The EM Poll

SONIVOX Muse 1.04 (Win) (Bonus)

Jul 1, 2007 12:00 AM, By Geary Yelton

           

A big advantage of owning a sample-based synthesizer workstation like the Korg Triton, Roland Fantom, or Yamaha Motif is that you have instant access to a tremendous assortment of musical sounds. Several software instruments, from IK Multimedia SampleTank to Quantum Leap Colossus, provide an even larger palette that encompasses almost any musical genre you can imagine. The new kid on the software block is Muse, a sample player paired with 37.5 GB of 24-bit content sampled at 48 kHz. Created by SoniVox (the soundware developer formerly known as Sonic Implants), Muse is that company’s first software instrument and the first third-party software based on Tascam’s Giga Virtual Instrument (GVI).

FIG. 1: Although SoniVox Muse is based on Tascam’s Giga Virtual Instrument, it can’t import or export samples in Giga format. Fortunately, Muse supplies enough instruments to keep you busy for a very long time.

Get It On

I installed Muse on my Dell D-610 notebook PC with a 2 GHz Pentium-M running Windows XP Pro SP2. It had 1 GB of RAM, a FireWire card, an 8x DVD drive, and an internal 40 GB hard drive. I installed the content on an external 160 GB drive connected by USB 2.0. An M-Audio Ozonic served as a FireWire audio interface, MIDI keyboard, and control surface. I ran Muse standalone and as a VST plug-in in Cakewalk Sonar 6 Professional Edition.

Muse’s only user manual is a 31-page PDF file, and it focuses mostly on specifics such as how the content is organized, how MIDI Control Changes (CCs) are configured, and how to use GigaPulse. I found it helpful to download the GVI manual, which furnishes much greater detail about the user interface, from Tascam’s Web site.

Installation was an interesting experience. As the first of five dual-density DVDs copied files to my hard disk, the progress bar repeatedly climbed from 1 to 255 percent, occasionally stopping at a random number. The manual reassured me that such behavior was expected. Each disc took about an hour and 20 minutes to complete, or just under seven hours for all five. Of course, installation would have taken less time if my DVD drive had been faster.

To authorize Muse, I inserted the included Syncrosoft copy-protection key into one of my computer’s USB ports, ran Syncrosoft License Download Wizard, entered the included authorization code, and downloaded a license to the Syncrosoft key. I completed installation by updating to version 1.04. The first time I ran Muse, it automatically opened the program’s Configuration pane so I could specify the content folder’s location, MIDI and audio hardware settings, maximum polyphony, and so on.

GVI’s GUI

Although Muse comes with GVI as its front end, it is a totally proprietary version and works only with its own content. It can’t open files formatted for GigaStudio, GVI, or any other program; nor can GigaStudio or the standard version of GVI open Muse files. That’s unfortunate because I might want to customize sounds more than Muse allows, and it would be useful to edit Muse instruments in GigaStudio. Tascam is currently developing GVI for Mac OS X, and a Mac version of Muse should soon follow its release.

Only the System menu appears in Muse’s menu bar, and it contains just two commands: Configure and Exit. Clicking on icons in Muse’s taskbar performs functions such as loading and organizing presets, unloading instruments, and resetting defaults (see Fig. 1). Additional buttons open the Edit, FX, GigaPulse, and Loaded Instruments windows.

Below the taskbar is the MIDI Mixer, which displays 16 rows—one for each MIDI channel—containing slots for loading instruments and for adjusting mix parameters. After you load an instrument into a slot, you can replace it with another instrument or stack one or more additional instruments in the same slot to create splits and layers. No matter how many instruments I stacked, I was able to add more until I ran out of RAM. You can choose to show or hide all the instrument slots in a stack, but you can’t hide unused slots if you don’t need them. Clicking on a stacked instrument’s name reveals a pull-down menu from which you can open the Stack Properties window, in which a graphical keyboard allows you to define keyswitches, MIDI CCs, and note ranges for each layer in the stack.

Clicking on the Edit button changes Muse’s GUI to Quick Edit view, which provides four tabbed windows to adjust instrument-specific parameters. Clicking on the General tab accesses controls for volume, panning, pitch-bend range, and so on. The Amplitude/Pitch tab lets you change settings for a 6-stage amplitude envelope, a 2-stage pitch envelope, and two LFOs. The Filter tab lets you specify parameters for a single 4-mode filter with modulators that include a 6-stage envelope, an LFO, MIDI Velocity, and two MIDI CCs (see Fig. 2). And the Loop tab lets you specify start points and loop points for the currently selected sample.

Control Yourself

You can use preassigned MIDI CCs to control not only MIDI Mixer parameters such as Volume, Tune, and Pan, but also synth parameters such as amplitude and filter attack, filter frequency and resonance, and portamento speed. Whereas synth presets provide default MIDI CC assignments to these mod destinations, orchestral presets provide different sets of mod assignments. For example, all orchestral instruments, as well as saxes and pop brass, allow you to switch release triggers off using MIDI CC 94 to conserve computer resources. Whereas CC 1 controls filter sweep when you’re playing a synth, it crossfades between fast and slow rotor speeds when you’re playing Drawbar Organ. The manual spells out exactly which MIDI CCs are assigned to each instrument.

MIDI CCs are fixed and you can’t change them; that’s fine if you have reassignable controllers, but otherwise you may need to reroute them in your sequencer. You can, however, reassign which parameter you control using the sliders in each instrument’s MIDI Mixer slot. To reassign sliders normally used to control Volume, Tune, and Pan parameters, you click on an adjacent triangle and select a MIDI CC from a pop-up list. Unfortunately, the list displays only the MIDI CC’s name, and not which parameter a given CC affects for a particular instrument.

Instrument Variations

Muse has no search or browser functions, but with more than 1,000 presets, organization is crucial. You select instruments from a hierarchical pop-up menu that organizes them into 15 families, each containing several subgroups that SoniVox calls clans. Each clan contains numerous articulations, groups of instruments, or instruments further organized by type. In addition to presets containing complete multisampled instruments in all their detailed glory, Muse provides quite a few lite versions it calls EZ Instruments, which have fewer Velocity layers and are less demanding on your computer’s resources. Some EZ Instruments have reduced keymaps, meaning that fewer notes were sampled and pitches are transposed further. In most cases, you’ll find two EZ versions; for example, whereas Solo Violin is a 550 MB, 4-layer preset, Solo Violin EZ1 is 135 MB and 2 layers, and Solo Violin EZ2 is 60 MB and 1 layer.

Some presets are designated Preview Instruments, which group every instrument in a clan into a single stack. Those are useful for loading a bunch of sounds and auditioning them one by one using the Mute and Solo buttons. The Orchestral and Ethnic Percussion families provide Ensembles, which offer several instruments in a single keymap. And in the case of drums, some presets let you load entire kits, while others let you load individual drums and cymbals.

General MIDI Matters

Muse has two General MIDI sets, Smaller GM and Larger GM, but neither the user manual nor SoniVox’s Web site mentions how to use them. SoniVox explained the procedure to me, but it’s hardly intuitive. After loading a GM set into a slot, you open Muse’s Currently Loaded Instruments window, which displays hundreds of choices; you then select an instrument and drag it to the desired slot. After you drag-and-drop the instruments you need, you can detach the GM set.

Muse supplies more than the standard complement of 128 GM instruments, and they load almost instantly. Most sound really good, though some had too much ambience for my taste. When I loaded Larger GM, Muse’s memory meter shot up to 96 percent (remember, my PC has only 1 GB of RAM), but even when I detached the preset, it remained at 96 percent until I rebooted Muse. Muse’s GM instruments don’t respond to Program Changes, and they’re less GM compatible than, say, a Roland Sound Canvas. You’ll probably need to do some tweaking if you plan to use them for Standard MIDI Files you download off the Web.