Cultural Diversity

Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

Best Service Latin World

Latin World ($199.95) teams Intakt Instrument with 4.66 GB of South American, Central American, and Caribbean-flavored loops and one-shot samples (see Fig. 2). Practically all of Latin World's content serves as a construction kit for creating your own tracks. Unlike many Intakt-based instruments, Latin World focuses on time-sliced loops without splitting them into separate slices you can trigger using MIDI. Each category supplies variations in as many as five tempos, and the loops accommodate tempo changes quite well. Many loops are as long as 16 measures. Their sheer number is impressive; not surprisingly, most concentrate on Latin drums and percussion.

Six of Latin World's 15 categories are called Instrument Loops. Five of them group their presets by instrument type: Drums, Percussion, Bass, Guitar, and Horn. In addition to the loops, you get a multisampled bass, three multisampled guitars, three percussion kits, and one complete drum kit you can play from your MIDI keyboard. The sixth Instrument Loops category, Athmo, has only one preset, but it maps 46 ambient sound effects to the keyboard. Sounds range from cheering crowds and traffic noise to recordings of a street parade (see Web Clip 2).

The other nine categories are called Music Style Loops, and indeed, seven are defined by their musical style. They include Baion (Brazil), Bomba (Puerto Rico), Candombe (Uruguay), Merengue (Dominican Republic), and Murga (Uruguay), each of which comes in two tempos. Salsa gives you three tempos, and Samba gives you four. All seven categories supply 4/4 loops in four key signatures and one rhythm-only preset.

Two more categories, Ternary and Polyrhythm, are grouped with the Music Style Loops. The Ternary category was apparently designed for assembling songs in the A-B-A (or ternary) song form common in Latin music. Ternary supplies loops in four keys at 120 and 136 bpm, as well as rhythm-only loops at the same two tempos. Polyrhythm gives you two presets, each with a selection of drum and percussion fills at 120 bpm.

Most Music Style Loops contain all five instrument types mapped to different notes. Drum and percussion loops are assigned to the two octaves below middle C. Middle C and above play bass guitar, acoustic or electric guitar, and horn section loops. A two-sided cheat sheet uses color coding to show you how Instrument Loops and Music Style Loops are mapped. Latin World's documentation also includes a 68-page Intakt Instrument manual, a 4-page PDF file that shows idiomatic chord progressions in eight styles, and HTML files that provide credits, the license agreement, and a brief description of the software.

Best Service Orient World

From the name, you'd probably expect Orient World ($199.95) to feature sounds from China, Japan, and other regions of the Far East. You might be surprised to find no koto, shamisen, or erhu, nor any other sounds usually associated with that part of the world. Instead, Orient World focuses on the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe — specifically, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, the Balkans, and regions only as far east as Pakistan.

Because Orient World is also an Intakt Instrument with an orange-pastel color scheme, it appears identical to Latin World (see Fig. 3); its layout of presets, however, is quite different. Among the 16 preset categories are 9 individual instruments, voice (wordless male and female vocals), percussion instruments and ensembles, and short musical phrases played by an orchestral string section. Two categories, Inspiration Alibaba and Inspiration Odyssey, each contain a single preset that maps loops and phrases from other categories across the keyboard (see Web Clip 3). Another category, X Oriental Dance, gives you heavily processed experimental timbres created from instrumental source material.

The selection of instruments in Orient World's 4.66 GB of content is quite varied. It includes winds such as the balaban and ney; strings such as the kanun, saz, and violin; and percussion such as the bendir, darbuka, tablas, and tar. It also includes instruments not necessarily Eastern in origin — accordion, saxophone, and electric guitar — playing in Eastern modalities.

Other than nine individual hand drums you can play from a MIDI keyboard or percussion controller, all of Orient World's content consists of loops and phrases. Before you can play the hand drums, though, you'll need to edit their envelopes; the release stages are set at the same default, which decays too quickly for percussion to sound natural. In fact, all of Orient World's sampler parameters have been left at their default values, which means, for example, that all instruments — even vocals — are processed by simulated tube distortion with a Drive value of 25%.

Although most categories offer a selection of tempos, the tempo range varies depending on the instrument. Ney, for example, provides a total of 22 presets containing phrases at tempos of 60, 70, 90, 100, 120, or 130 bpm. Percussion Combo provides seven loop presets, each at a different tempo: 74, 86, 93, 94, 108, 140, or 147 bpm. Guitar gives you nine phrase presets, all at 120 bpm. The number of phrases or loops in each preset also varies, from as few as 3 to as many as 65 samples; their lengths also vary.

Orient World's documentation consists of an Intakt manual and a 6-panel gatefold that provides brief descriptions of 22 instruments and lists of instruments used in 6 categories, as well as the license agreement and credits. A handful of HTML files duplicate that information.

MOTU Ethno Instrument

MOTU's Ethno Instrument ($295) delivers 7.87 GB of content and a custom interface that works a lot like MOTU Symphonic Instrument's GUI, but with time-slicing functionality (see Fig. 4). Sample content is evenly divided — 3.92 GB provides more than 6,000 loops and phrases, and 3.95 GB provides more than 500 multisampled instrument presets. If your computer is up to snuff, Ethno Instrument is 64-part multitimbral and capable of 256 stereo notes per part, according to MOTU.

Ethno Instrument encompasses musical cultures from all over the world (see Web Clip 4). When selecting instrument presets, you can browse them either by geographic origin or by instrument type. Clicking on the browser's Geographic button lists 12 regions or cultures such as Africa, Celtic, Indonesian-Gamelan, Occidental, and Spanish Gypsy, as well as categories for World Synths and Xtra Percussion. If you click on the Instruments button, seven types are listed: Fretted String, Key, Percussion, Strings, Woodwind, World Synth, and Bell, Metal & Gong. Clicking on the Loops button reveals a list that's almost identical to the Geographic list. Many loop and phrase presets supply numerous key signatures and tempos.

Ethno Instrument has lots of programmable parameters, and its presets take advantage of them. Comprehensive user controls let you adjust the multimode filter, ADSR envelopes, tuning, polyphony, glide, 2-band EQ, and other settings. Onboard convolution reverb has controls for predelay, highpass and lowpass damping, and more. Clicking on the Expert Mode button opens a window to specify a part's note and Velocity range, custom keyswitches, disk-streaming preferences, and audio outputs.

Controls in the Loop section affect only loops and phrases. You can start and stop playback, change tempo, sync playback to a host's tempo, and choose from three loop-playback modes. Increase or decrease playback by a factor of four and change the sample start position. You can drag-and-drop loops and phrases from Ethno Instrument to your host software's audio tracks and drag-and-drop time-slice data to MIDI tracks.

With so many instrument presets to choose from, Ethno Instrument's diversity is very impressive. If you're browsing by instrument, the Fretted String category offers tremendous variety. The Latin Percussion subcategory alone gives you 25 presets. If you browse by region, Middle East — Mediterranean instruments such as oud, baglama, and Egyptian flute are the most plentiful. World Synths, a category that furnishes 79 electronic timbres, goes beyond traditional ethnic sounds and offers complementary underpinnings for world-fusion musical styles.

Ethno Instrument has the most extensive documentation of any software in this roundup. The 120-page manual covers every aspect of its operation. It also groups instruments by their geographic origin and provides descriptions, preset names and sizes, and note ranges.