Weighing in at about 3.5GB to download, this sample library gives you a realistic piano tone whole remaining easy on CPU use. Sampled from a stage piano in a brilliant concert hall in the Czech Republic, Monastery Grand is a free instrument for the MSoundFactory platform. Between the two matrices and the ADSR controls in the Globals tab, every synth sound you could imagine is at your fingertips. Compressors, Limiters, Delays, Choruses, Vocoders, and a whole galaxy of other effects are available. In addition to the individual effects on the matrix in the Generator tab, there is a separate FX matrix that gives you access to any of your installed MeldaProduction effects. I spent hours just playing with the generators, making cool sounds, and messing with knobs, and I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of what MSoundFactory is capable of. Clicking any of the blanks on the matrix brings up a huge menu of generators, filters, and various effects. Next up, the Generator has a giant matrix view for toggling and adding oscillators and effects. This makes it incredibly easy to nail down the perfect ADSR settings for your custom patches. When you strike a note, it travels down the ADSR graph from left to right in realtime to show you the attack and sustain times. The Globals tab in Edit Mode includes the coolest ADSR Envelope control panel I’ve ever seen on any synth, bar none. Suffice it to say that in terms of control, the Easy Mode is like driving a car, and Edit Mode is more like flying a plane. I could spend a bunch of time talking about the Easy Mode, but in the interest of time I’ll skip straight to Edit Mode, as that is where the sausage is really made. Without a doubt, Edit Mode is where the magic happens in MSoundFactory. (One called Planetary Pads sounded an awful lot like the pads in the opening to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Clicking Download Presets in the loader performed an online exchange, beefing up my library with an additional 151 presets. This means that you can browse through and try out presets that other MSoundFactory users found useful enough to save. There is also a separate preset loader with search, save, upload and download capability. That’s probably why they included the Genre, Timbre, Articulation, Algorithm, and Features keyword lists, plus a folder-style browser with search bar. With nearly 1100 different patches, the preset library is almost a little insane. I don’t always talk about presets in my reviews, as they seem largely an afterthought on some plugins. Bear in mind as we go through the plugin’s features that although I’ve done my level best to cover all the important parts, there’s surely some controls or features that I’ve missed. There is so much to the MSoundFactory interface that I was compelled to pull out the manual within a few minutes of loading it up to help guide me. Everything is laid out well, and there are tons of toggles to expand and collapse various control sections for customized views. Broken into the same three tabs as the Easy mode, the Edit mode has a modular routing grid with a huge array of modulation sources, ADSR settings with an enormous graph for setting the perfect envelopes, and an effect routing matrix with a vast selection of effects. Hitting the Edit button brings up the Edit mode, which gives you far more granular control over the current preset. In between are the knobs and buttons for the currently-loaded preset broken out into three tabs: Generator, FX, and Globals. On the left is a preset loader including categories and a tree view to narrow down the list, and on the far right is a meter with output volumes and stereo width, plus 8 preset selectors for quickly flipping through favorites, A/B, copy/paste functions, undo/redo, and arpeggiator toggle. The default view is called the Easy screen and provides a simplified interface for controlling the selected preset. MSoundFactory has the standard MeldaProduction bluish-gray look with colorful buttons and knobs. Let’s check them out in detail and decide whether MSoundFactory is worth the price of admission. I spent some time this week playing with both MSoundFactory and the new Monastery Grand library. Though it’s been out for over a year now, MeldaProduction’s MSoundFactory, Melda’s enormous synth and sampler suite, has just been beefed up with a new, free sample library called Monastery Grand. Choosing the Best Digital Audio Workstation for your Home Studio.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |