Sound Advice

Sep 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Electronic Musician Staff

GEFEN SYSTEMS On Gefen's Sounds of the American West four-CD set ($295), you'll find sounds of the frontier days. The first disc, The Old West, provides rumbling stagecoaches, eggs frying on the griddle, meat sizzling over the fire, prospectors panning for gold, and more. Other discs in the series include Industrial Revolution; Trains, Guns, and Model Ts; and Western Town, which has spittoon clangs, saloon door swings, and telegraph clatter.

Digiffects CDs ($60 each) are intended to serve as part of a general-purpose sound library. Two (of the ten) new offerings, Stockholm and South Africa, include ambient sounds recorded in those locales; Industry, Human, Special, Cross Section, City, and South America round out the ambient sounds in this selection. Two new Zynthetic Harmony discs are included; these discs, from the Production Elements product line, feature a variety of sounds designed to establish moods or punctuate audio material such as voice-overs.

Also new is the Foley Sound Library five-CD set ($395), a collection of sound effects by Academy Award- winning sound designers at Soundelux Hollywood. This set gives you everything from the sounds of brawling to sword fighting, shattering glass and splintering wood to fizzing soda pop. Gefen Systems (distributor); tel. (800) 545-6900 or (818) 884-6294; fax (818) 884-3108; e-mail gsinfo@gefen.com; Web www.gefen.com.

Circle #407 on Reader Service Card

PATCHMAN MUSIC Patchman Music's latest Wind Controller Soundbank set ($39.95) can be used with MIDI wind and breath controllers and is compatible with Alesis QS-series synthesizers, including the QS6, QS6.1, QS7, QS7.1, QS8, QS8.1, and QSR models. The Soundbank contains 127 sounds that range from woodwind, brass, and string patches to synth leads, basses, guitars, a General MIDI drum kit, morphed sounds, and others.

The morphed patches are programmed to gradually change from one sound to the next, according to the force of your breath. Other patches are split, so you can use different sounds with a single patch, depending on what register you are playing in. There are string sounds that are dependent on Velocity; the sound switches from a bowed string sound to pizzicato when you tongue the note harder. Some of the more extreme sounds, including PhilGlass and Dimentia, rely on the QS synths' Modulation Matrix capabilities for mapping various modulation sources to multiple destinations.

You can buy the Wind Controller Soundbank as PC-compatible SYX files, or in Standard MIDI File or Mac Self Loader formats. Patchman Music; tel. (216) 221-8282; e-mail matteblack@aol .com; Web www.patchmanmusic.com.

Circle #408 on Reader Service Card

MZONE The WaveIt Synth CD-ROM (Win; $99), the fourth release in the WaveIt series from Mzone (formerly from Time Signature), is now available. WaveIt Synth contains a SoundFont library of synthesizer sounds sampled from a wide array of instruments, ranging from classic analog synthesizers to modern physical- modeling units, as well as a variety of drum machines. The sounds can be used with any SoundFont- compatible sound card or software synth.

The disc includes more than 300 SoundFont banks, each with numerous variations, for a total of more than 2,000 synth sounds. A large selection of synth drum sounds is available, both as complete kits and as banks of individual sounds. You also get looped sequences of drums, basses, synth leads, and vocoders to play with, in three tempi and several keys.

The WaveIt Synth package includes Wien (as in Vienna), a SoundFont editor that gives you a variety of synth parameters to tweak so that you can create your own patches. You can have fun with your custom patches and the preset ones using the included MicroLogic Fun sequencing program from Emagic. MicroLogic Fun features real-time MIDI parameter controls and editing tools and provides notation capability.

WaveIt Synth requires at least an 80486/66 PC with 16 MB of RAM and a SoundFont-compatible sound card or synth program. East West (distributor); tel. (800) 833-8339 or (212) 541-7221; fax (212) 541-7015; e-mail info@mzone.dk; Web www.mzone.dk.

Circle #409 on Reader Service Card