Virtual Instruments

Lethal Audio recently released Lethal, a crisp-sounding "rompler"-style software instrument with a heavy emphasis on EDM, but which will also be useful for pop, rock, hip-hop, and film scoring.

Recently, Cakewalk announced Rapture Session, a new member of its Rapture software-instrument family. It offers less sounds and no programmability, but it has the same synth engine as the flagship Rapture Pro and comes with almost 4GB of content. What makes it most notable, however, is its super-low price tag: $29.95. So is Rapture Session a great bargain or just a waste of time? We tested it recently to find out.

The drum instrument market is a crowded one, and already full of excellent choices. East West, a company renowned for its high-quality instruments and sound libraries, has just thrown its hat in the ring with ProDrummer, a new MIDI drum instrument library that runs standalone or as a plug-in on the East West Play platform, and comes with 14,000 MIDI grooves.

UVI announces Spectre, an expansion pack for Falcon including 140 presets inspired by the high-energy and detailed styling of modern electronic music.

The long chapter dedicated to recording electric guitar has come to an end. That said, the articles in the coming weeks will deal with topics that could easily be integrated into it. But I made the choice to separate them because the things we will be addressing go well beyond the scope of the guitar. In fact, the end of the last installment where we talked about amp emulations encouraged me to write an article dedicated to virtual instruments. The use of a certain number of VSTis is extremely common in "home" productions. Yet the best way to approach the work with these tools is often to apply the same methods that you'd use if you were recording the actual instrument.

To help you avoid making music that sounds like everyone else’s, I want to tell you about some premium-quality soft synths you may not know about. Although none of these instruments are terribly obscure, each deserves more attention than it normally gets. Some are relatively new but haven’t gotten much ink, while others are all but forgotten by anyone who doesn’t use them already. Every one of them runs as a plug-in on Windows and Mac OS X, and two — Tassman 4 and Circle2 — run standalone, as well. Each is unique and probably very different from other soft synths you’ve used. When you’re looking to stand out from the pack, different is good.

I’m often surprised by musicians who use their mice or trackpads to change MIDI software parameters, and then complain that they miss using real knobs and buttons. I’m surprised because they could use knobs and buttons if only they’d take advantage of MIDI Learn (sometimes called MIDI Assign), which gives you the ability to assign the physical controls on your hardware to the virtual controls you see on your computer screen.