicked our laptop đ Luckily, none of the synths are harmed (though a few are a bit traumatised)… but because this was the laptop we used for running the website and dealing with emails, we’re now struggling to make do until a replacement arrives: I’m typing this on the creaking mainframe that’s tethered to our audio system, which is a bit daft.…