2

[John]

LMAO     Yeah…..   I just didn’t KNOW that was the EZplayer icon….. !    🙂
So then, there’s 2 places that EZplayer shows up.   Just needed to KNOW that!   haha

 

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

[John]

Yes I have Toontrack solo and I can load EZD, but cannot find EZplayer.  Is there a trick to getting it to appear in the drop-down of Solo?

Ahhhhh – I see it now.  I was looking to add EZplayer into the initial screen, which showed only my EZDrummer.   Instead, the EZplayer was available in the View screen as shown here.   Hope this can help some others as well –  thank you Scott!
– John

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

• This post was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by John.

[John]

I just purchased the EZPlayer today, and am having the same problems as was described by Adrian above.  I was under the impression that EZPlayer would work stand-alone in the same way as EZDrummer or EZKeys –  but OK, I have the Toontrack stand-alone and it works fine with my EZDrummer – but again, where is the EZPlayer app hiding at?  I don’t see any option in any menu drop-downs or any trace of it.

I too, use Studio One 4 Pro, and while I can access EZPlayer in the DAW, I want to use it stand-alone, for exactly the same reasons that Adrian describes.  So with the DAW closed, and Toontrack with EZDrummer open, where is it?  How is EZPlayer accessed?  So far this latest purchase has been a bit of a disappointment – there does not seem to be the same consistency to its functionality like the other products have.   Appreciate any assistance before I uninstall the thing.   Thanks
John

Reply To: Where is it? version: 1.2.0
Operating system: Windows 10

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

[John]

BEST ANSWER

James, I read over your questions and the replies so far, and I’m not sure if I can help but I’d like to offer my own response – I’m a basic skilled guitar guy and I’d say a beginner keyboard player.  I use a synth, an Alesis QS7 MIDI, input into my DAW, Studio One 4 Pro, with the Presonus Studio 2/6 USB interface.   My strengths though, are as a writer/composer and I’ll never be a super-skilled performer but I’m just smart enough to know how to use the incredible software tools here to put together some pretty good compositions.  It’s a bit difficult to convey everything using just text here and no video tutorials or screen shots, but I’d like to give you hopefully some useful thoughts if I may.

By the way, since I bought into EZKeys a couple weeks ago, I’ve become so addicted that I have not had to use my MIDI synth directly yet – and I’ve already composed 4 complete songs using EZKeys and EZDrummer2 in fact,  adding just some bass and some light strings (using my synth for that, yes) and then the vocals.  Ref EZKeys, I have found to my delight, that I don’t even need to have my DAW loaded in order to compose – I simply open the EZKeys stand-alone, hit the browser, begin scanning through the various genres & categories of intro’s, verses, chorus… and I can go from start to finish and build my entire piano track and save it, ready for import into my DAW later on.   But in my case, I already have many songs written that I never got recorded – so I am simply unloading melodies already finished in my head, now onto piano tracks.  Can’t tell you how much EZKeys speeds up the process, especially when I have a day job and the music creation is my hobby/passion.

But I think you’re really asking more along the lines of the creativity aspect, and I’d like to get to that.  Look, so you play guitar and drums.   With the guitar skills you’re already well equipped to compose in EZKeys – you just may not realize it.  Cause that’s the incredible strength of EZKeys, it takes the need to actually “perform” the piano-playing away and allows you to just CREATE.   Let me illustrate with an example melody that I trust we all might know,  the basic tune of “Amazing Grace”?   Visualize you’re playing a basic chord rhythm on acoustic guitar – in C.   I’m at work but, I can visualize it I hope, enough to describe a basic chord sequence of  C:

C         Em                F                    C                      C                Em               D
Amazing Grace,  how sweet      the sound     that saved   a  wretch  like me……

This is enough for us to look at…..  so, you have your melody in your head… and there are chords that you know SHOULD be needed somewhere in all that fancy piano playing,  that have to support your track.   (I’m assuming you want to use piano predominantly in your song and not mix with a guitar track, but either way you can combine those sounds if you want or use pauses in one instrument or the other, depends on the sound you’re going for).

OK so, you said you kind of get this far but when you try putting some chords together they don’t “feel” quite right.   OK.    I’m assuming that you began your effort by opening up the Browser, and searching through however large of a EZKeys library you have – even the default EZKeys MIDI pkg gives you a lot of good options for ballads – I use ’em extensively.  A tip – although I don’t do country per se, I have found a wonderful lot of patterns inside the country straight 4/4 section of EZKeys MIDI.   There’s something to keep in mind I think, with doing this – look for phrases that give you a nice ballad feel of piano “notes” that go “in and out of”  piano chords.  In other words, treat the editor like you’re standing beside a real guy (or gal!) who will actually play what melody you’re creating.  You don’t want him/her to just simply pound chords.  Remember what it’s like to try a new song on an acoustic guitar – you don’t play that “melody line” note by note – you play the chords, and if you’re not strumming you’re picking out little notes here and there that emphasize that melody line but staying within a certain “chord progression”.  This aspect is important when composing original songs, because you want to vary from anyone else’s work and yet there’s only so many chords in popular music.

There is an aspect that I find very different between guitar and piano writing, personally.  When I play a basic rhythm acoustic guitar song, I don’t strum I prefer mostly fingerpicking (and I use a 12-string a lot) and there are also some “extra” notes that I try to “toss in” as I play a rhythm part that sort of adds a bit of color to the melody.  There are some songs then that I also do a bridge on, where I play a bit of a melody line before going back to the next verse and I’m back on rhythm.  Maybe the difference I hear, is that with piano it seems there are so many more of those “extra” notes that float around going outside of the basic chord and at times can be even a bit discordant, but then in EZKeys you bring in the next chord or phrase and it brilliantly comes back in together and your ear just goes “ahh!”.  That’s part of this editing process.

So it seems you’re able to get the process of locating the BEST piano “loop” or phrase and bring it in to your editor, and then you’re working with a melody line in your head while you’re looking at it in the chord chart/circle right?   I wanted to compare the process you’re going through with what I do, let’s say for instance the amazing grace example above.  You know you can play those few chords on guitar, but what’s different in EZKeys for piano – you MIGHT have grabbed a phrase that reads instead, more like:      Cadd9      Emadd11    Fmaj7         and so on…..  is this the point where you’re saying “I like the chord progression, but the actual chords themselves don’t feel quite right”?

Here’s the thing – and don’t worry about any particular key, take the key of C that most of the EZKeys are in, because it’s easiest to work with and once you get the phrase edited to conform to YOUR OWN original melody then you can always transpose it and save it into your song project….   so use just your ears to listen to the first chord and if you can match up your melody line to begin in C or whatever other easy (basic) chord, then just use that as a starting point and go from there.  Play around with that circle and especially, OPEN the Details section on top, and do this for EVERY chord that you check.  Go one by one.  Practice with whatever the first one is,  say it’s Cadd9,  and turn OFF the “add9”, until you can hear a basic “C” only.  THEN use your ears and play around with adding 3, 5th, 7th, 9, 11,  but not all at one time  LoL  turn on each one, listen to see if that’s what you really have in mind that better matches your own melody… and proceed through the options.   Sometimes you may not have the correct BASIC chord.  That’s why I suggest starting with that first, turn off all those little “extra” notes and hear just the basic chord.  If that is not the chord you need for that measure or beat or lyric, then go to another.  But if you play guitar, this will come natural to you!   Just visualize your guitar and see what basic chord you would have used, and try THAT one from the chord circle.

The really nice thing about EZKeys is that you can custom-build your OWN song melody from all these pro-quality phrases and by the time you finish modifying an 8-measure phrase sequence, you might not even be able to recognize it from the original one you dragged down from the browser!  On the bad side, you might not ever be able to locate it again……!   I have forced myself therefore, to go slower than I’d like to, and I open up a text file beside the EZKeys stand alone window, and I begin with my Intro, and I log it down on paper:

“Intro – I used 8 measures”
“I used EZKeys MIDI, Country, Ballad Straight 4/4, Intro variation 02”   
I modified the original phrase to this sequence:
     Cadd9       Fmaj7        Dmadd9      Gadd11     
“note:  I’m documenting this all in the original key (C) but ultimately I transposed to “D” to fit my vocals better”.

(on and on, so for every song I write, I have at least 2-3 kinds of different sheets of documentation.
I also use various guitar loops, so I also carefully document where on my 1TB drive I have all these many hundreds of loops and which 3-4 I used.)

I also write it in a certain way if I broke apart 1 measure and made it 2 chords,  I’ll write for instance   “Cadd9 & Dm7″   to show that’s all 1 measure.
Laugh all you want but for each song I write now with EZKeys as part of it, I produce a sheet I call my “EZKeys Mapping” and I write all this stuff out.
The first song I did when I bought EZKeys – I went to town, build an entire song track piano part, and never documented where I got each phrase from.  I figured there’d be some easy way to locate it afterwards.  Not so!  Ha   If I ever wanted to go back and rebuild it – I’d have to go from scratch.   There is an option to “locate in browser” but all that points you to is where on your drive the EZKeys saves your song projects, and that’s basically with whatever random filename you might have saved it under.  So, just food for thought on that issue.

Final point, you mention also that in your verses all you have is a melody line, no chords.  I’m just guessing here but, perhaps you built your verse section by using the  EZKeys MIDI “Basic” section, where it gives you a single chord and none of the usual “rolling chord/notes” that most of the other sections use for style?   There are times when you do want to build something by note, but your song’s piano track will want the sort of chord progression patterns that you find within the styles that come with the EZKeys pkg or any one of a number of add-ons that can be purchased separately.  I can’t stress enough too, that the real “effort” if you think of it like that, is in this “initial browser selection phase” as I call it.  You have your own melody in mind.  You have like, tons of options but – which one to choose?   Well, you seem a lot like me, you play by ear, you know what your melody line sounds like in your head… as you listen to phrase after phrase, try to find which one has the sort of rhythm to it that you want.  Not a straight single chord, but a nice-playing section that seems to fit the basic style you want.  This is the step I spend probably the most time on, because this affects a lot of what you do throughout the song’s piano track.

In fact, I’ve done a song where I barely used 2 or 3 different patterns because I was able to modify just a couple variations so much that Intro, Verse, Chorus, and Ending were all possible just by re-writing the chords I needed to match MY melody line, but it kept the nice flowing piano-playing style.  And that’s the beauty of it.   But if I DID want to create a special piano melody line as a section within the track, it would be my easiest method to just fire up my Alesis QS7, practice the part I want a few times until I can play it close to correct, and then simply record that as a separate track inside my DAW project.  Then use the MIDI editor to clean it up a bit, before either transposing if needed, and then converting to audio track.   Does that help at all?  I’m sure with this kind of tool, there are many ways creatively to get to the same end result.  I’m just hoping that by explaining a bit how it goes for me, maybe it will help you to not give up and to try further to get your melody into your desired piano part.

Oh, you also asked about the possibility of a live piano-player to do a recording for you.  Yep, there are such things of course, and there’s a particular place I go to for specific parts I want to have done “live” that are far better than I can do.  They are at:   http://www.airgigs.com   and you can find pro vocalists, piano players, guitar players, even mixing and mastering – anything you need, and if you search a bit and listen to their sample demos, you can find some truly outstanding artists who are very, very reasonable – under $100 for numerous pianists for example.   If you decide you need to go this route, it’s a very popular option that a lot of us songwriters use.    OK, sorry this is so long but if any of it can help you or anyone else on here, it was time well spent.  Best of luck to you – EZ Keys is an awesome product and a truly great creative tool!
~ John

PS   nope, I do not work for Toontrack and no one bribed me to say good things about their great product EZKeys! I just love it!!    :))

Reply To: How to write piano parts version: 1.2.5
Operating system: Windows 10

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

James, I read over your questions and the replies so far, and I’m not sure if I can help but I’d like to offer my own response – I’m a basic skilled guitar guy and I’d say a beginner keyboard player.  I use a synth, an Alesis QS7 MIDI, input into my DAW, Studio One 4 Pro, with the Presonus Studio 2/6 USB interface.   My strengths though, are as a writer/composer and I’ll never be a super-skilled performer but I’m just smart enough to know how to use the incredible software tools here to put together some pretty good compositions.  It’s a bit difficult to convey everything using just text here and no video tutorials or screen shots, but I’d like to give you hopefully some useful thoughts if I may.

By the way, since I bought into EZKeys a couple weeks ago, I’ve become so addicted that I have not had to use my MIDI synth directly yet – and I’ve already composed 4 complete songs using EZKeys and EZDrummer2 in fact,  adding just some bass and some light strings (using my synth for that, yes) and then the vocals.  Ref EZKeys, I have found to my delight, that I don’t even need to have my DAW loaded in order to compose – I simply open the EZKeys stand-alone, hit the browser, begin scanning through the various genres & categories of intro’s, verses, chorus… and I can go from start to finish and build my entire piano track and save it, ready for import into my DAW later on.   But in my case, I already have many songs written that I never got recorded – so I am simply unloading melodies already finished in my head, now onto piano tracks.  Can’t tell you how much EZKeys speeds up the process, especially when I have a day job and the music creation is my hobby/passion.

But I think you’re really asking more along the lines of the creativity aspect, and I’d like to get to that.  Look, so you play guitar and drums.   With the guitar skills you’re already well equipped to compose in EZKeys – you just may not realize it.  Cause that’s the incredible strength of EZKeys, it takes the need to actually “perform” the piano-playing away and allows you to just CREATE.   Let me illustrate with an example melody that I trust we all might know,  the basic tune of “Amazing Grace”?   Visualize you’re playing a basic chord rhythm on acoustic guitar – in C.   I’m at work but, I can visualize it I hope, enough to describe a basic chord sequence of  C:

C         Em                F                    C                      C                Em               D
Amazing Grace,  how sweet      the sound     that saved   a  wretch  like me……

This is enough for us to look at…..  so, you have your melody in your head… and there are chords that you know SHOULD be needed somewhere in all that fancy piano playing,  that have to support your track.   (I’m assuming you want to use piano predominantly in your song and not mix with a guitar track, but either way you can combine those sounds if you want or use pauses in one instrument or the other, depends on the sound you’re going for).

OK so, you said you kind of get this far but when you try putting some chords together they don’t “feel” quite right.   OK.    I’m assuming that you began your effort by opening up the Browser, and searching through however large of a EZKeys library you have – even the default EZKeys MIDI pkg gives you a lot of good options for ballads – I use ’em extensively.  A tip – although I don’t do country per se, I have found a wonderful lot of patterns inside the country straight 4/4 section of EZKeys MIDI.   There’s something to keep in mind I think, with doing this – look for phrases that give you a nice ballad feel of piano “notes” that go “in and out of”  piano chords.  In other words, treat the editor like you’re standing beside a real guy (or gal!) who will actually play what melody you’re creating.  You don’t want him/her to just simply pound chords.  Remember what it’s like to try a new song on an acoustic guitar – you don’t play that “melody line” note by note – you play the chords, and if you’re not strumming you’re picking out little notes here and there that emphasize that melody line but staying within a certain “chord progression”.  This aspect is important when composing original songs, because you want to vary from anyone else’s work and yet there’s only so many chords in popular music.

There is an aspect that I find very different between guitar and piano writing, personally.  When I play a basic rhythm acoustic guitar song, I don’t strum I prefer mostly fingerpicking (and I use a 12-string a lot) and there are also some “extra” notes that I try to “toss in” as I play a rhythm part that sort of adds a bit of color to the melody.  There are some songs then that I also do a bridge on, where I play a bit of a melody line before going back to the next verse and I’m back on rhythm.  Maybe the difference I hear, is that with piano it seems there are so many more of those “extra” notes that float around going outside of the basic chord and at times can be even a bit discordant, but then in EZKeys you bring in the next chord or phrase and it brilliantly comes back in together and your ear just goes “ahh!”.  That’s part of this editing process.

So it seems you’re able to get the process of locating the BEST piano “loop” or phrase and bring it in to your editor, and then you’re working with a melody line in your head while you’re looking at it in the chord chart/circle right?   I wanted to compare the process you’re going through with what I do, let’s say for instance the amazing grace example above.  You know you can play those few chords on guitar, but what’s different in EZKeys for piano – you MIGHT have grabbed a phrase that reads instead, more like:      Cadd9      Emadd11    Fmaj7         and so on…..  is this the point where you’re saying “I like the chord progression, but the actual chords themselves don’t feel quite right”?

Here’s the thing – and don’t worry about any particular key, take the key of C that most of the EZKeys are in, because it’s easiest to work with and once you get the phrase edited to conform to YOUR OWN original melody then you can always transpose it and save it into your song project….   so use just your ears to listen to the first chord and if you can match up your melody line to begin in C or whatever other easy (basic) chord, then just use that as a starting point and go from there.  Play around with that circle and especially, OPEN the Details section on top, and do this for EVERY chord that you check.  Go one by one.  Practice with whatever the first one is,  say it’s Cadd9,  and turn OFF the “add9”, until you can hear a basic “C” only.  THEN use your ears and play around with adding 3, 5th, 7th, 9, 11,  but not all at one time  LoL  turn on each one, listen to see if that’s what you really have in mind that better matches your own melody… and proceed through the options.   Sometimes you may not have the correct BASIC chord.  That’s why I suggest starting with that first, turn off all those little “extra” notes and hear just the basic chord.  If that is not the chord you need for that measure or beat or lyric, then go to another.  But if you play guitar, this will come natural to you!   Just visualize your guitar and see what basic chord you would have used, and try THAT one from the chord circle.

The really nice thing about EZKeys is that you can custom-build your OWN song melody from all these pro-quality phrases and by the time you finish modifying an 8-measure phrase sequence, you might not even be able to recognize it from the original one you dragged down from the browser!  On the bad side, you might not ever be able to locate it again……!   I have forced myself therefore, to go slower than I’d like to, and I open up a text file beside the EZKeys stand alone window, and I begin with my Intro, and I log it down on paper:

“Intro – I used 8 measures”
“I used EZKeys MIDI, Country, Ballad Straight 4/4, Intro variation 02”   
I modified the original phrase to this sequence:
     Cadd9       Fmaj7        Dmadd9      Gadd11     
“note:  I’m documenting this all in the original key (C) but ultimately I transposed to “D” to fit my vocals better”.

(on and on, so for every song I write, I have at least 2-3 kinds of different sheets of documentation.
I also use various guitar loops, so I also carefully document where on my 1TB drive I have all these many hundreds of loops and which 3-4 I used.)

I also write it in a certain way if I broke apart 1 measure and made it 2 chords,  I’ll write for instance   “Cadd9 & Dm7″   to show that’s all 1 measure.
Laugh all you want but for each song I write now with EZKeys as part of it, I produce a sheet I call my “EZKeys Mapping” and I write all this stuff out.
The first song I did when I bought EZKeys – I went to town, build an entire song track piano part, and never documented where I got each phrase from.  I figured there’d be some easy way to locate it afterwards.  Not so!  Ha   If I ever wanted to go back and rebuild it – I’d have to go from scratch.   There is an option to “locate in browser” but all that points you to is where on your drive the EZKeys saves your song projects, and that’s basically with whatever random filename you might have saved it under.  So, just food for thought on that issue.

Final point, you mention also that in your verses all you have is a melody line, no chords.  I’m just guessing here but, perhaps you built your verse section by using the  EZKeys MIDI “Basic” section, where it gives you a single chord and none of the usual “rolling chord/notes” that most of the other sections use for style?   There are times when you do want to build something by note, but your song’s piano track will want the sort of chord progression patterns that you find within the styles that come with the EZKeys pkg or any one of a number of add-ons that can be purchased separately.  I can’t stress enough too, that the real “effort” if you think of it like that, is in this “initial browser selection phase” as I call it.  You have your own melody in mind.  You have like, tons of options but – which one to choose?   Well, you seem a lot like me, you play by ear, you know what your melody line sounds like in your head… as you listen to phrase after phrase, try to find which one has the sort of rhythm to it that you want.  Not a straight single chord, but a nice-playing section that seems to fit the basic style you want.  This is the step I spend probably the most time on, because this affects a lot of what you do throughout the song’s piano track.

In fact, I’ve done a song where I barely used 2 or 3 different patterns because I was able to modify just a couple variations so much that Intro, Verse, Chorus, and Ending were all possible just by re-writing the chords I needed to match MY melody line, but it kept the nice flowing piano-playing style.  And that’s the beauty of it.   But if I DID want to create a special piano melody line as a section within the track, it would be my easiest method to just fire up my Alesis QS7, practice the part I want a few times until I can play it close to correct, and then simply record that as a separate track inside my DAW project.  Then use the MIDI editor to clean it up a bit, before either transposing if needed, and then converting to audio track.   Does that help at all?  I’m sure with this kind of tool, there are many ways creatively to get to the same end result.  I’m just hoping that by explaining a bit how it goes for me, maybe it will help you to not give up and to try further to get your melody into your desired piano part.

Oh, you also asked about the possibility of a live piano-player to do a recording for you.  Yep, there are such things of course, and there’s a particular place I go to for specific parts I want to have done “live” that are far better than I can do.  They are at:   http://www.airgigs.com   and you can find pro vocalists, piano players, guitar players, even mixing and mastering – anything you need, and if you search a bit and listen to their sample demos, you can find some truly outstanding artists who are very, very reasonable – under $100 for numerous pianists for example.   If you decide you need to go this route, it’s a very popular option that a lot of us songwriters use.    OK, sorry this is so long but if any of it can help you or anyone else on here, it was time well spent.  Best of luck to you – EZ Keys is an awesome product and a truly great creative tool!
~ John

PS   nope, I do not work for Toontrack and no one bribed me to say good things about their great product EZKeys! I just love it!!    :))

Reply To: How to write piano parts version: 1.2.5
Operating system: Windows 10

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

[John]

Henrik, it looks like you nailed it,  I found the setting in Menu / Browser / Use Original Key Signature.   Checking that Enabled, allowed me to save the transposed phrase into my Favorites folders.   Again, many thanks for the tip!

~ John

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

1

Thanked by: Henrik Ekblom

[John]

I’ll check those menu settings after work – I may have thought that setting worked the opposite way than you said.  That would certainly explain the issue, as that’s the exact situation I’m hearing.  Many thanks for your prompt reply!  I’ll update my post when I am able to check and test this setting later today.  ~ John

Reply To: EZKeys Transpose doesn't SAVE in the new key? version: 1.2.5
Operating system: Windows 10

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

1

Thanked by: Henrik Ekblom

[John]

I agree with this issue – I enjoy working with all the beautifully played phrases of the various EZ Keys & Libraries and always wonder who really performed them.  I think listing a performer somewhere in the interface, say when each clip is brought into the editor maybe, and show it along a side panel or something?  Would be a nice touch in any new version.

Reply To: Musician Credits? version: 1.2.5
Operating system: Windows 10

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

[John]

This issue is one of the most important on this entire forum I think, because regardless of technical issues with our favorite products, all of us who create our own songs/song recordings, need to know all we can about copyrights, current changes in the process, recent cases and any significant rulings, and so on.  I send a lot of work to the US Library of Congress for actual copyrights, and I would not trust or recommend, any other process.  Regardless if I never sell a song, if I ever have to defend it I’d want nothing less than an official copyright to back up any claim.   There’s lots of good info out there, and here’s a link that is short, sweet, and in plain english:

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/8-basic-facts-every-musician-should-know-about-copyright-law

Here’s a link to the US electronic Copyright Office which is SO much easier to use than in the “old days”   (I been doing copyrights since the late 1970’s).

https://eco.copyright.gov/

I think we all love to use commercial royalty-free loops and patterns like EZDrummer and EZKeys and many others, and there’s a concern that even under the guidelines of that license usage, we should be trying faithfully to alter and otherwise modify the patterns to make them fit OUR OWN original work, and not try to create a song out of the given loop or pattern AS IS.

In fact, just having bought the EZ Keys Ballads2  MIDI pack, I was amazed to hear what sounds to ME like a lot of phrases that I’ve heard Jim Brickman play.  (I’ve seen him play live, and he’s one of my favorite artists for piano ballads).   I wonder if he provided some actual input to the clips or whether their “professional piano player” as advertised, was as much a Brickman fan as I am!    🙂   But again, I’d feel as though I can’t just drag down a few clips AS IS, paste them together, put some lyrics to it and call it MY song.   I feel like I need to create my own melody, then locate what phrases I feel are CLOSE and that I can then make chord and note changes to, in order to fit it INTO my own melody and lyrics.  Does this seem to agree with what most of you are doing?  Or is there a wide degree of opinion about the whole “creativity” aspect of using these kinds of tools in our own creations, and what is “OK” to do or not to do as far as using the loops in our own works?

I’m not seeing a lot of guidelines from the vendors about this point, but it seems common sense to me.  Sure, we might go through our lifetime without ever having any issue come up, we’re not in that tens-of-millions of dollars category, but we should all be trying to use these tools to enhance our own original creations while streamlining our process and enabling us to create a song recording in days instead of weeks (or much longer) as I used to do.  I wanted to start a new thread for just the creative aspect of using these tools but was glad to see this one and felt it should do fine for a longer term discussion.  How do you all use these tools in your own creations, and using EZ Keys specifically?   I’d love to hear more from you about this aspect of songwriting with these EZ-tools.  Best wishes to all of you who are creating your own music!

John

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

[John]

I use S1 4 Pro also, and I’ve been an EZ Drummer user for a long while now, and just this past couple days I added EZ Keys.  I’m using Windows 10 Home 64-bit, and both EZD and EZ Keys work in both stand-alone and as VST plug-ins in S1 4 Pro.

So I’m not sure what to advise, you have a lot of other gear that I don’t, so not sure if there’s driver issues or whether you did not get a good install of the EZ apps.  Odd that you had them both working with drag-n-drop but not when adding into a new project.  This probably indicates a specific installation issue, but not sure where things went wrong for you.   I wanted to be sure to respond though, that I am a S1 4 Pro user and my DAW just loves both of these 2 toontrack products.   I’m at work and not at my studio, but “m trying to visualize the steps I go through to insert a EZ Keys track in S1 4……

OH!  I remember something that was unique in Studio One –  once you have the instrument track in place, you single left-click on the little icon at the right side of the track panel.  You know where I mean?  It looks like…  some weird tiny little upright piano thing?  I dunno what they had in mind with that shape of icon, but when you click on that,  then it OPENS the EZ Keys interface, so that you get the same interface as if you open it up in stand-alone.  Maybe that is the step you needed to know about?  That is not mentioned in EZ Keys docs, it is a Studio One specific thing.  I hope that helps.  I remember that I accidently found that out by just stumbling around…. but it works great.

If for some reason that doesn’t solve your issue, sometimes it helps to back up,  do a clean un-install, and then carefully re-install.  I’m an IT Manager by trade, so trust me when I say that I’ve seen and resolved a LOT of system issues by carefully redoing the install.  The stuff can be a little complex and all of us have tons of drivers and different interface types and windows itself is – well, windows….   Did you use the toontrack program manager to install and register, or their website (both worked fine for me).  I can tell you that after I did the download, install, and update steps I did not have to even register (it already did it for me) and I did not have to do a thing with Studio One 4 – all I did was create a new song project, select (or browse) instrument, get an instrument track — and then clicking that little icon in the track settings (not the Inspector, just the track settings), it brought up the EZ Keys interface and everything goes fine from there.

 

keep us posted here, let us know if you got it working yet.
happy recording!
John

using both CW Sonar and Studio One 4 DAW; Win 10 OS; commercial audio loops as well as MIDI, EZDrummer and EZKeys; Presonus Studio 2/6 I/F; Nectar2 Production Ste; iZotope Ozone for mastering.

• This post was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by John.

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