Product Reviews by KVR Members

Interface: Very elegant, simple, nicely hi-tech looking interface. Separate pages for oscillators, filter/amp, lfo, midi/voices, fx and presets, fit into a nice step-by-step workflow.

Sound: Superb. I was most surprised by the thunderous bass this thing can get. Leads are musical and pleasing, pads can be lush and move in interesting ways over time...digital, analog, it really covers the basses very impressively.

Features: Many ways to manipulate sounds with your keyboard playing...changing time-stretch with velocity, lfo with aftertouch, etc...lots of nice, musical modulation possibilities.

I took away one point on features for lack of control of each of its oscillators' pitch. So, you can't harmonize a root and a fifth without stacking two instances of the synth and detuning one of them. The WAV import is a bit unpredictable, and seems to produce musical results only with a limited range of sounds.

Documentation: great manual, more than enough to teach you everything you need to know.

Presets: Great presets from many different sound designers. More than enough inspiring sounds to tinker with here.

Customer Support: Torben is tops. Any noticeable bugs were worked out within weeks of its release in a 1.01 update. Very active on KVR forum.

Value for money: Not the cheapest synth, but it certainly deserves to be in the price range that it's in.

Stability: Rock solid in Tracktion 2.

Next to Ivory this is the most expressive and beautiful grand piano. With Yamaha P60 as a controller it is a very convincing piano experience. Makes PMI Bosendorfer sound like a Casio.

This is one of very few instruments that I can literally found myself lost for hours just improvising and enjoying the details of the sound. I compose nearly all of my music with it, even if piano doesn't necessarily find itself in the final mix.

I used to have similar problems with slow rendering and loading described by others here when I used it with Cubase, but now that I have switched to Tracktion as my sequencer, it renders and loads extremely fast. Ironic to think that a Steinberg instrument works better in non-Steinberg sequencers...

There are times when I find it sounds just a tad bit muddy in a mix, but then I do play the left hand a bit heavy, and usually have bass guitar in my tracks as well. In any case I just roll off a bit of the low end and it sits in the mix very well.

There is not much of a choice of sounds here, but the sound it has is truly remarkable.

This is the first VST product that I have felt strongly enough about to review (well, I'm pretty excited about Tracktion, too, but that seems to have enough hype going for it now).

I have been playing guitar live and in the studio for over 15 years, and only began using amp emulation in the past year. Originally i enjoyed using Amplitube, but I had some problems with CPU usage and stability when using more than one instance, so I started experimenting with other plugins, including the excellent and free Guitar Suite.

I was a little skeptical to try a new, big commercial plugin after being quite happy with Guitar Suite, but I was completely bowled over at how musical and playable the sounds are on this thing.

I sat down to test the plugin, expecting to spend 15 minutes or so. Hours later, I had torn calluses on my fretboard hand, and several cigarettes had smoldered down to the quick in my ashtray while I just spent the afternoon wailing with this beauty.

I quickly went back and re-amped some songs I recorded in Tracktion originally using Guitar Suite, and the difference was remarkable. It gave the guitar tracks much more presence and character in the mixes, much more pro sounding and more life and character.

An outstanding plugin. One item for my wish list is to be able to create sub-banks of presets, I like the directory structure that Amplitube has and it would make it easier to store patches for a particular song.