ONE-SHOTS
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jason Scott Alexander
GENERAL VIBE VECTORSECTOR
A PROPHET REBORN
Several companies have released their own take on vector synthesis in the recent past, but none have paved a direct path to the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS. And who better to tackle this task than General Vibe founder Joshua Jeffe, who wrote the VS firmware at Sequential circa 1986, with VectorSector? Jeffe pulls no punches in this faithful software rendition of the hybrid synth classic as he resurrects nearly every sonic detail.
VectorSector features the expected quadoscillator structure per voice, drawing from 126 waveforms or white-noise generator and passing through a genuine VS Curtis-style 4-pole (24dB/octave) resonant lowpass filter model. Dynamic waveform crossfading is achieved via the joystick while five-stage envelopes additionally control vector mix, filter and amplifier. Here, segment 0 is fixed in time; 1 through 3 are linear; and segment 4 (release) features an exponential taper — an alternate release time is activated via hold or sustain pedal. Envelopes can loop in forward-only or forward-reverse mode, spanning one, two or three segments at a time, and loops can have 1 through 99 or infinite repeats. Effectively, this turns the envelope generator into a triggered LFO, though there are two dedicated LFOs per voice with six wave shapes to choose from. With VectorSector doubling the Prophet VS' eight-voice count at 16-note variable polyphony, all that's crucially missing from the original is its arpeggiator.
GENERAL VIBE
VECTORSECTOR > $129 (PAYPAL ONLY)
At a glance: Faithful software emulation of the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS. VST (Windows XP/2000); AU, VST (Mac OS X).
Contact: www.generalvibe.com
TOONTRACK SUPERIOR CUSTOM & VINTAGE
ACOUSTIC DRUM KIT PLUG-IN
The follow-up to Toontrack's acclaimed dfh Superior series, Superior Custom & Vintage carries on the company's ambitious method of replicating a real studio session environment by capturing close, bleed, ambient and overhead location samples for each instrument in a drum kit. Using the proprietary Drummer plug-in engine, C&V delivers more than 80,000 all-new single-hit sample files (across five DVDs), consuming a whopping 36 GB of your drive for a full install. Born from the philosophy to record the drums classically using techniques reminiscent of those used in the '70s, all material was recorded at 2KHz Studios in London on an EMI TG desk with a selection of vintage microphones from Neumann, AKG and Sennheiser. To keep the vintage vibe in check, Toontracks hired renowned UK session drummer Chris Whitten (Edie Brickell, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders) and ex — Air Studios and George Martin protégé Peter Henderson (Supertramp, McCartney, Rush, Frank Zappa) to produce and engineer the sessions.
Three preset kits include the Noble & Cooley Star Series, Slingerland Studio King and Camco Oaklawn. In the design matrix, you can mix and match individual components to custom-build kits with as many as 23 pieces, with each instrument having its own designated output providing total mixing control of microphone selection, positioning, bleed levels and more — just like in a real session. Needless to say, warm, earthy tones abound.
TOONTRACK (DIST. BY EAST WEST)
SUPERIOR CUSTOM & VINTAGE > $299.95
At a glance: Collection of some of the rarest and most highly prized vintage and custom drum instruments in the world. VST, ReWire (Windows XP/2000); AU, VST, ReWire (Mac OS 10.2 or higher).
Contact: www.soundsonline.com or www.toontrack.com
BETA MONKEY MUSIC DRUM WERKS V5
DRUM-LOOP LIBRARY
This independent sample shop has been churning out slammin' acoustic-drum-groove discs at near-breakneck speed for more than two years. Beta Monkey Music's economy-priced libraries, to date, have covered everything from double-bass hard rock and metal to country, blues, pop and hip-hop. In Drum Werks V5, the skilled BM team sets its sights squarely on sizzling, energy-soaked rock, alt- and power-pop grooves presented in a toolbox manner. What you get are more than 570 MB of 16-bit WAV loops (738 in all) — including beats, fills, intros, endings, hi-hat and ride cymbal patterns, and one-shots — arranged into tempo-based folders. Confidently casual and polished-feeling throughout, these folders span 12 different groove genres, from 75 bpm classic rock to straight and occasionally swung 100 to 50 bpm — range rock and pop to straight and shuffled 180 bpm blister grooves. What's more, a folder containing a copious amount of multivelocity single hits awaits assembly into a complete drum kit for augmenting the provided grooves or rolling your own.
The loops come just as I like them, intimately raw and underprocessed, preferring to leave the treatment to mixdown. The really cool thing about this disc is that every groove, fill and hit is sonically matched, pristinely recorded off the same kit and taken from the same recording session. This makes for a cohesive library of uniform ambience front to back, where you can mix and match elements from not only within a single folder but also across the entire disc. The smart inclusion of cymbal swells, tom variants and several intricately played hi-hat and ride cymbal patterns (with and without snare backbeats) for each groove genre makes creating a complex and dynamic-sounding arrangement possible. Whether building a contemporary pop track from scratch or looking for brilliant session drumming to remix, Drum Werks V5 is a go-to loop collection for ballsy, realistic results.
BETA MONKEY MUSIC
DRUM WERKS V5 > $26.99
At a glance: More than 700 acoustic drum grooves and associated elements geared toward modern rock and power pop. Acidized WAV on CD-ROM.
Contact: www.betamonkeymusic.com
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