Recording - June 2012 - 39

Desert Winds As Epic World is broad, Desert Winds is deep: this 2.5 GB library is entirely focused on a handful of ethnic wind instruments—the Ney of Persia and Turkey, the Duduk from Armenia, and the Zourna. Each instrument is presented in equal temperament as well as several appropriate microtunings, and multiple articulations and legato phrasings are provided for easy play of very realistic-sounding lines. There are also 21 Soundscape beds using the wind instruments as a basis, because let’s face it, it wouldn’t be a Tarilonte sound library without at least a few deep meditative ambiences. For example, the Duduk offers eight distinct articulations for straight play, swells, falls, trills, etc., and intuitive legato control via the mod wheel and velocity. There’s a lovely demo of this on the Best Service website, where you can follow a MIDI piano-roll display and watch how note velocities and mod wheel position affect the legato phrasing. I have been working with Desert Winds for several weeks now and am just getting the hang of playing in a realistic-sounding manner, but hey, everything gets better with practice. The Neys and Zourna offer similar levels of control, with their own unique sonic signatures, e.g. overblown harmonic accents on the Ney. I should also note that if you’re playing Desert Winds on a laptop with the sound library on the same hard drive you’re booting up from, expect delays as these instruments load—there are a lot of samples to map. Anyone who’s used to working with articulation-heavy sampled instruments will appreciate the depth of what’s provided

here; to play these instruments convincingly takes practice, but careful playing technique is rewarded with haunting realism. Final thoughts Both libraries come with the trademark one-knob Deep Blanket Of Reverb that acts as a familiar glue for these ambiences and instruments; it’s defeatable with a click if you prefer to process with outside effects. And you can always click into the Pro Edit pages to get down and dirty with every parameter setting you can think of and probably several dozen you can’t— remember, underneath it all, ENGINE is a competitive pro-level sample-playing instrument, with all that implies. My one complaint with these libraries is the same as it was with Forest Kingdom: there are still momentary dropouts when the ENGINE player gets overtaxed, and you can’t predict when they’ll hit. Best Service has informed me that it knows where this bug is, and plans to fix it as part of the next big upgrade to ENGINE due later this year. I’ll wait patiently for that upgrade, as those little hiccups are the only less-than-blissful experience in working with either of these magnificent libraries. You’ll definitely want to give the free ENGINE offerings a try... including Tarilonte’s new Era: Medieval Legends, due to ship by the time you read this. Prices: Epic World, $239; Desert Winds, $179 (prices slightly different for download and subject to exchange rates) More from: Best Service, www.bestservice.de

Detunized.com Live Packs
Detunized is a German soundware firm that specializes in Live Packs, collections of sounds and presets for Ableton Live that use Live’s built-in instruments and effects. These Live Packs can be purchased individually or bundled into groups of similar products. Each Live Pack costs between 7 and 9 Euro (roughly $9–12); that price point makes them a tiny risk for a quick purchase and very rewarding in comparison to what you pay for them. Most of the Detunized offerings start with rare instruments or other unusual sound sources, lovingly recorded and brought into Live’s Simpler sample player in Multisample mode to be keymapped and turned into playable instruments. The sample player and added effects are combined into an Instrument Rack, with a set of Macro knobs for quick tweaking of selected parameters. The presets for each source range from honest representations of the original sounds to whacked-out soundscapes that bear little resemblance to the raw recordings. Detunized’s Stephan Marche was kind enough to provide me with three Live Packs to try: Harmona Forte, Phase Facets, and Day Time Traffic Piano. The Harmona Forte is a “laptop accordion”, a reed organ that gets its air pressure from an electric blower. Original recordings of all five stops are provided as presets, with user-adjustable stereo spread and separate dials to put in more or less of the reed itself, the thump of key-down, the snap of key-up, and even the rush of noise from the blower itself. Even by itself, this would make Harmona Forte a charming little organ sound suitable for Americana or country sessions and well worth the cost of the set. But then things get weird... a separate folder with the deceptively nonscary name of “modified” contains 11 unbelievably warped reinterpretations of the original sounds, processed with delays, saturators, filters, autopanners, and much more. The results go from swelling synthetic textures to crushed and bleeding radio transmissions from other decades, with strange thumps and chirps in the background. Cool stuff! Phase Facets uses samples taken from the Hohner HS2/E, a German version of the infamous Casio VZ-10m iPD (interactive Phase Distortion) synth of the 1980s. Casio’s original Phase Distortion synths were phenomentally popular at the time; they were affordable and programmable, if a bit arcane, and our Editor still owns a CZ-101 that he treasures. But the higherend VZ synths were a failure: noisy, temperamental, impossible to program. Most folks who tried them (I had a brief fling with a VZ-1) went away wishing that someone could take their distinctive chiming timbre and marry it to a programming interface that sort of made sense... and with Phase Facets, that’s exactly what you get! Over 800 24-bit samples of iPD waveforms totaling 650 MB, all neatly organized into tweakable, playable, and very beautiful instruments, with harp timbres, pianos, and otherworldly textures. I found this library a delightful reminder of all that was good about the VZ, with none of the bad... they even removed the background hum! But as lovely as these two libraries were, my hands-down favorite was Day Time Traffic Piano. It is exactly what it says on the label: a Hoffmann & Kühne upright piano, recorded in a Berlin apartment on a sunny
RECORDING JUNE 2012

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Recording - June 2012

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