Product Reviews by KVR Members

This is a great little looper if you are looking for a minimalist approach to playing back and re-arranging loops in your project. If you are a Reason refugee and have a lot of REX or RX2 files laying around that you don't particularly want to see go to waste, this is a great investment to recycle (pun intended) those loops.

I am not a great drum programmer, so I rely on a combination of programmed beats and loops to make my drum parts for songs. Adding a loop gives some 'live' feeling to the rhythm and then I can add the killer kick drum or whatever is needed using a drum machine. This also gives me a lot of freedom to create variations of the beat. It is very important to me to have a looper that can deal with each beat as a seperate object, that way I can re-arrange loops, replace beats, make variations of the loop, and make completely new loops very easily while still using only one sample, which keeps the project easy to deal with on an intellectual level (no hunting for 40+ seperate sample files to load up your drum sounds). Plus, since the loop was usually crafted by a pro, all the sounds in the loop will sound right together, no need to manually tweak a filter for each sample so that they sound right together, etc.

So what does this plugin do? It loads up a REX file (Rex 1 or 2 format) and allows you tweak it minorly (adjust pitch of individual beats, etc.), and then allows you to drag-and drop the midi component of the REX file into your sequencer host, where you can then copy, paste, and re-arrange your loop into infinite variations. Creating fills, break-downs, change-ups, etc. is a snap at this point, no more 'my god, they used the same drum loop for the entire sound with no variation whatsoever'.

The features of this plugin beyond what I mention above is very limited. There are is no distortion, no filters, no envelopes, no LFO's. This plugin will pretty much just play back the beat and that's all, you will need to rely on plugin-effects to get your bitcrushing and filter sweeps on. It would be nice to have these features in this instrument, but it's rock-solid drag-and-drop midi from the plugin into your sequencer was enough for me to throw down $40US for it. I hear Jon is working on these features for an upcoming update of Dicer, which does have distortion and filters and envelopes and LFO's out the wazoo, but it doesn't currently have the drag-and-drop midi that love dearly.

I guess I should mention the features that I don't use: you can import standard WAV files rather than REX files, this seems to work alright, the interface for chopping the wave file up into bits seems to work alright, but I must admit I would rather just make a REX file in Recycle, but if you don't already have Recycle this is a very good little extra abilitity to have. You can also manually map slices from the loop to midi notes, and you can then adjust the pitch of the slice. You can have multiple instances of the the same slice mapped across the keyboard at different pitches if you want to go for that 'Max Headroom' effect or other weird '80's sampler effects. I haven't use this yet, I prefer to use the Auto-map ability so I don't have to spend any time at all mapping midi notes to slices. The last feature that is worth mentioning that I don't use much in my workflow is the drag-and-drop audio ability. That's right, you can load up a Rex file, select a slice out of the loop, then drag that slice straight into your sequencer and MicroDicer will export only that slice as audio for you to manipulate in your sequencer as you see fit.

One thing to check before you buy this is to make sure that your host supports drag-and-drop data from a plug-in. This works great in Sonar 4.02, I can't vouche for other sequencers, though. Get the demo and try it out 1st.

The only 'glitch' I've seen with this plugin is sometimes all audio from the plug-in will drop out as you repeatedly stop and start your project over and over. This seems to be easily fix-able by just bringing the plugin to the foreground or opening the plugin interface if you have interface closed. A weird little glitch.

I gave this a 5 for 'presets' but this is not applicable. The 'presets' are you REX files or WAV audio loops, so the quality of these will depend on your sample collection.

In summary, I love this plug-in's ability to quickly load up a REX loop, which you can then drag-and-drop the MIDI sequence into your host and then mung up that loop until the cows come home. This is a one trick pony: it is very easy to use, it is very limited in it's functionality, but it does what it was built to do very very well.Read Review

Pentagon was the 1st soft synth I had good success with in fully automating and programming it from within Cakewalk Sonar (version 2 at the time). Finally everything worked like it was supposed to, the MIDI learn features were solid and versatile, it had enough oscillators to generate some really nice sounds, as well as enough envelopes to really shape every step of the process. Really the only way to get the shaping features more flexible would be to use a mod matrix similar to what you find in rgcaudio's excellent z3ta+ synthesizer.

Since this synth is skin-able, there are some very attractive skins on it, so I would recommend you look into those, they are very easy to implement and the new look could very well improve your music creation process. Rene has a good following of friends, and customers online and from this community comes some great presets for the synth and skins. It really is a grass-roots built instrument and it's care in detail and quality shows in it's sound.

I used this synth for recordings on an album, then got into Reason for an album, and now I am back and pleased to find the latest updates for this synth add some new features and sounds, like the wavetables. It is nice to see Rene continuing to work on this product even though he has newer machines out.

It is true that this is "just another virtual analog" in that it's feature set doesn't boast anything that your auntie's soft synth doesn't also do. But I think that everyone needs to find their preferred virtual analog and make it "theirs" (or for the collectors amongst us, make it "one of theirs") in that you really take the time to learn the instrument inside out and figure out the nuances of it that sets it apart from everything else. Pentagon is that synth for me, I have used it over and over and it still has the sounds I'm looking for when it comes to analog. It has just enough features without the interface getting TOO rediculously large and it getting too bulky to tweak easily. It is a great balance between power an functionality, and with the support in the forums, the user community behind it, and the sound banks, it is easily worth paying for this instrument when you could conceivably find the same list of features on a freeware synth somewhere. A lot of expert thought and testing has gone into the development of this instrument, and it shows.Read Review

I have been dreaming of having a decent vocoder for years. And finally here is a good sounding, highly functional answer to that wish! Vokko has a very efficient synthesis engine on it w/ 3 oscelators (1 PWM, 1 rompler style, and 1 noise) which produces a great variety of carrier sounds. It also can do soundfont playback as a carrier as well, but I have not messed with that feature yet, so I can't comment on it. The interface could be a little cleaner, but it is usable. And certainly the most gratifying thing about it is that you get to install it, load it up in your host, and instantly start vocoding. I am running Sonar 4 as my host and I have managed to crash it a few times when using this plugin, so I think it could be more stable, but it is fun enough for me to put up with the crashes. Perhaps other hosts would be more stable.

This thing produces very nice sounding vocoding effects, vocal modulation sources result in highly comprensible results as long as you use the proper carrier synth settings. Other uses other than vocals (drums, random experimentation, etc.) also sounds great. The manual is not too well written and a little jumbled, but the user interface is simple enough that a quick look thru the manual is about all you'll ever need to get it. A lot of the features seem to be overkill to me, apparently it is based on someone else's vocoder effect and then other modules (such as the soundfont player) were added to make this into a new instrument. I haven't really bothered with the filters or envelopes, since I am using this mainly for vocoding vocals at this time. Many of the features seem extraneous to the core purpose of this instrument, but then again maybe I am just not using it the way the designer intended.

One thing to note is that the price for Vokko is $30US, not the $15 indicated above. That was the price I was charged for it as of 04-11-1 at least. But still, $30 is a great price for this handy little tool if you don't have a vocoder feature rolled up into some other plugin that you already have. This is a great sounding piece of dedicated software.Read Review