SOUND ON SOUND
Ever fancied arranging 'Oops, I Did It Again' for a full choir? Well now you can, courtesy of Symphonic Choirs, the latest virtual-instrument sample library from East West and Quantum Leap.
With Sonar Home Studio, Cakewalk have made the core features of their flagship sequencing application available at a bargain price.
Yamaha breathe new life into their AW range with USB connectivity, loop sampling, and an onboard pitch-correction processor.
Viewed by many musicians as the modern standard in computer-based score-writing software, Sibelius has an impressive pedigree and reputation. Following the success of three releases on the Mac and Windows platform, can it maintain its simple user interface as the powerful feature-set continues to expand?
This new small-diaphragm mic provides a good upgrade path for home studios currently working with just dynamic models.
The price of MIDI keyboard controllers has tumbled over the past few years, and Ion clearly feel it's time the same thing happened to MIDI drum kits. Their IED01 costs £299 and includes five pads, two pedals, and the stand!
Hollow Sun's vintage keyboard sounds go against all the current sample-library trends, being supplied on CD-ROM rather than on dedicated hard drives, and weighing in at Megabytes in size, not Gigabytes. But how do they sound...?
Hardware control surfaces promise to make working with a software DAW more intuitive and 'hands on'. Tascam's new offering has more knobs and faders than most, but also keeps things deliberately simple. Is it an essential accessory, or an expensive gadget?
Basement Arts Frantic, Cakewalk Z3TA+, and Progress Software Soup get the install treatment.
We check out the latest sample libraries on the block: Spatial Awareness, Ghetto Electro, Housematic, Cycles Volume 4: Momentary Incursions.
This new set of high-resolution drum mics is also versatile enough for many general recording tasks.
Part 2: We conclude our review of Roland's fabulous new rackmount synth, and look at the built-in VC1 and VC2 cards, which respectively convert the V-Synth XT into a fully functioning D50 and a powerful vocal-processing synth.
This new master clock generator from Mutec can transmit a bewildering array of clock signals at many different rates simultaneously. Does your studio need one?
Continuing the recent tradition for wedding software-instrument front ends to vast sample libraries, Ra is a 14Gigabyte collection of exotic and 'world' instruments with an NI Kompakt wrapper...
A compact active monitor for high-quality listening at low-to-medium sound levels.
Echo are the latest soundcard manufacturer to move into the market for Firewire interfaces, and the flagship of their range promises 12-channel analogue I/O with pristine sound quality.
This month: Universal Audio Boss CE1 • TC Electronic NonLin2 Stereo Effects Reverb
Note: this is a genuine product, not an April Fool hoax!
Part 1: The V-Synth repackaged Roland's groundbreaking Variphrase technology, creating a powerful new kind of sample-based synthesis. Now there's a rackmount V-Synth, and (as you'll discover in Part 1 of our two-part review) it's more powerful than the first...