Recording - January 2016 - 47

app to allow Voice D playback via external MIDI control). You
can build chords note by note if you don't have a MIDI keyboard attached to your iPad and you're not comfortable using
the onscreen keys. Besides the Record and Clear buttons for
pads and the keyboard range switch, there's a Save Bank
switch and a switch to select between unlooped playback that
ends after 7.5 seconds (like a real Tron minus the end-of-tape
glitching) or looped playback with 5-second or 3-second
loops. There's even an Inch switch that slightly moves where
the sample starts playing, for sharper attacks.
The sounds themselves are provided by Streetly Electronics
(mellotronics.com), the heirs to the original Mellotron builders
whose new-classic M4000 tape Tron is namechecked by
Omenie in the manual. They're authentic and sound great
right across the board!
How many and which sounds you get is determined by
which version of M3000 you download. The free version has
five sounds, the $11.99 50th Anniversary Edition has 16, and
there are six banks of extra sounds available as in-app purchases. There are three Streetly banks, a large bank of sounds
from Tron inventor Harry Chamberlin, a Clare Lindley violin

bank, and a lovely bank of solo and ensemble female voices
by soprano Caitlin Downie that's available preloaded into a
standalone app called Sopranotron for $7.99. If you want the
whole enchilada, $74.99 gets you everything preloaded into
one app called M3000 Ultimate, with over 60 sounds in all.
Jordantron is a special version of M3000 developed in conjunction with Jordan Rudess, keyboardist for Dream Theater
and tech-forward blogger extraordinaire. This app costs $9.99
and has a slightly different feature set and an entirely separate
sound library-57 over-the-top synth stacks from Jordan's live
rig, with everything from grand piano and huge swirling pads
to orchestral strings, brasses, and snarling leads. All sounds are
available over a 6-octave range, and there's a 1/2 Speed
switch that drops all the recordings by an octave and gives
them a heavier timbre. These new switches replace the Inch
and Loop switches, since there are all looped timbres. Oh, and
check out the hidden "wizard" switch, which changes the pitch
bend range from a whole step up/down to whole step up/one
octave down for massive divebombing lead synth whammies!
With all these great functions, is there room for improvement?
I'd say so. While it's possible to select a "dead zone" for the
ABC control so you don't have tiny bits of A or C bleeding into
the B sound when resetting in a hurry, a double tap on the knob
to reset it would be much faster and more intuitive. I'd love to see
some of the Jordantron features, especially half-speed playback,
incorporated into M3000, and the option to reverse playback
would be awesome. All that said, however, this is easily the most
compact solution for Mellotron sounds, and Jordantron is too
much bombastic fun to be legal. A winner all around!

KV331 Audio SynthMaster Player for iPad
free (in-app purchases $2.99 to $9.99); www.kv331audio.com

Bülent Bıyıkoglu isn't a name that rolls off the tongue if you're
not used to speaking Turkish, but if you're into virtual instruments,
it's a name you'll want to remember. Bülent and his crew in
Ankara, the capital of Turkey, have been quietly wowing the keyboard world for years now with a plug-in called SynthMaster-a
semi-modular software synth with a wide variety of different architectures, a huge preset library, and incredible sound. We'll be
bringing you a full review of SynthMaster in a future issue, but for
now, kindly allow me to turn you on to its brand-new iOS baby,
SynthMaster Player for iPad.
This is a port of the free/inexpensive SynthMaster Player for
PC and Mac, allowing basic control of sounds in its library with
quick and intuitive controls. It comes with 100 sounds, with 100
more free if the app is registered online with KV331 Audio. The
Pro upgrade ($9.99) gives you 800 patches in all, plus the ability to save tweaks to the preset sounds, import sounds from the
PC/Mac version, and more. Once you've gone Pro, you have
the option to add more preset banks in various genres.
SynthMaster Player is designed to be quick to use, so its
user interface is very simple. On the Performance page, you
have two XY pads that control pairs of parameters within the
chosen preset and eight Easy Knobs that give you direct
access to specific functions. These are all preloaded by the
person who created the patch, and are chosen for their musical usefulness. They come up with specific settings, but tweaks
can be saved with new names. The XY pads also offer the
ability to record and play back a looped movement of their
cursors to add animation to patches.
RECORDING January 2016

http://www.kv331audio.com http://www.mellotronics.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016