![]() Most of these erratic/chaotic behaviours aren't perhaps the most musical for classic styles of composition and alike, but if you're into free-jazz, ethnic or avant-garde style and anything similar, and especially if you're into some of the "Tradimoderne" afro-beat styles that sometimes include ethnic (and more or less achromatic) instruments, in where then, a brass section that behaves with a certain, unpredictable misrepresentation of chords and harmonies, but still at a controlled degree can be desired. Watch the CPU meter, though.īeing the only brass emulation based on pure acoustic modeling (with GSI Miles'tone, AFAIK), it is the only one that potentially emulates some behaviour of real instruments that even the WIVI brass collection or the famous (and beautiful) sample modeling brass and wind collection (this being inherent of both their hybrid synthesis techniques), won't be able to offer, so far. Even if you're not a fan, the great thing about Brass is that it does inspire you to find an excuse to use the sounds of these instruments where perhaps you wouldn't have done before.Įven if you're not a big fan of brass instruments, you can't fail to be impressed by Arturia's new offering, which hails a new era in the physical modelling of real instruments. Of course, your interest in reading this review is likely to be entirely proportionate to your love of brass instruments and your desire or need to use them in your music. Instead, you have to work primarily with Brass 's riff sequencer and then use the sequencer's MIDI or instrument tracks to trigger the riffs at appropriate points in the song. This rather goes against what I think would be many people's preferred way of working, which would be to run one instance of Brass for each instrument required and then do all the programming from within the host sequencer. The manual does warn you about this in its slightly obscure way, advising that it's better to run Brass in Riff mode if you want to employ an ensemble of brass instruments, rather than trying to run several instances of Brass in Live mode. This manifested itself in the rather too frequent glitching of audio, and there was a very noticeable time lag between the clicking of buttons and the required function happening. Indeed, Brass 's built-in CPU meter never seemed to drop much below 40 percent when playing one instrument at a time, and averaged around 60 percent when using ensembles in Riff mode. Even when running Brass as a stand-alone application, it wasn't long before the cooling fans were running at Warp Factor 5, a sure sign that the processor is under heavy continuous load. But right from the off, the program left my 1.8GHz G5 iMac huffing and puffing. The minimum spec for running Brass on a Mac is quoted as a 1.5GHz G4 (for a PC, a 1.5GHz chip is also quoted as the minimum). While everything in the garden might seem lovely and brassy, I need to sound the first of several sour notes and highlight just how very processor intensive all this activity is. Even so, they are still a cut above your usual lifeless synth or sample-based brass patches. By comparison, the saxophones seemed to be lacking in credibility and in sheer brassy presence. My initial impressions were that the trumpets are uncannily realistic and that the trombones were pretty good, and though less 'realistic', were certainly interesting as virtual instruments in their own right. Running through the presets is also a good way of getting a sense of the range that Brass is capable of. The trumpet, for example, comes in 30 flavours and with names like 'Classical section', 'Classical soloist', 'Jazz soloist', 'Latin lead' and so on, you get the idea of the kind of general sound each of them is intended to represent. ![]() With each of these instruments you get a number of presets to choose from. In Live mode, you can only play one instrument at a time: three main types are offered in the left-hand menu, and a natty spinning graphic of the currently selected one appears in the main window. But as you never quite know just how much earth, wind and fire goes into tweaking product demos, I was looking forward to giving these horns a blast in the comfort of my own studio. ![]() Particularly as the impressive audio demos on the Arturia web site (indicated that the company were not just blowing a load of hot air. So it was with great anticipation that I listened for the postie's tread on my front path as he brought me Brass in its box.
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