SOUND ON SOUND
• Solo Brass **** • Solo Woodwinds ***** • Solo Strings ***
The newest Spirit mixers offer a straightforward feature set and long-throw faders at a seriously...
A combined sub-harmonic synthesizer and high-frequency psychoacoustic enhancer for live and studio use.
****** 6/5 stars! Dave Stewart is a skilled musician and composer who's been reviewing sample libraries in SOS for years. With so much experience in this area, Dave has produced a library of his own, and rather than sampling conventional instruments, he's focused on a collection of unique instruments built up over many years.
Groove Tubes' versatile mics offer a range of facilities to suit every budget.
The latest plug-in for the TC Powercore card allows you to extract frequency responses from commercial tracks and apply them to your own mixes.
We check out Wave Arts Power Couple • Nomad Factory Liquid Bundle • Digitalfishphones Fish Fillets • Professional Sound Projects PSP84.
Edirol's latest desktop music product is a controller keyboard that can also be used to control your sequencer's on-screen mixer.
Trilogy is big on bass — its supplied library has 3GB of sounds! Is it sweet and low, or does it plumb new depths? We find out...
This popular shareware sample editor has grown into a serious audio manipulation tool...
As ever, Creative Labs' latest PC soundcard promises a lot of features for £200. But does it deliver the kind of performance that musicians need?
10 years on from the Vintage Keys module, Emu are looking to repeat its success, this time with 128-note polyphony, 32 MIDI channels and 32MB of sample ROM. But is it a fine Vintage, or past its best?
This quirky rack synth not only offers that genuine analogue sound, but comes with built-in MIDI interfacing and a very useful degree of patchability, for exciting sound-design potential.
Earthworks are already world-renowned for the fidelity of their microphones and preamps, and now their studio monitors are setting a benchmark for reference quality.
Although most major MIDI + Audio sequencing applications include bundled EQ, dynamics and reverb plug-ins, they don't always sound too great, so many users are on the lookout for alternatives, like these two from Wave Arts.
Voxengo's Curve EQ is a 'linear phase spline equaliser' with a 2048-point filter kernel, which lets you draw highly complex responses using its graphic interface.
This plug-in produces essentially the same results as its analogue rackmount counterparts, so if you already know and like the BBE process, you should take no convincing.
Formerly the East German state synth company (a great concept in itself), Vermona re-emerged last year with the MARS monophonic analogue synth. Clearly determined to win back their reputation, they've returned with the four-voice Perfourmer...
The latest in Roland's line of MC-series workstations is their best (and most expensive) yet, incorporating synthesis, sequencing, real-time control, and sampling. But in an increasingly software-driven world, can a Groovebox still cut it?