Recording - December 2009 - 13

tablas, darbuka, bata, various tambourines and shakers, bodhran, frame drum, conga, cajon, djembe, dumbek, and novelties like the Remo Thunder Tube, which creates otherworldly clangorous sounds by shaking a long spring connected to a resonating tube. Loops are provided for single instruments, pairs of complementary sounds, and full ensembles, with each loop offered at only one tempo. You’ll need to rely on your software’s time stretching capability to get the tempo you want, but this approach provides maximum breadth with lots of elements to choose from. Earth Tone: World Percussion offers a different approach to a world music library than Divinity; its 6 GB of samples on a duallayer DVD were all performed by Jamey Haddad, and include 12 folders divided by tempo, from 72 to 200 BPM. Each folder contains a wide variety of loops with a completely different ensemble of instruments for each tempo; one tempo might feature talking drum, shakers, tuned bells and waterphone, while another would have anklung, chinese cymbals, djembe, and hydraulic triangle (!). Each folder contains multiple performances on each instrument, for maximum flexibility in assembling loops from compatible elements, but it may take careful listening to combine pieces of one folder’s performance with elements from another, even with good tempo-adjustment tools, simply because the feel and “swing” of each ensemble is unique. Found Percussion offers 6 GB of loops and rhythms made by playing household objects of all kinds—from rubbing styrofoam to drumming one’s fingers on an empty metal can. A set of 85 folders are grouped by tempo and “ensemble”; each folder contains anywhere from one to six elements to mix and match, plus a demo file of what the elements might sound like when put together. The unusual nature of the sounds makes these loops intriguing and catchy, a fun alternative to traditional percussion sounds that layers well with more conventional drums or stands up fine by itself. Electron Smasher: Weapons Grade Loops, on the other hand, is about as different as can be from the other three libraries. Produced by Perry Geyer, whose Electromagnetic Fury library is still one of this author’s favorites, Electron Smasher offers 4.7 GB of processed, mangled, distorted beats, organized into folders (Grooving Kits, Ambient Kits, Xtra Loops) and then in subfolders—over 130 performances grouped by tempo, each with two to ten or more mixable elements, plus a couple dozen unclassifiable bits of weirdness. These loops don’t play well with others, but they’re impossible to ignore; use them sparingly, but when you do use them, turn them up loud! Whatever your musical style, there’s something fun and fascinating for you in these libraries. Check them out and be sure to go by the Big Fish website to see what else is new in your chosen genre!—MM GForce M-Tron Pro $199.95; www.gforcesoftware.com Some readers may remember my ecstatic review of the original M-Tron (November 2004), a virtual emulation of the Mellotron analog sampler keyboard from the 1960s. The Mellotron, famous for such signature sounds as the flutes that open “Strawberry Fields Forever” and the strings in “Nights In White Satin”, used strips of magnetic tape with sounds on them, one tape per note; when you played a key, the tape was drawn over a playback head, rewinding with springs and pulleys when the key was released. It was not the easiest thing to lug around and keep working, making it a prime candidate for a software version. The original M-Tron had what was considered a huge sound library at the time of its release—a whopping 2.1 GB of Tron sounds, sampled note by note over the instrument’s 35-note range for a full 8 seconds’ duration. It was stable, reliable, sounded awesome, and was easy to use, if not very programmable—but then again, neither was the original! MTron Pro raises the ante with an entirely new programmable sound engine, first shown in GForce’s Virtual String Machine (reviewed March 2009), and a 3.6 GB sound library that includes almost all of the original M-Tron’s sound libraries plus lots of new additions. M-Tron Pro installs as your choice of standalone app, VST, AU, or RTAS for Mac or Windows. M-Tron Pro does not overwrite the original M-Tron, so M-Tron users enamored of the few tape banks that didn’t make the new version (like some of the BBC sound effects libraries) or who want the option of an even leaner plug-in can keep it. Creating keyboard splits or layered sounds on the original Mellotron was very difficult, and on M-Tron it was impossible. M-Tron Pro can easily split and/or layer two sounds over the keyboard, each with its own set of parameters, or link the two sets of parameters for quicker edits. In the screenshots, the two Layers are linked so their parameters are shown in blue—when unlinked, Layer A’s are red and Layer B’s are green. Other new features include a multimode filter, two 4-stage envelopes, pan controls, an LFO, scalable velocity and aftertouch sensitivity, and a built-in Delay and polyphonic Ensemble effect. You can play back at half speed (a common mod to real Trons) and even play tapes in reverse. The Delay and LFO can sync to your host application, and all parameters can be controlled via MIDI. And if all of this seems sacrilegious to you, you can “close the lid” and hide all the new features, just playing back sounds from the extensive preset list. The new version is slightly more processor-heavy than the original, but still pretty lean—a dual-layer sound played with two-fisted chords barely touched 10% CPU load on my 2 GHz MacBook running Live 8.0.3. M-Tron Pro provides a great way to get all the vibe of the original Mellotron, with the option to really mess with its sounds if you like. I just wish they’d bring back the coffee stains on the lid.—MM TC Electronic Level Pilot $95; www.tcelectronic.com/levelpilot Most professional-grade powered monitors don’t have easily accessible front-panel volume knobs. Even if they did, you wouldn’t want to use them, because you can’t control both channels at once with accuracy. The best solution is to either have a dedicated control room monitor bus with its own independent level control—something a lot of inexpensive mixers and even fairly pricey audio interfaces don’t have—or to patch a passive inline attenuator into RECORDING DECEMBER 2009
http://www.gforcesoftware.com http://www.tcelectronic.com/levelpilot
Recording - December 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2009
