Happy New Year

Welcome to 2016! We hope you had a wonderful winter holiday. The u-he team have returned rested and ready to take on the year's new projects.

Last year was busy and productive: the release of Hive, Beatzille, Protoverb, Presswerk 1.1, and updates for most of our other plug-ins. We welcomed new staff, moved into a new office, and traveled to Frankfurt for Musikmesse.

We want to thank you, our community, for all your support in 2015. We appreciate it, and look forward to more collaboration this year.

It's a packed newsletter this month, so let's get to it...

Customer survey

New ideas arise constantly around our office, from entirely new product concepts, to small feature refinements, or where to go for lunch. To help guide our plans we are asking you to take a short (5-minute) survey. It's mobile friendly, so you can even complete it while waiting for the bus.

As a small thank you, we are offering a $25 coupon when you complete the survey. The coupon can be used at u-he.com for any software purchase (soundsets, merchandise and transfer tokens excluded). Survey will be open until January 31.

Protoverb plugin and contest

In December we released Protoverb — our reverb "research-ware" plug-in. The goal of Protoverb is to harness the power of our community and collect data on "good" and "bad" reverb settings. The response so far has been fantastic—we have collected over 1,500 submissions. We are still looking for more, so please keep experimenting and sending in your findings. If you have not already downloaded and tried Protoverb you can find it on our website and read more about the concept.

When we released Protoverb, we hinted at a contest. Here are the details:

• 10 people will be randomly selected from the submissions to win a u-he plugin of their choice (only 1 prize per person).
• Submissions will be accepted until noon (12:00 Central European Time) March 31, 2016.

Hive Science Soundset

Give Hive a boost with our new soundset Hive Science by Howard Scarr and Kevin Schröder. This soundset is a collaboration between two generations of sound designers at the top of their game. The 300+ presets cover a lot of ground, from edgy cinematic stomps through EDM essentials to brain-warping sound effects. This collection showcases the skill of the sound designers as well as the capabilities of Hive. Perfect inspiration for your next track.

Listen to some sound examples and buy Hive Science at u-he.com.

Until next time, all the best from Berlin.
- The u-he team