By funkychickendance
On 13th June 2006
Version: 2.0
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Wusik EVE - Electronic Vintage Ensemble
Now in v.2 and with a flashier interface than before, EVE is a great 'go to' synth. Not to be confused with EVE ONE (soon to be retailed as ManyOne), this is a rompler-esque synth that does great credit to its built-in good-quality samples, allowing up to three layers of different voices to be created and manipulated individually (or collectively) in interesting ways. Built-in effects are workmanlike, and you can split the keyboard to build never-before-heard ensembles.
The synth ships with a solid collection of vintage synth voices (in v.2, the selection is slightly larger than in v1.8, where I joined the train). But users will no doubt be tempted to pick up the other soundset/preset collections available at fairly reasonable cost. These include HQS1, a high quality Yamaha FS1r; HQS2, an exceptional MiniMoog collection; HQS3, the Evalon collection of yet more synths from BITR; and HQS4, Mellotronix, which has a fair number of Mellotron voices. I bought #4 even though I have M-Tron, simply because of layering possibilities. Quite a few star sound designers were involved in creating presets for these collections. Some are jaw-droppingly great.
EVE's sound is of very high quality, to my ears, and it does an excellent job of bringing the old synths back into currency. If you find yourself working in 70s and 80s genres, this is a good place to begin creating rich, swirling voices that don't sound very digital at all.
As with all DASH/Nusofting products, the support is excellent. A further bonus is that intercompatibility between Wusiksnd and DASHsnd offers yet more fresh choices for those of us who (sensibly) own both synths. It's very intuitive to use: I've never looked at the documentation! It's extremely good value-for-money, and it's rare to see anyone part with one in the secondhand market. Oh, and it has never crashed or 'acted up' on me in either FL Studio, ACID Pro 6, or in hosts like Chainer or eXT. |
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Last edited : 13th June 2006
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By funkychickendance
On 21st April 2006
Version: 2.0
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Artvera Golden Aset
If you've been intrigued by the family of synths that HG Fortune has developed over the past few years, you're sure to love this one. It's sold by artvera, whose Vera Kinter designed the truly beautiful interface, and whose work as a preset designer has graced a lot of HG Fortune's work.
If you are looking for a synth that can produce inspiring backdrops of sound for movie projects, or pads as underpinnings for ambient pieces, look no further. For $30, it's hard to think of anything else that will do the job as well. With 500+ carefully designed presets and the wonderful 'lazy' button for random resets, you're sure to trip across something that'll fit, in the spectrum from sinister to pastoral.
The themes are outer-spacy, Egyptian, mythological, fantasy-oriented, and named appropriately.
You can get three different GUIs -- gold, bluish, silver -- but the gold one is, for me, the way to go. Museum quality art, and I'm not kidding.
It's incredibly easy to use, and self-explanatory. You'll find time slipping past as you click through presets, trying to decide which to use...how about that? Therapeutic VST-induced meditative states! |
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Last edited : 21st April 2006
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By funkychickendance
On 18th October 2005
Version: 5.0c
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Sony Creative Software ACID
Isn't it odd? Only one review, and that of an expired version. Let me try to redress that problem.
I have taken a very odd path into recording and composition on a PC. I started out with Power Tracks Pro
(now in version 10) and Band In A Box (a sequencer based on families of musical styles from PG Software, which can output to MIDI or WAV). The results were/are muzakish or karaoke, and a lot of tweaking is needed to get any funk out of them.
Which is where I discovered ACID, looking for, e.g. ways to reverse guitar parts, or to handily play back drum WAV loops (I tend to write from the bottom up, and MIDI drums drove me nuts!). ACID isn't the perfect medium by any means, but it will do a helluva lot more than people give it credit for...
GUI: Very clean and clear, largely unchanged from Sonic Foundry days. You get an 'infinite' number of tracks into which you can put WAV or MIDI: either loops, one-shots, pre-recorded, or live. There plenty of processing (Fx, Volume, Pan, etc) at the track level, as well as on assignable buses for mixes.
One major improvement in v.5 Pro is that you can cluster parts in a folder (very handy for saving screen footprint when building complex rhythm parts). The Pro version comes with the XPress versions of Native Instruments' Hammond B4, FM7 and P53 ($117 worth, free). It'll host pretty much any VST I have tried, and multiple instances also work. I have a huge family of VSTs (free and purchased) and it's never complained or failed once. ACID is also rigged for ReWire and hosts DXi plug-ins, too.
There are plenty of Sony's own Fx built in, but nothing stops you adding more in VST plug-in form.
What can't you do? A common beef is that you can't assign envelopes to MIDI tracks in the same way you can to WAVs. This is a feature I hope will be added in the next full or partial upgrade.
The program takes a while to load -- all those VSTs, FX and my vast (100GB+) loop library being a cause, I'm sure.
Whether it's a great studio product or not, I can't really tell you. It works for me: I tend to use a lot of loops as shortcuts, and add MIDI or real audio at a later stage (or, when I find myself saying: 'this is where the M-Tron plug-in fits in,' or 'there's a better pad in Crystal,' or 'I'm going to work exclusively with Wusikstation today')
I also make my own loops at times -- you can do it from ACID Pro, but I prefer to use Sound Forge.
I'm conscious sometimes that I'm building my workflow around some of its quirks, but ACID seems like a good 'songwriter' product, capable of commercial-quality demos, and even commercial product. But I'm quirky, too. Sometimes a song will start out in the 'real' world, on my Tascam hard disk recorder with click track, guitar(s), bass, drum machine, vocals, migrate briefly into PTP for Helicon twiddling of vocals, then pop up in Sony as a package of WAV tracks. Then, loops get matched to it, and MIDI appears, via VSTs. Other times, the ingredients will be mixed another way.
So, ACID Pro works for me right now, and probably will for a while. It'll either grow to rival products like Cakewalk, or set itself some more modest boundaries. Only Sony can tell you about that, and they don't talk.
It's conceivable that I might adopt some other product in the future, but I haven't got a clue what it might be: the alternatives all look rather over-priced
and equally idiosyncratic, to be honest.
BTW, the program only costs $299, direct from Sony. And you can convince yourelf whether you want it from the 'home' version, which is around $70.
Edit: In April '06, Sony updated ACID to v.6. An upgrade from one 'Pro' version to the next was $130, for a short time. I've only used the demo of ACID Pro 6, but it seems to resolve a lot of the reservations expressed about handling of VSTis, and of MIDI tracks. While it still lacks one or two features of regular big-name hosts, it can outperform them in many other ways, if you're a loop user. My workflow is now increasingly 'all ACID' or 'all FL Studio Producer Edition,' depending on the type of project. |
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Last edited : 16th April 2006
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By funkychickendance
On 13th October 2005
Version: 031005US
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GForce M-Tron
Developer GForce features a pretty essential range of products, but this was the first I simply had to buy.
The supply chain to the US has been a bit iffy in recent months, but new distributor M-Audio now has it out with retailers.
It's the kind of VST you either love or hate: it does just what it's supposed to do, which is sound like the classic Mellotron, the sound of the Sixties and early 70s. [Yes, I know people used 'Trons long after, but their heyday was earlier].
The latest release is the real deal, containing ALL of the available sounds previously sold as add-on banks, and some that were never commercial in the first place (custom jobs for Yes, Tangerine Dream and Frank Zappa). This adds up to 2GB-plus, and explains why it's no longer a download...
Authenticity being the name of the game, some of the sounds are a bit creaky and wobbly, which adds to the charm. GForce has also added a few 'new' sounds in the same mood (mostly choral).
And for those who say 'What the hell in a chamberlin?' the answer is revealed in the manual, wherein you discover it was a 'Tron predecessor. Its sounds are included, along with some from the defunct Megatron.
The VST behaves very nicely. The GUI is a kind of send-up of studio hardware, complete with cigarette burns and coffee cup rings. It's pretty simple to use. I read the manual AFTER I'd been through pretty much every function 'live.'
If you're an old geezer like me, who remembers when these devices were brand new, and only owned by the nouveau riche and rock elitists, you'll agree that $99 -- what it cost me -- is a fantastic deal.
It knocks the socks off all other 'Tron wannabes I've auditioned. Now all I've gotta do is stop myself from overusing it! |
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Last edited : 13th October 2005
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By funkychickendance
On 8th October 2005
Version: 2.4.8
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Green Oak Crystal
As others have said, this is a long-established free synth, and yet, it's still one of the most surprising
and pleasing. Usually, I find myself forgiving all kinds of horrible quirks in free stuff, but there's no need to with Crystal. There's basically nothing not to like.
More to the point, there's a helluva lot to be pleased about, and grateful for. I'm kinda new to soft synths -- although I messed with hardware in the past -- so wasn't really prepared for an item like this, which is rich in features. Just the one feature of 'breeding' two separate presets kept me amused for an hour.
Crystal produces excellent pads, that's true. But that's only one aspect. There are many banks of excellent presets by other sound designers, and there's nothing to stop you creating your own. It's just as capable of lead voices as it is of making pads. It's 100 per cent stable, has a pretty decent online manual, and has consistently evolved over the years. It certainly has more tweakability than I know how to usefully employ at present, and always delivers something useful whenever I fire it up. |
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By funkychickendance
On 29th September 2005
Version: 2.1.4
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Wusik Wusik Station
I'm pretty new to the VST world, with a trio of NI Express keyboards as my only prior purchase, and a massive ever-changing folder of freebies from this fabulous forum. I have to say, though, that Wusikstation is worth every cent (or pfennig).
I've started to experiment with the synth's capabilities for tweaking sounds, which seem limitless to me. It comes
with an excellent package of samples, and the presets are well-chosen and thoughtfully done, too. What is intended to sound authentic sounds, well, authentic.
But it's the overall sound that makes this a great synth. To me, William has hit a home run here. I recall Wavestation moderately well, and the 'Wu' -- as I have started calling it -- can do pretty much anything that its inspiration could do, and then some.
It's remarkably stable, and doesn't hog CPU: though I guard against that issue in general by having 1GB of RAM, and expect to move up to 2GB soon.
The 'Wu' is creeping into more and more of my projects since I picked it up a week or so back, and I see
it displacing a whole lot of other VSTs as I get better at working on my own presets.
I'm coming back to synths after a long puritanical exile in the realm of grinding electric guitars and the 'authenticity' of acoustics. They're both perfectly fine, but something like Wusikstation really shows you what can be done with a little imagination. |
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| Latest 6 reviews from a total of 6 |
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