Recording - December 2015 - 48

Part 3: Crafting With Content
tin whistle, wooden transverse flute, and
three new brass instruments: the cornetto,
sackbut, and natural trumpet. There's a
huge variety of bowed and plucked string
instruments now, each in many different
articulations: legato, marcato, staccato,
pizzicato, and crescendo, as appropriate.
ERA II adds everything from the tenor viola
da gamba and bowed psaltery to the
medieval lute and the nyckelharpa (!).
There are lots of percussion and incidental sounds added as well: handclaps,
kettle drums, church bells... even the subtle
sounds of breathing to add to wind parts,
or a flight of startled pigeons to go with the
bells! They blend well with the elements in
the Sound Design folder, which are multilayered samples designed to evoke moods
and settings. There are "whooshes" (risers), Mysterious Atmospheres, and a huge
number of evocative Soundscapes that are
so addictive you might forget to stop for
food and sleep.
While you can always dig under the
hood in ENGINE's Pro Edit view, the
Quick Edit screen in ERA II gives you
almost all of what you'll need for most
uses: simple controls for volume, pan,
pitch, and reverb, plus a global ADSR
envelope control, and on a second tab,
parameter tweaks for things like individual sound layer volume-up to eight per
patch. There's even historical information to pop up for most of the instruments!
All of the instruments and articulations
are recorded impeccably, with lots of character and depth. It's fascinating to browse
through the various instruments and try their
articulations, or explore special ornaments
like trills or drum rolls. This is practically an
entire medieval fantasy film in one plug-in,
and if you're looking for unusual instruments to spice up your tracks, ERA II has
them in plenty.
TITAN 2 takes us from the romantic past
to the cutting edge of the future. It's marketed as "266 Synthesizers In One," and
that's not too much of an exaggeration.




The original TITAN library featured some 5500 synth patches, and version 2 takes that up to
over 12,500, with a bunch of new instruments and organizational tricks (you can now search
by synth type or sound category, for example).
Because so many users know and love the original TITAN, its sounds are still available within the old version's user interface, but they can be imported into TITAN 2 easily if desired.
One look at the new interface against the original tells you that TITAN 2 is about much more
than an expanded sound selection: it's added so many parameter controls that it makes the
original TITAN look downright simplistic.
Each TITAN 2 patch consists of two separate sample-playback engines called
Sound/Sections, each with its own sample, level, pitch, pan and stereo width, modulations,
envelopes, and multimode filter. Each Section then runs through its own effects chain: delay, phaser, flanger/chorus, and either bit reduction (Section 1) or distortion (Section 2). The User Guide
explains how to adjust or add to the modulations and effects in Pro Edit if you wish, but there's
so much available in Quick Edit that many folks won't ever need to bother.
At the bottom of the screen, there are global controls affecting both Sections. There's
a multimode filter with its own modulation envelope and LFO, a separate global filter
with velocity modulation, glide and legato control, sample parameter randomization
(start point, pitch, pan, velocity) or global sample start offset. A number of global extras
are available here, too: the Attacker (pitch envelope), Sound (shortcuts for the ENGINE
parametric EQ), Impulser (formerly called Origami, an impulse-response reverb), and
note playback options like Arranger (MIDI file player), Arpeggiator, and Step
Sequencer.
It's worth noting that all of these parameters are built into ENGINE itself and are always available; TITAN 2 has brought them to the surface in a neatly organized way. You can disable any
parts of the interface you don't need (they go dark), and for many users, TITAN 2 will be as simple as loading presets and playing.
There's a huge variety of sounds here, and you can quickly select them by category. However,
you'll want to get into the habit of saving your own tweaks with proper names or tagging the
sounds you really love; many names are simply numbered lists, e.g. "Pad 12 (Heliks)". Naming
is really the only gripe I have with TITAN 2; while it's easy enough to audition patches using the
patch up/down buttons in ENGINE, you have to rely on your ears to choose the sounds you
like, and in many cases you'll have to guess at what the original sampled synthesizer was. For
an old collector like me, the guessing game is fun for a while, but eventually you start wishing
for a crib sheet.
On the other hand, TITAN 2 isn't really for the old collector: it's for the musician who's
focused on finding sounds that work and playing them. If you've always wanted a huge
stack of synthesizers to poke around on but weren't interested in making a career of keeping them hooked up and working, TITAN 2 quickly becomes a major bargain.



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2015

Contents
Recording - December 2015 - Intro
Recording - December 2015 - Cover1
Recording - December 2015 - Cover2
Recording - December 2015 - 1
Recording - December 2015 - 2
Recording - December 2015 - 3
Recording - December 2015 - 4
Recording - December 2015 - 5
Recording - December 2015 - Contents
Recording - December 2015 - 7
Recording - December 2015 - 8
Recording - December 2015 - 9
Recording - December 2015 - 10
Recording - December 2015 - 11
Recording - December 2015 - 12
Recording - December 2015 - 13
Recording - December 2015 - 14
Recording - December 2015 - 15
Recording - December 2015 - 16
Recording - December 2015 - 17
Recording - December 2015 - 18
Recording - December 2015 - 19
Recording - December 2015 - 20
Recording - December 2015 - 21
Recording - December 2015 - 22
Recording - December 2015 - 23
Recording - December 2015 - 24
Recording - December 2015 - 25
Recording - December 2015 - 26
Recording - December 2015 - 27
Recording - December 2015 - 28
Recording - December 2015 - 29
Recording - December 2015 - 30
Recording - December 2015 - 31
Recording - December 2015 - 32
Recording - December 2015 - 33
Recording - December 2015 - 34
Recording - December 2015 - 35
Recording - December 2015 - 36
Recording - December 2015 - 37
Recording - December 2015 - 38
Recording - December 2015 - 39
Recording - December 2015 - 40
Recording - December 2015 - 41
Recording - December 2015 - 42
Recording - December 2015 - 43
Recording - December 2015 - 44
Recording - December 2015 - 45
Recording - December 2015 - 46
Recording - December 2015 - 47
Recording - December 2015 - 48
Recording - December 2015 - 49
Recording - December 2015 - 50
Recording - December 2015 - 51
Recording - December 2015 - 52
Recording - December 2015 - 53
Recording - December 2015 - 54
Recording - December 2015 - 55
Recording - December 2015 - 56
Recording - December 2015 - 57
Recording - December 2015 - 58
Recording - December 2015 - 59
Recording - December 2015 - 60
Recording - December 2015 - 61
Recording - December 2015 - 62
Recording - December 2015 - 63
Recording - December 2015 - 64
Recording - December 2015 - 65
Recording - December 2015 - 66
Recording - December 2015 - 67
Recording - December 2015 - 68
Recording - December 2015 - 69
Recording - December 2015 - 70
Recording - December 2015 - 71
Recording - December 2015 - 72
Recording - December 2015 - Cover3
Recording - December 2015 - Cover4
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