"...An Entirely New Instrument Offering an Easily-Learned Approach to Sound Design”
Mike Metlay of Recording Magazine on SampleMoog™
Recording, now celebrating its 20th year, is the magazine for the recording musician. It offers readers a fascinating and useful blend of topical articles, how-to-columns, tough yet balanced reviews with industry professionals and much more. Here, Mike Metlay gives his thought on IK's Virtual Synth Anthology, SampleMoog™. "SampleMoog is a virtual instrument from IK Multimedia that combines the company's well-respected SampleTank playback/synthesis engine with a large library of samples culled from an impressive collection of Moog synthesizers.""Perhaps the most significant is that there's a uniform, clear, easy-to-use interface for programming sounds, despite the wildly different control schemes of the original instruments. In many if not all cases, the SampleTank engine adds programming capabilities the original instruments didn't have, and in a few cases it's actually an improvement over the original's front panel...""It's no surprise to find the Minimoog and the currently-shipping Voyager and Little Phatty in here, and there are some less-famous machines like the Polymoog, the Prodigy, and the Multimoog, but a few of the offerings are genuinely weird and wonderful. Moog's Vocoder is represented by a collection of vocal effects and band-filtered percussion, and the Etherwave Theremin has been sampled and turned into a collection of ethereal, haunting keyboard textures that are among my favorites in the library. There's even a set of sounds from the Concertmate MG-1 originally sold by Radio Shack!""SampleMoog is a fairly CPU-light beast, as is common for largely sample-based virtual instruments. Each instance of SampleMoog added about 3% to the load on my 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook running Ableton Live 6, and adding an instrument part to a Mix would add another 2–3%; so an 8-part Combi would sit at about 25% load, which then didn't fluctuate much depending on how many notes one played (at least for melody lines and small chords). Compare this to the CPU load of a modeled analog synth: Way Out Ware's KikAXXE, for example, eats 25% of the same Mac's CPU just by being turned on!""Any sample-based instrument is only as good as its samples plus its engine; SampleMoog has both nailed down tight. I see SampleMoog not as a microscopically accurate emulation of vintage synthesizers, but as an entirely new instrument offering an easily-learned and uniform approach to sound design, with great flexibility and CPU efficiency, all based on timbres that have easily stood the test of time."Click here to learn more about SampleMoog. Click here to learn more about Recording Magazine. The Moog logo and trademarks, Little Phatty®, Etherwave®, Minimoog®, Voyager®, Taurus™, are property of Moog Music® Inc. used under license by IK Multimedia. SampleMoog™ is a trademark jointly owned by IK Multimedia and Moog Music® Inc. All other product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, which are in no way associated or affiliated with IK Multimedia.
2008-06-30
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