A plug in revolution is coming!
Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 2:22 am
Been absent from this forum for quite a while, mainly due to the time absorbing impact of my latest plug in which I bought in late 2011.
At that time I was looking for a physical modelling of a real instrument more than a traditional synth plug, I can remember, and one day I walked past this local music store with a wall covered in what appeared to be hand held interfaces for music creation and performance. They came in many different colours with the one thing in common that it had body, neck and strings attached to it. I asked the staff the regular stuff about bit depth, max polyphony, number of ins and outs, cpu load, software compatibility and integration possibilities to my other soft and hardware. I got the impression that the interfaces were mainly designed to produce sound on their own rather than controlling a VST component on a host computer, and I immediately felt that these were dated products.
However, I liked the design of a creamy white version with six strings and bought its sibling with only four but thicker strings just to have the full suite available in my studio. It cost a lot, but I had not seen much talk about, or images of, these interfaces in forums such as Planetz or at the Ableton, Propellerhead or Cubase user forums, so it might be a way to stand out, sound wise, of the music making crowd I thought, and I was advised to buy an amp even if I argued that I had pre amps, interfaces, mixers, plugins and monitors in my studio.
I got home and found a way to connect the interface with the amp, using jack cables and not MIDI cables (but could not find a way to connect the amp to my daw ...) and off I went. Needless to say i faced a steep learning curve, not being able to press the keys of my Oxygen 8, S80, An1x or CS1x to produce sound. But one I got an understanding of the layout of the interface, I could really appreciate the smart idea behind what appeared more and more to be a complete instrument of its own. The high resolution of bend notes and the non-aliasing transposition of the sound across the octaves blew me off my chair immediately, not to mention how the tremolo arm added another tactile dimension to the playability of the thing.
Cons: it tends to go out of tune which requires tuning, much in the same way as the oscillators of the early analogue synths I guess, so I count that as a bug which probably will be adressed in the next revision of the OS. (An OS which appears to be hard to update as far as I can see as there are no USB connections, but there might be a ROM chip inside - have not checked yet)
I sincerely believe I have seen the future of plug in design - there is a revolution coming!
Neb
At that time I was looking for a physical modelling of a real instrument more than a traditional synth plug, I can remember, and one day I walked past this local music store with a wall covered in what appeared to be hand held interfaces for music creation and performance. They came in many different colours with the one thing in common that it had body, neck and strings attached to it. I asked the staff the regular stuff about bit depth, max polyphony, number of ins and outs, cpu load, software compatibility and integration possibilities to my other soft and hardware. I got the impression that the interfaces were mainly designed to produce sound on their own rather than controlling a VST component on a host computer, and I immediately felt that these were dated products.
However, I liked the design of a creamy white version with six strings and bought its sibling with only four but thicker strings just to have the full suite available in my studio. It cost a lot, but I had not seen much talk about, or images of, these interfaces in forums such as Planetz or at the Ableton, Propellerhead or Cubase user forums, so it might be a way to stand out, sound wise, of the music making crowd I thought, and I was advised to buy an amp even if I argued that I had pre amps, interfaces, mixers, plugins and monitors in my studio.
I got home and found a way to connect the interface with the amp, using jack cables and not MIDI cables (but could not find a way to connect the amp to my daw ...) and off I went. Needless to say i faced a steep learning curve, not being able to press the keys of my Oxygen 8, S80, An1x or CS1x to produce sound. But one I got an understanding of the layout of the interface, I could really appreciate the smart idea behind what appeared more and more to be a complete instrument of its own. The high resolution of bend notes and the non-aliasing transposition of the sound across the octaves blew me off my chair immediately, not to mention how the tremolo arm added another tactile dimension to the playability of the thing.
Cons: it tends to go out of tune which requires tuning, much in the same way as the oscillators of the early analogue synths I guess, so I count that as a bug which probably will be adressed in the next revision of the OS. (An OS which appears to be hard to update as far as I can see as there are no USB connections, but there might be a ROM chip inside - have not checked yet)
I sincerely believe I have seen the future of plug in design - there is a revolution coming!
Neb
