EXS24 MkII new features, first reaction
2002-11-24 by Eric Baird
Yaay! We got crossfading! Cool! So now we can have really expressive string patches with just two (velocity cross-faded) layers, or we can have layered mute, picked, stroked, plucked and slapped guitar layers and use a controller to adjust playing style independently of velocity, etc etc. Niice! In fact about the only cool expression thing I don't see is any sort of obvious "randomised" modulation source anywhere ... it would be nice sometimes to give each note of a chord its own randomised pan position, or have a repetitive sequencer line jumping about the stereo field, or having the filter position changing on every note, or have a random mix of two or more hihat samples playing on each strike independently of velocity, to give a bit of automatic variation independent of playing technique. But there /is/ a nice pitch-randomise function for humanising sounds, and that should go a long way towards making repeated sampled drums sound less robotic, which is cool. But I don't want to nit-pick, the controllable fadeable layering is an extremely nice thing to have, I look forward to fidding with those new crossfade parameters on some of the cross-switched patches I've already got, and once Wizzoo et al have got together some nice new multipatches that use the feature, I expect to be buying some more (a brief think: if they ever bring out a further revision, some sort of text field display would be nice, so that patch authors can add copyright info and playing tips to a patch). And they also seem to have listened to users and put +/- buttons into the screen (perhaps these should exist up on the general-purpose button bar, and be available for all emagic instruments, but whatever). All in all, quite chuffed. Cheers! <beams> =Erk=