V-METAL 2

I have been using the original V-Metal 1 for many years and it is still the most realistic sounding metal guitar library that I know. Also, creating creating guitar tracks was super easy - a handful of key switches gave you all you needed. Hence, I was delighted to find out that Prominy had updated V-Metal. Bought it blind, because there was not a doubt in my mind that VM-2 would be as excellent as VM-1 was.

It kind of is that, but it is also over-engineered to a dizzying degree. So much so, that working with it is now painful. While it still features the great sound of the original version, programming tracks in the DAW has become a nuisance. After two weeks of trying to figure out what it wants me to do for basic tasks, I just gave up and returned to V-Metal 1. I want to lay down a quick metal track, not study object oriented programming.

V-Metal 2 has so much builtin gimmickry that the Powerchords were dropped from the keyswitches. Powerchords. Yes, who needs those in Metal, right? Sure, one can still manually add them into the user chords slots, or use the new chord recognition mode. If you figure out how to do that, that is (I did not). But the days where you could lay down a blazing metal rhythm track in no time are over.

Also, there's no VM2-to-VM1 backwards compatibility. MIDI tracks made for VM1 will not work in VM2. A compatiblity instrument or a conversion tool VM1-to-VM2 would have been nice, but there's none. One can of course read the excellent 200+ page manual. But who reads 200+ pages for a sample library update - particularly just in order to find out that VM-2 just can't do easily what VM-1 could do out of the box.

So if you upgrade from V-Metal 1 to V-Metal 2, be aware that you're going to swear. A lot. And there's a good chance you'll go back to V-Metal 1 like I did. And if V-Metal 2 is your first encounter with this product, you're probably still going to swear, but since you don't know how easy writing metal tracks was with version 1, you probably won't feel the pain as much.

I don't enjoy having to say that, but V-Metal 2 was Cory-Doctorow'ed, if you know what I mean. 2.5 stars for the sound. Zero stars for the Metal.