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Kirk Hunter Farewell Sale
- This topic has 75 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 3 months ago by
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After 25 years of crafting world-class instruments, Kirk Hunter Studios is closing its doors. To honor this incredible journey, we’re launching the Kirk Hunter Farewell Sale—a once-in-a-lifetime event!
For the next two weeks, we’ll be unlocking a different product at a deep discount every day. This is your final chance to own the award-winning Kirk Hunter collection at unbeatable prices.
We deeply appreciate your loyalty over the years, and we invite you to join us in celebrating this legacy one last time.
Don’t miss out on this historic opportunity to complete your Kirk Hunter collection before these legendary instruments are gone forever.
Thank you for being part of our journey.
https://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/?ct=t%28Farewell_Sale_Announcement
First Offer: (Original price was: $299.99 Sale price: $74.75)
https://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/products/virtuoso-ensembles-kontakt-retail/
113Kirk is a friend. I advised his business many years ago, and worked with him on the concept and promotion of the Rock / Pop Strings library.
Kirk and I stay in touch. I’m sorry to see him close his business. I’m sentimental, I suppose. I’m sure lots of exciting things await Kirk. I’ll touch base with him and tell him about this forum and see if we can get some time with him.
Maybe an audio interview with Kirk led yours truly? Two friends talking, but I can do it in an interview style. I used to do a lot of public speaking, keynotes and panels, and I do enjoy interviewing people. If anyone is interested, I’m sure I could make it happen. Otherwise, I’ll just have a one on one call. But it might be interesting to just record me asking Kirk what’s up.
Let me know.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
3Sad to see a business close down.
Do they have anything absolutely and positively mandatory in their product range though, that one should be looking out for?
Maybe an audio interview with Kirk led yours truly?
Might be interesting to hear about the journey from beginning to end in the sample/plugin world, and the reasons to close it all down (with guesses about where things are heading in the future.)
1Welcome to the non-toxic place @KirkHunter
I loved seeing that comment, @bapu. My mission– and yes, it’s idealistic–is to create an environment where everyone is treated with respect. Where there’s not a developer owner using the forum to defame and bully competitors or pushing crowds into following their worst motives; where personality cults aren’t the norm. It was over a decade ago that I first spoke out against that on another forum and one of the three forum bullies ended up purchasing the forum. That planted the seed in my mind to start a forum of my own where that would never occur.It was my experience at the Cakewalk Forums –prior to the censorship era — that also inspired this site, which candidly was the best, kindest community I’d experienced in a forum since the days just following 9/11 when I unloaded to the members of my publication’s site about the lives lost at my (then) employer and my experiences handling two forums used by our surviving employees and family members and significant others of employees looking for information on their missing loved ones. That experience forever changed how seriously I saw forums and social media. Far beyond marketing purposes. I witnessed and experienced how they can be significant in people’s lives. It certainly had given me little tolerance for unethical business people exploiting communities purely for profit. This community doesn’t reflect me as a marketing expert. It reflects my ideals and passions. Sure, I’m going to try to make it pay for itself. But that’s not its purpose. This forum represents a proof of concept. That ethics and just basics of kindness and acceptance can exist without being overrun by profit motives that manipulate, censor, and steer conversations without forum members even realizing what’s going on but often getting caught up in the toxic behavior, even justifying it because they’ve been presented with fabrications to serve a forum owner’s objectives. That’s coded. Some day soon, I’ll uncode it. I suppose I can leave it at, this community is for honest conversations — and sharing positive and negative experiences and opinions of the tools we use to make music. It’s not about a developer leveraging a forum to defame and attack other developers. That was the inspiration behind this community.LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
5New deal is Concert Strings 80% Off – $79.80
2The other thread about the sale does have one of the moderators questioning the legitimacy of the sale. That is sad.
It’s Mike Greene, the owner of Vi-Control
I’m just going to say it plain. Years ago, the head of ethics at Wharton stated that every Wharton student should be reading my writing due to my deep understanding of business ethics. I have not known of any business person with worse ethics than Mike Greene in my career. He is the inspiration for me doing this site. It’s not Cakewalk. Over a decade ago, Mike Greene, a user by the name of re-peat, NYC Composer and Paolo from Fluffy Audio all participated in a despicable bullying series of posts targeting Kirk. They ended up attacking and defaming me when I tried to stop their attacks against Kirk (who was not participating in the thread, but the thread made VI-Control an incredibly hostile and toxic environment for Kirk).
Last year, Mike Greene using proxies and participating directly, made an attack thread on 8Dio. The basis of that attack was a fabrication of a story by a Kontakt scripter employed by Mike’s friend Andrew Aversa, Impact Soundworks. The Kontakt scripter 14 years earlier had turned to a developer, who turned to me, after the scripter had done a fake review of a sample library he worked on, probably got paid royalties on, praising the library and comparing it to ToneHammer’s similar library, stating how the library he worked on and made royalties on was superior — except he never disclosed that he worked on that library and made royalties on it. He deceived the community by withholding that vital info. Troels — later. a cofounder of 8Dio with Tawnia, his wife — contacted that scripter — heck it was Mario / Evil Dragon — and told him (very accurately) that what he did was unethical and not legal and he could destroy his reputation and be sued. Troels pushed him to make things right. So, the developer that mentored Mario called me up and I gave the advice that Mario should apologize to Troels, and never engage in that kind of unethical behavior again.
14 years later, Mario participated in a thread at VI-Control with his Impact Soundworks co-worker, Sarah. attacking 8Dio claiming that he was bullied 14 years prior simply for doing an honest review. When Troels posted the completely accurate story, Mario called him a liar, all of this egged on by Mike Greene — as anyone could see in the thread — Mike was calling Troels all sorts of names, it was clearly libel. So, I posted in the thread that I was the person who gave Mario advice all those years ago and his story in that thread was untrue. Mario acknowledged that what posted was true. Mike Greene freaked out. Deleted my posts and Mario’s responding posts acknowledging that what I wrote was true (Mario and I have always gotten along well, FTR, but I will not be party to these unethical acts). So behind the scenes, Greene and I argued. Greene acknowledged that what he was doing wasn’t ethical but that he hates 8Dio for various reasons and that they’re heavy discounting of their libraries is destroying the industry. Greene also tried to persuade me to never work with 8Dio. I cc’ed 8Dio’s CEO, Tawnia on this, in my reply to Greene. When I told him that I thought his behavior was reprehensible and I was cc’ing Tawnia so she could be aware of his libel, Greene threatened to humiliate me on his forum. Which he did. First by libeling me, calling me mentally ill and other names. Tawnia persuaded him that was legally problematic and an easy lawsuit.
Now since then, Greene has gone after three other developers. The most recent of which is Cinesamples. He’s been spreading a rumor that they’re on the verge of going under.
Now, I don’t engage in libel. I can verify everything I wrote as fact if Greene came after me and countersue. But this is how Mike Greene operates and I stood up for two developers Greene bullied and used proxies to bully. Hans Zimmer called Vi-Control toxic, So did Christian Henson. Henson wrote that it was so toxic that he needs to take breaks from it. I can tell everyone that developers are afraid that they will be next on Greene’s list to be attacked. He exploited my friend Cory Pelizarri when Cory was in a terrible mental state. I had pleaded with Greene to stop exploiting Cory, that it deeply troubled him and Cory actually asked me to make posts on his behalf — but I never did it. Tawnia knows all of this from back then. So I pleaded and pleaded that this was causing Cory to go into a tailspin. Greene did not care. Cory eventually took his life and there was also another person who had a suicide attempt during all of this. Greene didn’t care.
Sorry for sidetracking your thread, Kirk. I do want people to know about this guy. I wouldn’t be doing this forum if it wasn’t for him. And FTR, that doesn’t mean I’m competing against him. I’m not. I made this forum to be a place for people who want to avoid that toxicity. That was why I created a bunch of graphics about it. It is significant to me. I realize that people just care about great deals. But I care about people, including developers. I loathe bullying. I’ve raised my kids to not just stand up for themselves, but to stand up for others. I could have avoided being bullied by Greene if I just STFU like he told me. But I knew that what he and Impact Soundworks employees were doing was all based on a lie in order to destroy a competitor’s
Greene and Andrew Aversa (Impact Soundworks) sent Tawnia a series of electronic messages I would consider gaslighting, bullying, demeaning and just plain demented taunting. She sent them all to me. I was and still am repulsed by any individuals who can do that to anyone. I doubt that they would have demeaned the CEO the way they did if Tawnia was a man and not a woman. That was blatant misogyny, IMO.
Business doesn’t have to be that way. Most developers are decent people. I’ve become friends with a bunch of them and a bunch of them are afraid Greene will harm their business. They’re afraid to work with 8Dio / SoundPaint — and that is part of Greene’s mission — because they’re afraid Greene will retaliate against them if they work with 8Dio. And I’m sure many are afraid to come to my forum because they’ll be on Greene’s enemies list even though I’m not a competitor to Greene’s forum and have no intention to spend money to attempt to attract people here. I’m super happy just to have my friends from Cakewalk Forum here. I’m simple AF.
Vent over. But every word of what I just shared is true. Kirk is my friend. I haven’t consulted to his business in a decade. But we chat a lot and it’s a beautiful friendship. It’s not business. He’s my friend. That’s all there it to our relationship. But I’m sickened by Mike Greene and his unethical behavior. I’m calling it out.
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LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
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