Garritan Concert & Marching Band
Kontakt 2 Player
With this library, Gary Garritan is marching to a different drum, heading into the same kind of territory he successfully explored in Garritan Jazz & Big Band. I'm delighted this review coincides with that of Garritan's Gofriller Solo Cello, because that gives me the perfect excuse for mentioning one of my favourite movie moments: the sight of Woody Allen trying to play cello in a marching band in Take The Money And Run.
I never realised there were so many types of band: parade bands, show bands, drum and bugle corps, carnival bands and 'scramble' bands are all listed, along with more familiar British institutions like the brass band and Salvation Army band (similar to a brass band but with added clarinets, saxes, trumpets, French horns and religion). Garritan gamely tries to cover the lot, providing a huge instrumentation that includes 14 types of brass instrument, eight woodwinds, the entire saxophone family, tuned and unpitched percussion and various drums. Most instruments are presented in a choice of solo and ensemble formats, with up to four variants to enable layering without sample duplication. That's a lot of samples!
In addition to decent trumpets, trombones, tubas and French horns (all standard orchestral fare), there are cornets (similar to trumpets, but a little less bright), euphoniums (a small tuba used in brass bands — think Hovis ad) and another brass-band staple, the flugelhorn. Surprisingly, there are no bugles. Instruments you won't find elsewhere are the sousaphone (a sort of power tuba that encircles the player's body like a boa constrictor), its 19th century predecessor the helicon, and the mellotone (a large, bass trumpet-like instrument popular in America). Different types of mute are available for some of the brass.
Piccolos are a good substitute for the fifes used in European bands. I was impressed by the solo clarinet — a good legato mode (accessed via the sustain pedal) produces liquid melody runs, while vibrato can be introduced with aftertouch. The rare bass sax and even rarer sarrusophone provide a sturdy honking accompaniment to the smoother tones of the higher saxes, which match the clarinet's expressive melodic potential.
Some of the bass drum and 'impact drum' hits are powerful, but the snare drums (tuned very high to produce that papery, high-pitched military-band clatter) have too few straight hits for comfort. A generous menu of percussion includes items as diverse as marimba and gong, and there's even a finger cymbal, which you can keep in reserve for peace marches.
Although the instrumentation is very wide, the sampling is quite shallow — everything seems to be played at one dynamic level and the brass and woodwinds perform only sustained long notes. It would be unreasonable to expect an outdoors band to have a concert-hall reverb, but the combination of a dry recording acoustic and mono solo instruments renders the basic sound less than sumptuous. Nevertheless, it's a unique, musically solid, workmanlike 1.4GB library, bursting with different timbres, and one which meets its specialist target. Dave Stewart
£159 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 55200.
www.timespace.com www.garritan.com
Garritan Gofriller Solo Cello
Kontakt 2 Player
Gary Garritan has a neat line in musician-friendly, problem-solving products: Garritan Personal Orchestra brought the entire symphony orchestra together in one affordable package, and the remarkable Stradivari Solo Violin went beyond the normal bounds of sampling to provide a truly playable, expressive violin (see review at www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug06/articles/garritanstrad.htm). Gofriller Solo Cello (GSC) continues in the Strad's footsteps, sampling and shaping the sound of an instrument played by many eminent cellists (including Jacqueline Du Pré) and widely considered the best in the world.
GSC, which ships with its own Kontakt 2 Player, incorporates Stradivari's innovative design features, all aimed at facilitating real-time expression while avoiding the chore of cutting and pasting different articulations. To this end, the instrument has just one program (hooray!) containing all the playing styles you'll ever need (with the possible exception of the sound of the cello being sawn in half, which I'm hoping will arrive in an update). Using keyswitches, you can instantly access monophonic legato (which intelligently flips to polyphonic mode when you play a chord), pizzicato, con sordino, harmonics, alternative altra corda samples and (as with the Stradivari) a not entirely successful tremolo simulation. You can also choose between three types of bow attack.
The instrument loaded quickly, and within seconds I was giving my all on the stage, a handsome chunk of burnished wood between my knees, wielding my bow with furious virtuosity while the audience rose to their feet and hurled flowers at my feet. Actually none of this really happened, but the impression of playing a cello (as opposed to activating its samples from a keyboard) is so vivid that you can be forgiven a little pleasant fantasising.
GSC scores in three main areas: vibrato, portamento and dynamic shaping. The mod wheel introduces a very realistic, emotive convolved vibrato which sounds nothing like the bogus, siren-like effect you get on a synth. Portamento (slide) kicks in when notes are overlapped but doesn't sound on detaché notes, which means you have to watch your fingering — the slides sound very lifelike, though the correlation between portamento speed and note velocity is counter-intuitive. Natural-sounding swells and fades can be created with an expression pedal; the ultra-smooth timbral transitions and absence of phasing artifacts between the dynamic layers is due to another unique design feature. Users can alter the timbre of the subtle stereo ambience surrounding the mono samples by selecting one of four impulse responses.
As you'd expect from a £2 million instrument, the tone is rich and vibrant, and though I've heard lusher sampled cellos, I've yet to find one that crams so many real-time expressive controls into a single program. I can highly recommend this to anyone wanting to create realistic, organic-sounding cello performances. The only caveat is that it doesn't suit a stand-offish, one-handed playing style: to make it come alive, you need to engage the mod wheel and expression pedal and make the samples sing. Dave Stewart
£129 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 55200.
www.timespace.com www.garritan.com
Big Fish Audio Dread Roots Reggae
Apple Loops, WAV & REX
No prizes for guessing the musical content of Big Fish Audio's Dread Roots Reggae — the title says it all. The library provides some 41 construction kits containing well over 700 24-bit, 44.1kHz loops and spanning over 1GB of sample data. The original kit tempos range from a laid-back 65bpm to a more urgent 160bpm, although there is some double-time playing in a few of the slower kits.
Usefully, the original key of the material within each kit is specified in the sub-folder name, and each kit includes a pre-mixed example, which makes it easy to get a flavour of what can be done. Each kit also contains a decent number of individual loops — usually three or more drum loops, a couple of bass guitar loops, two or three guitar loops and then an assortment of percussion (mostly timbales), piano, organ and brass loops. The guitars include both classic reggae rhythm playing and, in some kits, some very tasteful lead playing. Sonically, they are also just right — quite bright (almost cutting at times) and with a useful dose of reverb. Indeed, the authentic reggae vibe is present in all the sounds, and the majority of the material has ambience pre-applied. While some might prefer the flexibility of dry loops, I think the BFA production team have made the right call here: what you get is an instant slice of reggae atmosphere straight out of the box.
In terms of styles, a good number of the kits are in classic Bob Marley territory, but there is a healthy element of ska and the occasional hint at The Police. The drums, bass and guitar combinations can create some excellent backing tracks, but the icing on the cake often comes courtesy of the percussion and the brass loops — the latter, in particular, provide some really genuine Jamaican attitude. The kits also contain a nice selection of musical moods. Whether you want to construct something a little bit dark to sit under a protest lyric or require something more 'up' for a song about sunshine and beach parties, Dread Roots Reggae has it covered. Usefully, the sonic character of the instruments used is pretty consistent across the library, so it is easy to mix and match between construction kits.
I could imagine this library appealing to budding reggae producers and, particularly, to media composers who need a genuine taste of reggae for a project in a hurry — although, like many BFA libraries, do note that the licence doesn't permit the use of the material in library music tracks. This issue aside, Dread Roots Reggae had me dancing around my own studio while I was auditioning — excellent stuff. John Walden
£55 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 5520
www.timespace.com www.bigfishaudio.com
Soniccouture Synthi AKS
Kontakt 2 & EXS24
The EMS VCS3 and its Synthi derivatives were remarkable synthesizers, almost impossible to play as melodic instruments, but widely regarded as peerless sound-effect generators. It is fitting, therefore, that alongside the unexpected inclusion of a group of multisampled, polyphonic instruments, Soniccouture's Synthi AKS collection, which is supplied in EXS24 and Kontakt 2 formats, should concentrate on sound effects and on short loops that emulate the type of sequences you might have created using the 'S' (sequencer) of the AKS specification.
The library of sound effects comprises no fewer than 146 samples grouped into 27 instruments. Many of these offer a flavour of what made EMS synths so distinctive, especially when you experiment with extreme pitch shifts and a bit of echo and reverb.
Alongside these, the 93 sync'able, looped instruments are supplied as Apple Loops for Logic, REX format for Cubase, as Kontakt 2 Beat Machines, and as raw WAVs, and are divided into Acid Loops (36 samples), Slow Loops (40 samples) and Misc Loops (20 samples).
No fewer than 597 WAVs contribute to the multi-sampled sounds, and these form 25 instruments with four samples per octave on a diminished scale. Where no modulation is present, these play well across the keyboard but, inevitably, where modulation exists in the original sounds, there are discontinuities every few semitones, which may or may not bother you.
You can, of course, access any of the samples outside of their intended environments and do with them as you wish. But within Kontakt 2 the Synthi module still offers eight dedicated controls. These are the filter cutoff frequency and resonance, an AD contour for the filter, an AR contour for the loudness, and the amount of a 'virtual' spring reverb. You can adjust the parameter values using the on-screen knobs or MIDI controllers 21 to 28, as you wish. I like the reverb: while it is rather civilised and lacks the 'boinggg' of the EMS's, it doesn't howl like the original, and it adds character to the sounds.
The 1GB library was sampled from Soniccouture's own Synthi AKS, and listening to the raw 24-bit, 44.1kHz WAVs reveals that the company have taken care to ensure that the samples are as clean as the original synth allowed. Happily, many of the samples have captured the slightly sharp, nasal timbre of the Synthi, and all are generally recorded with significant high-frequency content, which leaves the user to decide how much filtering to apply for the desired effects. Interestingly, I found that judging them by stepping through the library and listening to each in relative isolation did not fully reveal their scope. The audio demos on Soniccouture's website gave a much better impression of the capabilities of the library, and I'd recommend that you listen to these.
Now for the down side: everybody has a different view of what a library of this type should sound like. Do you crave the progressive experiments of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, the psychedelic effects of Hawkwind's Space Ritual, or the more recent electronica of bands such as Autechre? Depending upon your needs, these samples may or may not be suitable. But if you like them, you'll find that they are well recorded and easy to use. If anything, they're too civilised; the original instruments were total pigs to set up and play, and in many ways their deficiencies and instabilities determined how people used them. Sampling removes much of this eccentricity, and by creating playable melodic patches, stable loops and (shock!) polyphonic instruments, Soniccouture have created something pleasing, but with a somewhat different character from any of the above. Gordon Reid
Download £45, DVD-ROM £47, including VAT.
www.soniccouture.com
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Garritan Concert & Marching Band
Kontakt 2 Player
With this library, Gary Garritan is marching to a different drum, heading into the same kind of territory he successfully explored in Garritan Jazz & Big Band. I'm delighted this review coincides with that of Garritan's Gofriller Solo Cello, because that gives me the perfect excuse for mentioning one of my favourite movie moments: the sight of Woody Allen trying to play cello in a marching band in Take The Money And Run.
I never realised there were so many types of band: parade bands, show bands, drum and bugle corps, carnival bands and 'scramble' bands are all listed, along with more familiar British institutions like the brass band and Salvation Army band (similar to a brass band but with added clarinets, saxes, trumpets, French horns and religion). Garritan gamely tries to cover the lot, providing a huge instrumentation that includes 14 types of brass instrument, eight woodwinds, the entire saxophone family, tuned and unpitched percussion and various drums. Most instruments are presented in a choice of solo and ensemble formats, with up to four variants to enable layering without sample duplication. That's a lot of samples!
In addition to decent trumpets, trombones, tubas and French horns (all standard orchestral fare), there are cornets (similar to trumpets, but a little less bright), euphoniums (a small tuba used in brass bands — think Hovis ad) and another brass-band staple, the flugelhorn. Surprisingly, there are no bugles. Instruments you won't find elsewhere are the sousaphone (a sort of power tuba that encircles the player's body like a boa constrictor), its 19th century predecessor the helicon, and the mellotone (a large, bass trumpet-like instrument popular in America). Different types of mute are available for some of the brass.
Piccolos are a good substitute for the fifes used in European bands. I was impressed by the solo clarinet — a good legato mode (accessed via the sustain pedal) produces liquid melody runs, while vibrato can be introduced with aftertouch. The rare bass sax and even rarer sarrusophone provide a sturdy honking accompaniment to the smoother tones of the higher saxes, which match the clarinet's expressive melodic potential.
Some of the bass drum and 'impact drum' hits are powerful, but the snare drums (tuned very high to produce that papery, high-pitched military-band clatter) have too few straight hits for comfort. A generous menu of percussion includes items as diverse as marimba and gong, and there's even a finger cymbal, which you can keep in reserve for peace marches.
Although the instrumentation is very wide, the sampling is quite shallow — everything seems to be played at one dynamic level and the brass and woodwinds perform only sustained long notes. It would be unreasonable to expect an outdoors band to have a concert-hall reverb, but the combination of a dry recording acoustic and mono solo instruments renders the basic sound less than sumptuous. Nevertheless, it's a unique, musically solid, workmanlike 1.4GB library, bursting with different timbres, and one which meets its specialist target. Dave Stewart
£159 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 55200.
www.timespace.com www.garritan.com
Garritan Gofriller Solo Cello
Kontakt 2 Player
Gary Garritan has a neat line in musician-friendly, problem-solving products: Garritan Personal Orchestra brought the entire symphony orchestra together in one affordable package, and the remarkable Stradivari Solo Violin went beyond the normal bounds of sampling to provide a truly playable, expressive violin (see review at www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug06/articles/garritanstrad.htm). Gofriller Solo Cello (GSC) continues in the Strad's footsteps, sampling and shaping the sound of an instrument played by many eminent cellists (including Jacqueline Du Pré) and widely considered the best in the world.
GSC, which ships with its own Kontakt 2 Player, incorporates Stradivari's innovative design features, all aimed at facilitating real-time expression while avoiding the chore of cutting and pasting different articulations. To this end, the instrument has just one program (hooray!) containing all the playing styles you'll ever need (with the possible exception of the sound of the cello being sawn in half, which I'm hoping will arrive in an update). Using keyswitches, you can instantly access monophonic legato (which intelligently flips to polyphonic mode when you play a chord), pizzicato, con sordino, harmonics, alternative altra corda samples and (as with the Stradivari) a not entirely successful tremolo simulation. You can also choose between three types of bow attack.
The instrument loaded quickly, and within seconds I was giving my all on the stage, a handsome chunk of burnished wood between my knees, wielding my bow with furious virtuosity while the audience rose to their feet and hurled flowers at my feet. Actually none of this really happened, but the impression of playing a cello (as opposed to activating its samples from a keyboard) is so vivid that you can be forgiven a little pleasant fantasising.
GSC scores in three main areas: vibrato, portamento and dynamic shaping. The mod wheel introduces a very realistic, emotive convolved vibrato which sounds nothing like the bogus, siren-like effect you get on a synth. Portamento (slide) kicks in when notes are overlapped but doesn't sound on detaché notes, which means you have to watch your fingering — the slides sound very lifelike, though the correlation between portamento speed and note velocity is counter-intuitive. Natural-sounding swells and fades can be created with an expression pedal; the ultra-smooth timbral transitions and absence of phasing artifacts between the dynamic layers is due to another unique design feature. Users can alter the timbre of the subtle stereo ambience surrounding the mono samples by selecting one of four impulse responses.
As you'd expect from a £2 million instrument, the tone is rich and vibrant, and though I've heard lusher sampled cellos, I've yet to find one that crams so many real-time expressive controls into a single program. I can highly recommend this to anyone wanting to create realistic, organic-sounding cello performances. The only caveat is that it doesn't suit a stand-offish, one-handed playing style: to make it come alive, you need to engage the mod wheel and expression pedal and make the samples sing. Dave Stewart
£129 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 55200.
www.timespace.com www.garritan.com
Big Fish Audio Dread Roots Reggae
Apple Loops, WAV & REX
No prizes for guessing the musical content of Big Fish Audio's Dread Roots Reggae — the title says it all. The library provides some 41 construction kits containing well over 700 24-bit, 44.1kHz loops and spanning over 1GB of sample data. The original kit tempos range from a laid-back 65bpm to a more urgent 160bpm, although there is some double-time playing in a few of the slower kits.
Usefully, the original key of the material within each kit is specified in the sub-folder name, and each kit includes a pre-mixed example, which makes it easy to get a flavour of what can be done. Each kit also contains a decent number of individual loops — usually three or more drum loops, a couple of bass guitar loops, two or three guitar loops and then an assortment of percussion (mostly timbales), piano, organ and brass loops. The guitars include both classic reggae rhythm playing and, in some kits, some very tasteful lead playing. Sonically, they are also just right — quite bright (almost cutting at times) and with a useful dose of reverb. Indeed, the authentic reggae vibe is present in all the sounds, and the majority of the material has ambience pre-applied. While some might prefer the flexibility of dry loops, I think the BFA production team have made the right call here: what you get is an instant slice of reggae atmosphere straight out of the box.
In terms of styles, a good number of the kits are in classic Bob Marley territory, but there is a healthy element of ska and the occasional hint at The Police. The drums, bass and guitar combinations can create some excellent backing tracks, but the icing on the cake often comes courtesy of the percussion and the brass loops — the latter, in particular, provide some really genuine Jamaican attitude. The kits also contain a nice selection of musical moods. Whether you want to construct something a little bit dark to sit under a protest lyric or require something more 'up' for a song about sunshine and beach parties, Dread Roots Reggae has it covered. Usefully, the sonic character of the instruments used is pretty consistent across the library, so it is easy to mix and match between construction kits.
I could imagine this library appealing to budding reggae producers and, particularly, to media composers who need a genuine taste of reggae for a project in a hurry — although, like many BFA libraries, do note that the licence doesn't permit the use of the material in library music tracks. This issue aside, Dread Roots Reggae had me dancing around my own studio while I was auditioning — excellent stuff. John Walden
£55 including VAT.
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 5520
www.timespace.com www.bigfishaudio.com
Soniccouture Synthi AKS
Kontakt 2 & EXS24
The EMS VCS3 and its Synthi derivatives were remarkable synthesizers, almost impossible to play as melodic instruments, but widely regarded as peerless sound-effect generators. It is fitting, therefore, that alongside the unexpected inclusion of a group of multisampled, polyphonic instruments, Soniccouture's Synthi AKS collection, which is supplied in EXS24 and Kontakt 2 formats, should concentrate on sound effects and on short loops that emulate the type of sequences you might have created using the 'S' (sequencer) of the AKS specification.
The library of sound effects comprises no fewer than 146 samples grouped into 27 instruments. Many of these offer a flavour of what made EMS synths so distinctive, especially when you experiment with extreme pitch shifts and a bit of echo and reverb.
Alongside these, the 93 sync'able, looped instruments are supplied as Apple Loops for Logic, REX format for Cubase, as Kontakt 2 Beat Machines, and as raw WAVs, and are divided into Acid Loops (36 samples), Slow Loops (40 samples) and Misc Loops (20 samples).
No fewer than 597 WAVs contribute to the multi-sampled sounds, and these form 25 instruments with four samples per octave on a diminished scale. Where no modulation is present, these play well across the keyboard but, inevitably, where modulation exists in the original sounds, there are discontinuities every few semitones, which may or may not bother you.
You can, of course, access any of the samples outside of their intended environments and do with them as you wish. But within Kontakt 2 the Synthi module still offers eight dedicated controls. These are the filter cutoff frequency and resonance, an AD contour for the filter, an AR contour for the loudness, and the amount of a 'virtual' spring reverb. You can adjust the parameter values using the on-screen knobs or MIDI controllers 21 to 28, as you wish. I like the reverb: while it is rather civilised and lacks the 'boinggg' of the EMS's, it doesn't howl like the original, and it adds character to the sounds.
The 1GB library was sampled from Soniccouture's own Synthi AKS, and listening to the raw 24-bit, 44.1kHz WAVs reveals that the company have taken care to ensure that the samples are as clean as the original synth allowed. Happily, many of the samples have captured the slightly sharp, nasal timbre of the Synthi, and all are generally recorded with significant high-frequency content, which leaves the user to decide how much filtering to apply for the desired effects. Interestingly, I found that judging them by stepping through the library and listening to each in relative isolation did not fully reveal their scope. The audio demos on Soniccouture's website gave a much better impression of the capabilities of the library, and I'd recommend that you listen to these.
Now for the down side: everybody has a different view of what a library of this type should sound like. Do you crave the progressive experiments of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, the psychedelic effects of Hawkwind's Space Ritual, or the more recent electronica of bands such as Autechre? Depending upon your needs, these samples may or may not be suitable. But if you like them, you'll find that they are well recorded and easy to use. If anything, they're too civilised; the original instruments were total pigs to set up and play, and in many ways their deficiencies and instabilities determined how people used them. Sampling removes much of this eccentricity, and by creating playable melodic patches, stable loops and (shock!) polyphonic instruments, Soniccouture have created something pleasing, but with a somewhat different character from any of the above. Gordon Reid
Download £45, DVD-ROM £47, including VAT.
www.soniccouture.com