It has been my pleasure to be involved in the development of ManyStation. One of my main tasks was the preparation of the user manual for ManyStation. I thought it might be useful to give you guys a bit of background to this document.
We wanted to do a few things with the manual:
- First, get people up and running as quickly as possible – you can also check out the note “ManyStation: read this first” for the really quick introduction.
- We were keen to introduce the product. The level of detail and the quality of the samples is simply not reflected in the price and so we felt it was important that the product was properly introduced.
- Rather than say to users “here are some samples – you’re on your own now” we wanted to give users some ideas about how the soundsets could be used in a practical manner and in particular how different soundsets could be used together. We do this in three ways – with the patches (over 700 patches are bundled with ManyStation), with the tutorial section in the manual (which has a small accompanying tutorial bank), and also with the commentary in the manual.
- Some of the samples have been taken from quite specific instruments or have been recorded by individual players. We felt it was important (and interesting) to give users some of the history of the sampling sessions so they could understand how the soundsets can be deployed in practice.
For all of you getting ManyStation, I hope you enjoy the product: it really is a great music making tool.
Simon