In today’s over-saturated virtual instrument market there are plenty of powerful samplers out there vying for the attention (and green) of your average music software consumer. This is much more apparent on the PC end of things where there are dozens upon dozens of alternatives both in plug-in (Kontakt, HALion, DirectWave, etc) and standalone (Gigasampler, Reason’s NN-XT, etc.) forms. It’s tough for a small company to really stand out amongst such strong competition. One such company that has been trying to make a name for itself is Vember Audio, makers of the powerful Surge synthesizer and Shortcircuit sampler. Their design philosophy bucks the current market trends in virtual instruments by delivering quality products designed around the needs of sound designers rather than preset users in much the same way as Native Instruments circa 2001. Their interfaces are logical, but stripped of much of the flash that the big names have (no 3D rendered hardware-style “pots” here). Instead of focusing on huge libraries of sounds, they deliver great platforms for users to create their own sounds from scratch.

Now their sleeper hit sampler Shortcircuit is being released for FREE!

Details after the jump.

As the last couple of decades have led to making music in software, some of the materiality of physical instruments is lost. No matter how much you love your hardware synths, odds are you spent at least a little time looking into the void of a computer screen. And to the public, much of that is obscured by the back of a display. Instruments face outward; computers face inward.

Enter online photo sharing. Screen grabs can make software rigs visible. For example, someone’s been busy putting together a monster bass channel strip in Ableton Live:

Contained: the synth source is Vember Audio’s Surge digital synth, fed into Ohmforce’s Ohmicide saturator/distorter, Waves’ C4 (a multiband parametric compressor), L2 (ultramaximizer) and Maxx Bass (bass enhancement), and Ableton Live’s own Auto Filter and Saturator. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m amused because this is hilarious, goes-to-eleven overkill.

Got some screen grabs you want to share? Add them (and anything else music-related) to the Create Digital Music Flickr pool, and drop us a line if you think we’ll find it especially interesting.

I’ll be interested to see if tools like plasq’s upcoming Mac utility Skitch also catch on for this purpose.