Giga, I Hardly Knew Thee
Today’s post is an obit for Gigastudio. I’ve been running GS 2.5 on a standalone PC for a number of years now. It’s been a real workhorse here, so I’m kind of sad to see it go. This is from Tascam so it’s not too suprising. (The old joke goes you can’t spell Tascam without scam!)
I’ve worked with a few other soft-samplers for Protools and they all seem to be a bit buggy. Native Instruments pianos sound great, but can really flake out. (Using a Mac for my experience here.) I know it seems old fashioned, but the standalone thing worked really well. I ran two midi cables to my Giga machine, and ran a light-pipe back into PT. Lovely! Pretty low latency, and Giga rarely messed up once you got it going. Great sample sets. The first samples I’ve heard that can pass as “real.”
I remember cutting the Twistin’ Trees album. I originally recorded all of the piano tracks late at night on a concert length Steinway. It sounded simply amazing. . . until I got the tracks back on monitors and realized a few key notes were out of tune. I recut everything via midi through Gigapiano (the included one with GS 2) It sounded GREAT! The mastering engineer asked where I cut the piano. I was sold at that point.
A few caveats of course. I’ve never been able to register my software, despite trying the several times I’ve reinstalled over the years. Another is that on one particular mobo I couldn’t get the midi inputs to show up in the sampler. Everything was greyed out. No matter what voodoo I tried, no luck. I had to reinstall windows from the ground up, and it worked. The sample editor (if you’re really trying to make a GS “instrument”) is an absolute pain in the butt. I’d rather code something in assembly (note: I don’t know anything about assembly.)
Flaws included, I look back with fond memories. Of course, I’ll keep using the version I have, but now I’ll never get to know GS 3, and certainly not the short lived 4.
(Pouring coffee onto floor) Here’s one for my homie:
Giga, I hardly knew thee!
Tags: Gigastudio, GS 2.5, Native Instruments, NI, Tascam