Recording - June 2012 - 40

RECORDING'S

SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS
afternoon with the window open. The 58 samples ring out to full length, each underlain with the passing thrum of cars and trams, engines revving, the wind... as you play, the background noises create an entrancing underlayer to the piano sound, placing it in an ambience that is at once brashly unclean and breathtakingly real. Adding to this are five extra presets where the timbres are again taken to new realms of strangeness with added effects and sample processing. I loved, loved, loved this instrument. There is lots of great programming under the hood of all three Live Packs, and it is instructive to rip open the Instrument and Effect Racks to see how the sounds were made. Phase Facets often provides not one but two banks of Macro controls, called “Salt” and “Sugar”, and Macro

parameters range from simple things like reverb time and filter cutoff to Aliasing, Birds, Brizzl, and Mach It Kaputt (!). Detunized states that these Live Packs require the full version of Live; users of Live Intro will find that all three load and play, but they might not sound exactly like they would in the full version, and some Macro controls will be missing. I look forward to exploring more of the Detunized catalog. Check out the website to read about the many libraries on offer, try out a collection of delightfully silly freebies, and pick a Pack or two to take home with you. These great-sounding and inspiring instruments are a cinch to install, fun and easy to use, and very affordable; at this price, there’s no reason not to grab a few of them and dive in. Prices: 9 Euro (roughly $12) each More from: Detunized, detunized.com

Camel Audio Dream Voices, Himalaya: Vintage, and Biolabs: Dark Space for Alchemy
Alchemy; hundreds of Megabytes in size and programmed by some of the best sound designers in the business (quick tip of the hat to my much-respected colleague Ian Boddy from this side of the Atlantic), they can be purchased and added to either program at affordable prices, and provide instant access to whole new worlds of sound design. Price becomes an even more important selling point when one realizes that Alchemy Player is provided, along with its first 1 GB starter sound library, free of charge. The price of the sounds is the only price you pay to play the Player. I recently had a chance to try out three of Camel Audio’s newest sound libraries for Alchemy. All are available for download directly from the Camel Audio site; the buyer creates an account on the website where purchased products can be downloaded and registered, along with the special keyfiles that Alchemy has to see on your hard disk before it will load and play the sounds. Dream Voices The newest and largest of the Alchemy libraries (well over 1 GB), Dream Voices is a collection of synthetic textures primarily based on the voices of four female recording artists who appear courtesy of Gizeh Records: Anna-Lynne Williams of Seattle’s Trespassers William, Belgian vocalist Chantal Acda a.k.a. Sleepingdog, Glasgow’s Anneke Kampman of Conquering Animal Sound, and Elly May Irving of Leeds’ Glissando. Naturally you’d expect choral and vocal sounds from a group of four ladies singing, but what’s startling is how much else Alchemy can do with this raw material. With the built-in modulation and synthesis tools, the arpeggiator, and the hands-on performance controls like dual XY maps and the sound-morphing Remix Pads, the four voices are used on their own and mixed with hundreds of other waveforms to create lush pads, complex soundscapes, bass timbres, even drum kits. Among my favorites: Antique Oriental, an arpeggiated, percussive patch where each of Alchemy’s four oscillators plays back vocalese from a different singer that morphs into deep bell-like tones; EllyAnna Germ Kit, a drum patch with a keymap of sung syllables mixed with coughs, sniffles, and giggles; Digital Drain Pipe, a sound effect where whispered syllables are modulated and chopped into gurgling, flowing water; and the lush Vocal Bloom, an endlessly changing crescendo/diminuendo of voice processed into resonant layers of synthesis— practically a drone ambient composition in and of itself. But there is surprising beauty to be found in even the simplest of the Dream Voices sounds: the Vocal Choir presets, which blend the four ladies singing simple vowel and nasal sounds (“Aa”, “Mm”, “Oo”, etc.) or staccato syllables (“Ta”, “Da”, “Oh”), with one XY controller blending the relative mix level of each lady in real time.

We first reviewed Camel Audio’s Alchemy plug-in in our February 2010 issue. It was, and is, a remarkable virtual instrument, best described as an extremely powerful synthesizer whose core waveforms can, if desired, be drawn from huge and detailed sample libraries. It demands a fair bit of computer horsepower, but even more than that, it demands a fair bit of programming knowledge to delve into its depths with any degree of expertise.

With that in mind, the folks at Camel Audio have taken steps to make the power and beauty of Alchemy more accessible to non-programmers. For one thing, they’ve released Alchemy Player, a simplified version of Alchemy for people who aren’t interested in programming their own sounds. There’s even a Mobile version for iOS devices that we’ll be examining more closely (along with its Pro variant that allows wireless remote control of Alchemy/Alchemy Player) in a future issue. But Alchemy Player and Alchemy Mobile are only part of the story. The real aid to recording musicians who’d rather play than program is in the range of sound libraries that have been developed for
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RECORDING JUNE 2012

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Recording - June 2012

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