Recording - March 2013 - 31

Punch also comes with four independent effects processors with a
total of 29 effects algorithms to choose from; Mono Delay, Stereo
Delay, Comb Filter, Reverb, HQ Reverb, Chorus, Chorus/Delay,
Flanger, Phaser, Wahwah Delay, Distort, Low Fi, Amp Sim,
Waveshaper, Widener, AutoPan, Gator, Ring-Mod, Filter, Equalizer,
Compressor, Noise-Gate, Ensemble, Cabinet, Multi Distort,
Autowah, Tape Delay, Tape Flanger, and Analog Phaser. Each
effect comes with up to ten controls, depending on the effect chosen.
Finally, the Management Page gives you one convenient location to manage all of the different preset categories, from a full
bank down to presets within the individual pads themselves.
In use
Getting around Punch took a bit of work at first, but it all began
to gel quickly after the first half hour or so. Once you get a chance
to click through each of the panels, tweak the controls, and have
a brief readthrough of the manual, the sheer number of controls
feels much more manageable. If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed
at first, just give yourself some time to wrap your head around
what Punch has to offer. The extra effort will certainly pay off.
Punch provides a tremendous amount of variety with its synthesis and samples, with an extremely low CPU load: typically
5%-10% on my i7 950 3.06 GHz quad-core processor. I was
especially pleased by the Filmscore and TV Soundbank that provided powerful and unusual atmospheric sound beds and beats.
Those who prefer to roll their own sounds can easily import their
own WAV or AIFF files into Punch for further manipulation.
If you’ve used other Rob Papen synthesizers before, no doubt
you’ll notice the sequencer in Punch is very similar to the arpeggiator in his other offerings. While this certainly isn’t a bad thing,
my only real gripe is the fact that the sequencer has only 16
steps. Expanding the steps to accommodate 32 steps provides

more flexibility with time signatures (think 5/4, 7/4, etc.) and
allows a groove to build over two measures if one desires a standard 4/4 timing scheme.
I do understand that Punch is meant to be used as a plug-in
inside what will almost always be a very full-featured DAW program that should have facilities for building sequences. But it
seems to me that too many drum programs neglect to address
time signatures outside the bog-standard four on the floor dance
beats. Rob’s creations usually go that extra mile, and I’d love to
see this addressed in a future release.
Conclusion
If you’re creating original beats for your productions, you can
never have enough drum generators in your arsenal, and Punch
is a worthy weapon to add to your collection. Its powerful, driving, and forceful sound with its Groove and Break patterns
makes building drum beds fairly quick and easy.
As we went to press, we were informed by Rob Papen that an
updated version of Punch will be made available by the time you
read this. We didn’t get a chance to test this new version, which
adds a larger preset library, MIDI grooves for every preset, and
one new feature in the user interface that you can see in the
screenshot that Rob provided for us: individual Mute and Solo buttons on every drum pad.
As you’d expect of anything from Rob Papen, Punch is well
worth your time to check out. As is common practice for Papen,
there is a relatively full-featured demo version available on the
website (no preset saving, 30 minutes per use, 30 days total
availability before it injects noise into the audio outputs). You’ll
get more than enough capability in the demo version to see if it
will fit your workflow nicely, and I expect you’ll be pretty stoked
by what you hear.

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Recording - March 2013

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