EM Editors Choice 2009

Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By the EM Staff

           
 

2009 EDITORS' CHOICE AWARDS

BONUS MATERIAL
Reviews and Such for This Year's Winners

Software Drums

FXpansion BFD2 2.0.5 (Mac/Win, $399)

FXpansion, winner of the 2005 Editors' Choice Award for BFD, is back on top this year with the long-anticipated and completely redesigned BFD2. The new version starts with a fresh graphical user interface, adds a full-featured mixer, and tops it off with a comprehensive drum-sequencing, editing, and composition environment. You get 50 GB of sample content consisting of ten drum kits that represent a range of vintage and modern styles and manufacturers, along with a broad selection of extra snares and cymbals. And FXpansion has managed to keep all this backward compatible with older BFD content.

BFD2's Kit page offers 10-, 18-, and 32-piece drum kits. You can fill the kit from scratch or customize one of the preset kits. You can have as many as 96 Velocity layers per articulation, and each articulation includes up to 3 stereo and 6 mono mic setups. Each mixer channel strip holds four insert effects and has four effects sends. Aux busing, sidechaining, and submixing are all supported. The Groove window is a sophisticated drum sequencer in which you can create, import, and edit MIDI grooves, and more than 5,000 patterns are provided. When you've created a drum sequence, you can render a multichannel mix of discrete WAV files directly from BFD2. All of this is available standalone or as a plug-in in your favorite host.

Sound Library

SoniVox Anatomy (Mac/Win, $219 [MSRP])

Just when you thought everything under the sun had been sampled — orchestral instruments, vintage keyboards, ethnic ensembles, and burning pianos — SoniVox did something different and sampled human sounds. If you're wondering what's unusual about that, then you've obviously never heard Anatomy, a unique sample library for Kontakt 2 and 3. Have you ever considered the groove potential of burps, farts, coughs, and ululation? SoniVox sampled every one of those sounds, truncated them, looped them, and mapped them to MIDI. Anatomy covers the gamut from icky to ethereal, from comic to downright danceable.

Anatomy's instruments are divided into two categories: Man and Machine. Sounds categorized as Man are unprocessed, without any obvious effects. Machine sounds, though human in origin, are heavily processed and barely recognizable as humanoid. Alongside all the vocal percussion and sampled vowels, you'll find snoring, screaming, moaning, and all manner of breathy mischief. If it's a sound the human body makes, you'll find it in Anatomy. For examples, visit SoniVox's Web site. For sound design, soundtrack enhancement, or simply something completely different, we give it eight thumbs up.

Synthesizer (Hardware)

Dave Smith Instruments

Prophet '08 ($1,999)

Dave Smith has been around the block a few times, and he keeps on contributing. He conceived and helped give birth to MIDI, invented wavetable synthesis, and developed the first commercial soft synth. Beginning in 1978, his company Sequential Circuits produced one of the most desirable synths of all time, the Prophet-5. For years musicians were clamoring for a new Prophet, and in 2008 Smith delivered. The Prophet '08 has all the features you'd hope for in a polyphonic synthesizer — eight voices with two independent layers, a versatile lowpass filter, three envelopes, four LFOs, complex modulation routing, an arpeggiator, and even a 4-channel sequencer — at a price that can scarcely be believed. And if you don't need the 61-note keyboard, a tabletop/rackmount module ($1,499) is also available.

You want to talk about fat? The Prophet '08 is a true analog poly synth, with a voltage-controlled filter (VCF), a voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA), and digitally controlled analog oscillators (DCOs). Even with an entirely analog signal path, the Prophet '08 takes full advantage of digital technology. It stores 256 top-notch factory programs, and you can rewrite any of them. Here's an example of its many useful touches: you can apply its sequencer to control any parameter that's available for modulation. Powerful and fun, the Prophet '08 gives us everything we wanted a modern-day Prophet to be.

Synthesizer (Software)

Spectrasonics Omnisphere (Mac/Win, $499 [MSRP])

How would you describe your dream synth? Lots of everything and then some? The core of any synthesizer is its pool of raw sounds, whether simple waveforms or complex multisamples, and bigger is usually better. If you're like us, you also want the sound-shaping potential of multimode filters and multistage envelope generators. Sophisticated onboard effects and a nice arpeggiator wouldn't hurt, either. Throw in a large assortment of well-designed patches and then organize them for quick recall, and you have Omnisphere, the flagship soft-synth plug-in from Spectrasonics.

A mountain of advance publicity preceded Omnisphere's September release, and for once, the software completely lives up to the hype. Beyond its remarkable assortment of dynamite patches and 42 GB of sample content, Omnisphere's depth and ease of programming are unprecedented. Each part in a multitimbral setup has two layers, and each layer offers real-time control paths and an impressive variety of synthesis techniques, from sample playback and FM to granular and variable waveshaping. Omnisphere wraps all this power in a transparent user interface that feels natural. Giving it an award was easy; leaving it long enough to write about it was hard.