I Just got the new N.I Tonewheel set today
luvly jubly !!!

If you love your B4 you will love it even more
with these babies inside.
I was not exactly sure what I was going to get
but they are made by Native Instruments and thats
a good enough endorsment for me.

I was expecting the usual box with a manual, disk
and a piece of sponge inside. But it actually comes
as A CD in a jewel case, no manual needed!
Installation was a snip , just run the installer
then remove the disk, put the origenal B4 disk in
the drive and boot up the B4 and your done.
Instructions are on the jewl case liner.

There is no change to the GUI at all and the
3 new organs use the B4 GUI ,they don't have
a new GUI for Each one, as some people were
wondering, and that is a good thing because
the B4 has more controls than the others, so
you can get sounds from the new organs that
were not possible before with the origenal
hardware versions, the harmonium didn,t have
any controls before and now it has everything
the B4 has and so can make some impresive new
sounds.

You Can change tone wheel sets with just a
click of the mouse in the presets menu
(not the patch presets) where before you
just had B4 at the bottom of the menu you
now get 16 items

They are>>>
B4 Classic
B4 Pure
B4 Clean
B4 Classic 436
B4 Classic 444
B4 Classic 448
B4 Classic 452
B4 Dirty
B4 Filthy
B4 Trash
Vox Continental
Vox Continental Mix
Vox Continental Hard
Farfisa Compact
Farfisa Boost
Harmonium

And finally you can have different tone wheel sets
open at the same time using B4 as VSTi in a VST host
So if your CPU is up to it you can have B4 , Farfisa
Compact, Vox Continental and Harmonium all running
simultainiously as different instances.

expands the B4'S tonal pallet nicely

Well done N.I

Regards
Raven

[ 29 August 2001: Message edited by: Raven ]

Oh! forgot to say the B4 ageing process is quite ingenious
toooooooo......

Nice one Raven, I heartily agree with you, this is a good addition to the B4, good review. I do have a few quibbles with the package though.

1. Why do the new 25 or so patches written for the Vox and Farfisa not automatically change the tonewheel to the correct one?

2. Why do NI talk about patch nos in the read me when there's no patch numbering system in the plug in (I use the standalone a bit) I suppose only practice will tell me which of the Vintage presets are for the other organs. I think I'm just going to save them off to another bank.

3. Why no presets for the Harmonium tonewheel, I've no real idea of what a Harmonium should sound like, a starting point would have been nice.

4. Why are there no bass tones in the lower octave of the Vox, it seems to kick in at C2. Granted this may be a feature of the original hardware but I haven't played one in years, anyone got one lying around?

But apart from that loving it, these shortcomings are inspiring me to start writing my own patches more and the new B4 tonewheels are great.

If you've got the B4 you need these.

Tim

Hi Greedy Soul

quote

Quote:

2. Why do NI talk about patch nos in the read me when there's no patch numbering system in the plug in (I use the standalone a bit) I suppose only practice will tell me which of the Vintage presets are for the other organs. I think I'm just going to save them off to another bank.

Ah but there is ! if you click on view then change keyboard
to control you will see presets with numbers and you can
scroll through them with the keyboard up and down keys
Regards Raven

So,

can someone PLEASE post some sound-examples....


Bram.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greedy Soul:
4. Why are there no bass tones in the lower octave of the Vox, it seems to kick in at C2. Granted this may be a feature of the original hardware but I haven't played one in years, anyone got one lying around?

---

I've never played a Continental, but I've got a Vox Jaguar (the cheeper version) and the bottom octave doesn't produce the lower harmonic. The reason is that the bottom octave produces a bass tone (sine wave, down one octave) through a seperate output, so you can run it through a bass amp, while playing the organ through a leslie or whatever. There's also a switch to turn off the organ sounds all together on the bottom octave to play bass by itself, and a knob to control the volume of the bass tones (the volume pedal is the only volume control for the organ output). This lets those of us without a fender piano bass still pretend to be Ray Manzeric (sp?) every now and then

hmm..... I received it today, and so far I am not THAT happy as some of you.
Yes, I like it, but it wasn´t the "great" surprise I´d expected it to be.

Especially the Harmonium isn´t the way I thought about it.
(How should you simulate the pumping and modulating of the real sound??)

Strange - but sometimes I had the feeling I was playing my M-Tron while playing those new tonewheels....knickknack?

But hey - just the first day I tried it out, and I will go ony trying this stuff in several songs.
Native Instruments is still doing a very good job.

putte