Review: Redmatica Compendium 1.5 (Mac)

Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Len Sasso

MULTISAMPLERS NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD

ultisampling Toolbox

Keymap, winner of an EM 2008 Editors' Choice Award, is the most complex application in the Compendium package, and there's a 360-page manual to prove it. The program contains many idiosyncrasies, but its basic purpose is straightforward: to let you quickly create layered and grouped multisamples, edit their zones individually or in bulk, and set up how the zones relate within an EXS instrument. Keymap's capabilities go beyond anything you can do directly in the EXS editor, and most tasks are easier to perform than in even the most full-featured samplers. If you create your own multisampled instruments on a Mac and your sampler is EXS compatible, Keymap is for you.

You start with a project, which might be empty or might be based on existing EXS instruments (a project can hold many EXS instruments). Instruments within a project have a slightly more complex structure than their EXS counterparts — they have multiple layers, each holding zones and zone groups. Layers are an artifact that makes it easier to manage overlapping zones, and they disappear when an instrument is converted to EXS format. If a project contains several instruments, you can easily combine some or all of them in a single EXS instrument, assigning them separate or overlapping key and Velocity ranges or crossfading between them with a MIDI controller. That's managed in Keymap's Setup window.

As in most samplers, you build your own multisampled instruments by loading or dragging samples (WAV, AIFF, SDII, MP3, and AAC) to a two-dimensional Zone window with columns representing notes and rows representing Velocities. Alternatively, draw in empty zones and fill them with samples later. A zone's width and height represent its key and Velocity range, and you can stretch zones in any direction.

In Keymap, zones cannot overlap; when you drag or stretch one zone into another, all affected zones are tessellated (tiled), with split zones being created as necessary. That's one reason for having layers — zones in different layers can overlap. You don't need different layers for key and Velocity crossfading, however; you can set up crossfades between zones on the same layer either individually or globally (see Fig. 3).

Resynthesize This

Keymap gives you a variety of sophisticated tools for processing the samples, and most of those tools apply to individual zones or to all selected zones. All of the processing is DSP based and doesn't rely on EXS components such as filters, modulators, and effects. And all of Keymap's DSP is nondestructive; the original samples are never altered. Instead, new samples are created as necessary when instruments are saved in EXS format.

Harmonic Resynthesis is among Keymap's most useful sample-munging features. It lets you manipulate the pitch, time, formants, and amplitude of the sample independently. The pitch, time, and formant operations are designed for monophonic material and work best on single hits rather than, say, bass or vocal loops. However, those operations often produce interesting results on unpitched sounds like speech and percussion. For example, you can pitch-shift speech without affecting formants or time to produce familiar chipmunk or Darth Vader effects without altering the rhythm of the original clips (see Web Clip 1).

The pitch and formant algorithm, which is the most sensitive to the material being transformed, has three modes: with formant adjust, without formant adjust, and standard pitch-shifting (like speeding up or slowing down the clip). With the first two algorithms, you can actually raise the pitch while using the independent time-shifting algorithm to lengthen the clip and vice versa. In addition to time and pitch adjustments, you get dynamics processing, highpass and lowpass resonant filtering, and saturation effects.

When you simply want to start with a sampled note and map it across a range of keys, you have the standard multisampling alternative of widening the key zone, but Keymap gives you another option called Polyphonate. That automates the Harmonic Resynthesis of pitch for a selected zone to create new, adjacent pitch-shifted zones over a range of up to two octaves. That's useful, for instance, when you have a sample with natural vibrato or tremolo and you want to preserve its rate.

Time to Split

Keymap takes a lot of the drudgery out of splitting and looping samples. It will automatically split single audio files at regular intervals or by detecting transients. It will then trim the individual hits based on attack and decay thresholds you set, and automap them to a new layer.

You get two approaches to automatic looping. Select a portion of the sample (a rough loop, for example) and let Keymap refine the boundaries to get the best loop. You can even apply that process simultaneously to multiple zones. The other approach, single-cycle looping, sets a very short loop to produce a specific pitch. Once the loop size is set, you change the loop location and the timbre by moving the start point with an onscreen slider.

Five drag-and-drop areas in the Instrument editor called Magic Pads invoke macros for common multistep processes involving splitting, looping, trimming, and layering groups of samples. I usually found that some hands-on editing was required after using the Magic Pads, but even so, they save a great deal of time.

As much as anything else, saving time is what the three applications in the Compendium bundle are about. You can accomplish most of what these programs do with a DAW and a full-featured sample editor. But Redmatica has painstakingly identified the most tedious tasks involved in creating and managing multisample libraries and has automated them to make things much simpler. In the process, it has added some very clever bells and whistles.

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Len Sasso is an associate editor of EM. For an earful, visit his Web site at swiftkick.com.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

multisample management tools	$389.99
with printed manual	$529.99

PROS: Versatile suite of multisampling tools. Automates many tedious tasks. Powerful nondestructive DSP options.

CONS: User interface is crowded. Some processes could be more straightforward.

FEATURES	1	2	3	4	5
EASE OF USE	1	2	3	4	5
AUDIO QUALITY	1	2	3	4	5
VALUE	1	2	3	4	5

Redmatica
redmatica.com