From benjamin.kuris@compaq.com Tue Feb 04 00:26:40 2003
Subject:laptop -> soft electro

If you are like me, you might have a bit of nord-electro jealousy.
Getting a good organ sound is hard enough-- then you need to move on
to other keyboard instruments. Meanwhile there is that little red
keyboard w/zero setup time.

I recently purchased the Sample Tank LE / Piano collection which is a
VST softsynth that retails for a $80 and when combined w/B4 or any
other clone will let you "roll your own" nord electro. It is a high
quality sample playback engine combined with an intuitive effects
browser (4 effects allowed) and performance controls. You can set
up 4 midi channels w/different instruments on the LE version (better
then an electro). There is a free trial version that lets you play
w/a piano and a few other sounds which you might recognize from your
favorite albums... Based on that experience, I expected to find
decent piano sounds which to me would be worth $80. I was
pleasantly surprised by the quality of effects, clav (if you add some
grit and use an unweighted controller), rhodes, and Yamaha CP
sounds. The wurlies don't cut it for me as they are quite
overdampened.

The sounds are gig and home-studio worthy. The pianos compare
favorably with my S80 (played from the S80 keyboard)-- I find them
somewhat more playable but haven't figured out why yet, sizewise the
steinway grand is 42.5MB which is larger then the ROM in my S80.
The entire library is something like 500megs. Certainly there is
more variation and tweakability then most romplers with little
waveform re-use. Rather then capture the sound you hear on the
piano bench, the sound designers seem to have focused on
produced/mic'd piano sounds. The lo-fi piano (english invasion
style) is lots of fun!

I see two flaws: Bad organs, and no glide implementation but there
are plenty of capable softsynths around and there is B4. Midi
Implementation is fine. I had no problems running 24bit, 5.8ms
latency w/64 voices on my system (CPU load peaked around 35%). The
note-allocation algorithm seems stange though (dropped recent
notes?!) so make sure you don't keep the sustain pedal down forever
when using a lower voice setting.

The other problem I had was that I have to load "VST settings" (which
are like performance patches) twice to get them to stick. This
could be a problem with my VST host (Audiomulch).

So the ultra-light laptop rig will return for my lesser gigs and
quick rehersals. Might run my laptop as a dedicated clav. box for
other gigs-- it just might be time to find a funk band...

The "soft" Electro, winter 2003
Used laptop = $500 (PIII or better)
Sound card (echo indigo) = $100
Controller keyboard = $230-...
B4 software = $170
Soundtank = $80
=================
$1090.

You can buy the software direct from www.sampletank.com.

Obviously dropping out the laptop and/or controller makes things even
cheaper.

-Ben