benefit from a superlative analog sound. While this library would certainly complement a progressive rock style or a latter day Wakeman style, I’d hesitate to suggest that it should be associated with a specific musical genre. Any style requiring a highly musical sound (as opposed to synth special effects) could find a use for Memories. Let’s look in more detail at the library's composition. At the base level are WAV files. These are mono recordings made at 48kHz. Of the 6202 total files, totaling over 2GB in size, approximately 300 are synth drum samples. The rest are pitched musical tones. A good number of the pitched sounds are single shot (nonlooped) and the rest are looped for continuous play. The files belonging to sample sets are sampled every third semitone, typically starting around MIDI note 21 or 24 and ending between MIDI note 96 and 108. Above the wave files, we have sfz files that organize the multitude of wave files. Of these we have the following numbers by category: • • • • • • •
Brass – 18 Basses – 19 Drums – 68 Keyboards - 6 Leads – 72 Pads – 21 Plucks – 55
• Strings – 22 • Sweeps - 10 The sounds fit the categories well enough, although, as usual, the line between lead and keyboard or between strings and pads can be pretty nebulous. But just visit the aforementioned demo web page to listen to the sounds and you’ll get a good idea of the range of sounds Memories offers. Of the drums, most the SFZ files reference a single sound, but there are a few kits. That’s the last I’ll be talking about them simply because I’m not qualified to comment on their quality, or anything else having to do with drums for that matter. Except for the Pluck category, nearly all sample sets offer looped sounds. The single shot sounds typically have durations of one to two thirds of a second. I noticed no sample sets where the tuning was other than dead on nor the consistency of the multisamples was anything but seamless across the full keyboard range. Above the level of sfz files, we have synth-specific presets. There are banks for Alchemy, Rapture and Dimension Pro. Although I have all three of these instruments, I did not bother to evaluate the Dimension Pro presets under the assumption they’d be quite similar to those for Rapture. September 2011
Some generalizations are in order about all of these synth-specific libraries. For one thing, the majority of presets are thoughtfully offered in two versions: one employing delays and/or reverb effects and those in which those effects are not present. There are a smattering of layers and split presets, but I get the feeling these are present more as an illustration of what can be done, so that the Memories owner will be inspired to roll their own. In fact, the layer presets in Alchemy are mostly different from those offered for Rapture, although there’s technically no reason they could not have been identical. Rapture has one three layer preset called “Still I Miss You” consisting of sounds “LD Technox”, “PD Melody” and “ST Memory Pad”, all at about the same volume setting. This one is absolutely captivating. Alchemy owners, you’re heartily encouraged to recreate it. Back to more generalizations, we can observe that many of the Lead type presets are monophonic, but that’s done at the synth preset level. The underlying SFZ files are polyphonic, so any LD type sound can be used either way. Finally, the amplitude envelopes are pretty generic and there’s normally little filtering at the synth level, this being already accomplished in the source sound.
www.WusikSoundMagazine.com
21