Recording - May 2015 - 62

Soundware Showcase
Output REV
By Mike Metlay with Jon Hillman
Output is a new sound library company that has taken the world of
sound design by surprise with a first offering that's well-designed, musically useful, inspiring, and... to be honest... totally out of left field. REV
stands for "reversed," and this virtual instrument ensemble for Native
Instruments Kontakt 5.3 (or the free Kontakt Player) is just that: an entire
collection of audio content that's meant to play back in reverse.
Why reversed sounds?
If you've ever messed around with playing samples or audio recordings
backward for their interestingly slow starts and abrupt endings, you'll
understand the appeal of REV. Many genres of pop, modern rock, hip
hop, and dance music use tricks like rises-sounds that start soft, get loud,
and end abruptly-to telegraph transitions in a song arrangement. The
human ear naturally gravitates toward reversed sounds; we instinctively
know that something's unnatural about them, and they heighten interest in
whatever we're listening to. (We'll set aside the inevitable discussion of
whether reversed vocals are in some way evil. There aren't any in REV.)
REV does the hard work of making these sounds musical so we can get
on with the business of songwriting and sound design. It's easy to flip a
sample backwards; getting it to line up with forward audio in a musical
way, sync to tempo, and behave as we'd hope it would, can be quite a
bit more difficult. In REV, the user is presented with a wide palette of
reversed sounds, all recorded in high quality with and without audio processing. This content is then presented in a very playable format.
There are a variety of ways in which producers like to work with material like this; rather than shoehorn all of those applications into a single
overly complex user interface, REV instead presents us with four different
ways to play with reversed sound. While there are many common features, these workflow approaches are optimized to get the composer
where he's going with a minimum of fuss.

down by one octave. Transposition is selected with the range of
keys shown in pink in the screenshot, and loops or rises in a
bank of 24 are selected and triggered with the blue keys, with
simpler content generally grouped onto the lower notes and
more complex content higher up.
The Loops and Rises Engines have access to a pool of Effects
Presets which can be loaded into any of their patches. This common pool of presets is in contrast to Effects in the two Instruments
Engines, which are stored as part of a patch and not easily
sharable between patches on their own. The Effects chain in
these Engines includes Lo-Fi (bit crusher), Rage (distortion), Stack
(guitar amp modeling), Motion (modulation effects like chorus,
flange, and rotary speaker simulation), two Delays (identical in
features), Reverb, and 3-band EQ with semi-parametric mid.

Engines and common features
REV consists of four different Engines for sound creation. These are:
Loops, Rises, Instruments, and Timed Instruments. While the function set Instruments and Timed Instruments
The Instruments and Timed Instruments Engines each contain
changes a bit from Engine to Engine, Output has taken care to create a
consistent user interface, so learning one Engine gives you most of what two separate Layers. Each Layer loads its own sample and has
a full complement of filter/envelope/stutter/effect features as
you need to use the other three.
All four Engines feature a multimode filter with cutoff, resonance, and given above. Layers can be individually switched on/off or
envelope modulation; two ADSR envelopes, one for amplitude and one swapped. Each Layer can be set to one of four modes: Dry (no
for filter cutoff; two sets of Stutter controls, one for pitch (stepped vibrato) effects), Wet (effects in place), Pad (looping), and Fwd (played
and one for amplitude (stepped tremolo); and a multieffects processor with backwards, which in the case of REV means played forwards!).
In addition to the two Layer tabs, there is a Main tab which
seven or eight different switchable effects. All Effects can be set to Trigger
in momentary or Latch (toggle on/off) modes, using the set of bright green offers a third independent Effects chain that's global to both
keys at the bass end of the DAW's onscreen keyboard, which correspond Layers. These Main Effects, like those in the Loops and Rises
to notes on your MIDI controller. These controls are all automatable via Engines, can be triggered via keyboard notes. The Main Effects
MIDI or DAW automation commands, and surround a graphic display of the currently loaded waveform.
Delivery: Download only, 6.9 GB (requires 15 GB disk space)
Loops and Rises
F
ormat: Windows 7+ and Mac OS X 10.8+, loads in Native
The Loops Engine offers 360 loops organized into 15 catInstruments Kontakt 5 (version 5.3 or newer) or in free
egories, each one with 24 loops. Categories include such
Kontakt Player
choices as Acoustic Piano, Harmonics, Cymbals and
Copy Protection: Requires Kontakt, uses NI Service Center
Shakers, Atmospheres, and Sound Design. The Rises Engine
challenge/response
offers one-shot samples that play back in sync with your
Licensing: Sounds can be used royalty-free in original music
DAW's tempo; there are 1080 rises organized into 45
recordings; no resale or repackaging in products for
banks of 24 rises each. Banks of rises are categorized by
resale permitted
length (1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, or 4 bars) and by whether they end
Documentation: inline contextual help, PDF Installation Guide
with an abrupt cutoff, an effects tail, or "Electro" processing.
Price: $199
Loops and Rises can be played back at full speed, half
More from: Output, www.outputsounds.com
speed, or double speed, with a further transposition up or
62

RECORDING May 2015

http://www.outputsounds.com

Recording - May 2015

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