Recording - June 2012 - 42

RECORDING'S

SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS
for this library includes machinery, metallophones, voices, bent and abused electric and acoustic instruments, and more, all chosen for maximum emotional impact and further processed to become the stuff of nightmares. Some of the sounds are designed to evoke subliminal fear responses—for example, Insane Laughing Machine contains the sound of someone laughing, distorted by pitch modulation into something demonic and sinister... and I’m pretty sure the raw waveforms used in Dark Corridor Of Doom include a dentist’s drill. The aptly named HorrorFX Kit is a keymap of classic horror film sound effects, from creaking doors and scraped guitar strings to echoing booms and clangs. As is the case with most Alchemy libraries, the raw material also includes loops that

can sync to your host tempo, but the Dark Space loops are particularly creepy and effective; check out the insistent clanging beat of Chasing Shadows and the morphing radio-noise textures of Forgotten Mindprobe. If you do music for films, TV, video games, or other applications where a brooding sense of dread and sudden, energetic explosions of emotion are your bread and butter, there’s a lot of deeply buried angst to mine in Biolabs: Dark Space. It stands in stark, effective contrast to the beauties of Dream Voices and Himalaya: Vintage, showing the breadth of the excellent library content Camel Audio offers to get recording musicians into the Alchemy experience. Prices: Dream Voices and Himalaya: Vintage, $59 each; Biolabs: Dark Space, $35 More from: Camel Audio, www.camelaudio.com

Ilya Efimov Nylon Guitar for Kontakt
and forth between the bridge and the sound hole. Of course, there are an infinite number of shades between the two, but I would have liked to see the library include samples of all articulations played by the bridge. This would obviously have doubled the size of Nylon Guitar, but it would have allowed me to play the repeat of the Bourrée with a distinctly different color. Then again, that’s just a former player speaking—you may not miss the ponticello samples at all. Okay, let’s get down to a few details. Legato samples—hammer ons, to you country pickers—are essential to the creation of a realistic sounding guitar plug-in. Nylon Guitar handles this task beautifully. Be careful, though; if you don’t couple playing in legato mode (a temporary key switch that must be held down to remain in effect) with an understanding of where you are on the virtual neck, you may find yourself thinking that some legato connections are missing. They’re not. You can choose to play in positions or on individual strings. If you’re playing in first position, for example, and strike the notes D-E (notated 4th line, 4th space, treble clef) they will sound on the second string and the open first string consecutively and no legato transition is possible. Use the string selection or fret position key switch to have both notes played on the B string, say, and you’re good to go. There’s also a glissando key switch that works beautifully with the legatos, plus half and whole step slides into a note. You see where I’m going here... if you have a sense of the guitar you can create some wonderfully realistic music with this plug-in. String players will sometimes choose to play a phrase on one string to get a smooth and warmer effect. Think of Bach’s “Air On The G String.” Never mind that this wasn’t Bach’s thought (it’s from a transcription of an orchestral piece)— the idea was a good one; to play the entire melody on the lowest string of the violin for the color it imparts. Nylon Guitar lets you make similar choices, but I find this effect less satisfactory than you might think, simply because the total effect that comes with moving a line to a deeper, richer sounding string includes the added rubato that a player always brings to these passages. Press the Options tab and you’ll be taken to the area where you can customize your guitar in some meaningful ways. For the most part the instruments are fine out of the box, but there will be times, for example, where I’d like to extend the legato range by another semi-tone, or add a bit more fret noise, particularly if I’m playing a difficult passage that I know would yield more in the real world. Although I own some great convolution reverbs I would not hesitate to recommend the ‘verbs that ship with Nylon Guitar. They’re quite good—particularly when compared with some of the boomy spaces I remember playing in! One of the coolest features, Open Chord Mode, took some time for me to understand—in part because the manual was written in Russian and translated into English, with some attendant confusion. No matter. Do you know the great Spanish guitar piece “Leyenda,” written by Isaac Albéniz and made famous by Segovia? Did you know that it wasn’t written for the guitar, but transcribed for it after the fact by Francisco Tarrega? What a beautiful composition, and it’s a great example of how the open strings on the guitar can be used to allow for fast passages that would not be possible if they had to be fingered. If you turn on Open Chord Mode and place the fret board in seventh position, the lowest notes on your MIDI keyboard

Once upon a time I spent six hours or so of every day practicing the “classical” guitar. For a couple of years I had the high honor and distinct privilege of studying with the great Fred Hand. What a player! You won’t get all of Fred’s (or even my) nuances out of Ilya Efimov’s Nylon Guitar, but it’s awfully impressive. Nylon Guitar weighs in at about 2 GB. I’m not sure how the developer decided on 14 velocity layers per note, but the touch is quite comfortable; the ability to kiss notes gently and then follow up with a forte attack is one of the things that makes this plug-in addictive. An equalization and effects package is included, and they’re undoubtedly used to create the multiple presets (“classic”, “pop”, “spanish”, etc.) that you can select from. This instrument has plenty of features, and if you’re going to master it you’ll need to dedicate some time to studying the manual, but let’s just play, shall we? There’s no better place to start than one of the grand chestnuts of the literature, the Bourrée from Bach’s Lute Suite #1 in E minor. If there’s a finer way for a young player to learn two-part counterpoint than to study the balance between these two gorgeous lines I haven’t come across it. I performed this piece into my sequencer and listened back. Holy toledo, I rushed the second phrase, just like I used to! But what a beautiful sound. Honestly, if I was hearing this in a less than pristine environment and wasn’t really concentrating I’m not sure that I would have picked up on the fact that it was being played by a virtual instrument... unless the repeat signs were observed. The lack of ponticello samples shows up in a piece like this. To vary color guitarists move back
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RECORDING JUNE 2012

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Recording - June 2012

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