Acoustix – Music Tech – August 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
With the seemingly unstoppable rise in popularity of Ableton Live as a production (as opposed to just performance) tool, it’s no surprise that many samples companies are releasing Live-pack versions of their libraries. The latest pack from Sample Logic, Acoustix, goes one step further and has been specifically programmed within Live, with a host of instruments and clips that use Live’s Rack format.
The download-only pack weighs in at 775MB (expanding to 1.7GB once uncompressed), and requires Suite 8, Live 8 or Live Intro in version 8.1.3 or above to work. The pack contains 200 instrument racks covering ambiences, impacts, kits and multi-sampled instruments and ensembles, with each one containing eight mapped macro controls for easy tweaking. There are also 63 tempo-sync’ed rhythmic loops in both audio and MIDI formats, plus 14 construction kits with multiple instruments and clip pre-loaded.
The main focus of the sounds is on cinematic grooves, ethnic melodic instruments and some excellent deep and twisted ambiences. There’s plenty of variety on offer, and, of course, by playing with the macro controls you can use Live’s effects to sculpt the sounds even further.
Having all the programming of a samples pack laid bare in your DAW is a massive bonus and hugely increases the flexibility of what you can do with the material. We hope to see more companies following suit in the future – maybe there’s an untapped market for special samples suites created using Logic, Cubase or Pro Tools’ built-in plug-ins. This high-quality toolkit will be of particular interest to composers of film scores and deep electronic music, but may be a little too clean-sounding for some dance producers.
Verdict Masses of cinematic sounds and grooves laid bare for instant tweaking in Live.
Rating: 8/10
Click here for more information on Acoustix
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