7th September 2010: Loop and Sound has released Eternity, a powerful virtual analogue synthesizer featuring 2 VCOs with about 140 waveforms each (Sine, Triangle, Sawtooth, Square plus 135 special wave forms). Each oscil…
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Loop and Sound releases Eternity VA Synth
Named for Curtis Roads, Curtis is an iPad and iPhone/iPod touch application that implements granular sound processing – a technique, imagined early on by the composer Xenakis, which divides sound into tiny granules, allowing more liquid modification of the audio. Roads brought this idea to digital synthesis, and the results can transform recorded samples in pitch and time.
Composer, producer, and sound designer Richard Devine has long made use of granular techniques in his own work, so it’s little surprise Richard is turning his sonic compositional efforts to the iPad app. The latest release includes a new sound set he designed, but he also writes CDM to point out a track he’s shared on SoundCloud, free to download and hear and for your remixing and re-compositional use.
The track is a composition of samples, and it shows just how much you can do with recorded audio:
This piece is a Acousmatic composition based on everyday found objects. I recorded various wine glasses, gears, metal, motors, Ratchets, chimes, croaking frog scraper, Indian bells, Tibetan Singing Bowls, Santoor, waterphone, piano, hematite magnets, processed voice, underwater ambiances, computer, and sprinkled bits of Buchla 200e/Doepfer Euro rack Modular.
All of the sounds originally captured at 24-bit 96khz with a Neumann RSM 191 A/S stereo shotgun mic, SMK4060 Stereo Matched 4060-BM Miniature Omnidirectional Microphones and Sound Devices 702 recorder.
Objects Of Granularity by RichardDevine
If you want to try out Curtis, you can do so on both iPad (pictured above) and iPhone:
Curtis for iPad
Curtis Heavy for iPhone
I love the geometric/vector-style twist on the wave display. New in the recent 1.1 release: pitch control, echo effect, volume control … and the all-important MP3 import. (Usually working with uncompressed files is more successful, however. With WAV or MP3 files, simply drag-and-drop files from iTunes.)
In other sound design experiments, Richard records an insect’s footsteps inside a box, recorded on a catch-and-release program, from earlier this summer.
Found a large Velvet Ant walking on my driveway today, and couldn’t help but notice the odd sounds this insect was making. The recording is of the insect crawling around inside a cardboard box, before I let it go back into my backyard. The Velvet Ant, also known as the “Cow Killer” is actually not an ant, but a wasp. I recorded this with 2 DPA 4060 Lav’s and Sound Devices 702 recorder at 24bit-96Khz.
Recording of a Velvet Ant. by RichardDevine
See the article here:
Sounds by Richard Devine, Granulation on iOS, and Footsteps of a Wasp
Trigger, from Slate Digital, is a drum replacement plug-in. You feed it multi-track drum parts into it and it will replace your recorded kit with whole new sounds or variations of. Nothing new here I hear you say! Well… it is the concept and design of this plugin which really makes it the only choice for all your drum re-triggering practices. Lets not forget that we live in a world where sometimes you maybe given something to mix and the drums are just not right and no matter how much processing you do to them is going to change that. The feel is right but the sound is just not acceptable…what do you do. Replace the drums. We all know it would cost a fortune to go back intuit he studio and re-record the drums and that is why we use programs such as Trigger.
In one instance of the plugin you can seamlessly trigger multiple samples simultaneously such as a close mic sample, stereo overhead sample, and a stereo room mic samples, or mix as many different drum samples to develop your own custom unique sounds. This multi-channel triggering functionality allows the user to easily recreate the sound of natural drums with real multi-tracked samples. Of course the fun does not stop there – each sample layer has a host of parameters allowing you to control velocity and dynamic control, attack, sustain, release and independent levels to suite your sound. This is really what mix engineers as myself have been waiting for. The other absolutely killer features include 2 detection modes, MIDI in/out, automation, up to 127 different articulations per instrument, velocity layers, and a unique “Leakage Suppression” function.
This is truly a next generation drum replacement VST/RTAS/AU plugin offering phase accurate multi layered triggering.
Control
The ‘Leakage suppression’ function is really the icing on the cake and really is the function I have been missing when working with multi-track drums. Obviously the problem with multi-track drums is the ‘bleed’ or ‘leak’ from one part of the drum kit into another parts microphone which can lead to some unwanted triggering. For example the kick drum may cause your snare drum to trigger a sample when ever it is hit and this can be tricky to get around. Listen to the following audio here of a snare track taken from a multi-tracked drum kit and notice how much kick drum, hi-hat and toms you can here on the track.
To get around this, Slate Digital have brought this unique ‘Leakage suppression’ functionality, whereby you can instruct the plug-in not to trigger certain leakages on any given drum track!
In the past I have had to do some complex filtering to notch out certain frequencies or use sidechain compression techniques to get a workable result. TRIGGER does it all for you. Setting this up is as easy as pie but does require another instance of TRIGGER to be activated on a stereo group or aux track which you must send it the drum track that you wish to replace routed to the LEFT channel of this new group track and send the track you wish to use as the suppressor to the RIGHT side of the Trigger group. Adjust the Suppression control in the upper left portion of the display and hey presto suppressing bleed from other drums without any filtering or crazy EQ!
Suppose we just want to replace just the snare and we don’t wish to use the suppression method as above, then no problem, as I mentioned above we are able to control the ‘Sensitivity’ (sets the engine’s sensitivity level), ‘Retrigger’ (sets the minimal interval between hits), ‘Detail’ (sets the level threshold below which the plugin will not trigger the signal) and ‘Input’ of any instance. The waveform display is truly fantastic for setting these controls exactly as you want them as you are able to see where to set the threshold precisely as well as using your ears. I had no problem setting these controls to get the sod I was looking for and I was able to get on with mixing the rest of the track in no time at all. Remember being a mix engineer means you are often working to a strict timescale so anything that can be used to increase the speed of your workflow is essential these days.
Listen to the same audio again with a new snare sample being triggered to hear how some unwanted hits will naturally occur.
Now hear it is using the above controls and all your unwanted triggering is now gone.
Ok so how does this all work when we are working with say 8 multi-track microphone tracks? Well, here is the sound of a drumkit I was given to start mixing on just as I was reviewing this product and consists of :
TRACK 1 – Kick In
TRACK 2 – Kick Out
TRACK 3 – Snare
TRACK 4 – Hi-Hat
TRACK 5 – Low Tom
TRACK 6 – Hi Tom
TRACK 7 – OH Left
TRACK 8 – OH Right
And it sounded like this:
Now these were by no means the worst drums I had the pleasure to work with but I knew the track need a little more power behind them and so I decided to replace the Kick IN, Kick Out, Snare and both Toms using Trigger. On an Aux track i loaded an instance of Trigger and sent the Snare track to the left hand side of this and the Kick Drum to the right hand side so that I was able to supress any Kick drum spill on the Snare track. I left the Hi-Hat and Overheads as they were but I had to make sure they stayed in phase by using Protools Timeadjuster (no need to on HD). The result sounded like this.
I am instantly a lot closer to the sound I am looking for in this mix and I have only just started playing around with only a few of the provided samples.
Installation & Added Library
At a mere 2.35GB, the install was extremely easy to do with 2.25GB of that being the accompanied high-quality industry standard 24 bit Steven Slate Drum samples which boasts: 45 snares, over 30 kicks (including 2 Deluxe kick drums) and 8 sets of toms (including 2 high-detailed Deluxe snares with adjustable overheads and 12 alternation hits per each velocity). All the samples in the Steven Slate packs are recorded to 2 inch tape and processed with the finest vintage and modern analog gear. Steven Slate Drums include three sample layers including stereo room mic samples from the famous NRG Recording in North Hollywood, California – basically they’re all fantastic quality and they are all labelled as below so you know which are close microphones or ambient.
TRIGGER EX is the slightly cut-down version of the TRIGGER Platinum and the library contains 10 snares, 9 kick drums and 3 sets of toms.
Make Your Own
With Trigger’s instrument maker, you can also create your own multi-velocity sample sets using your own drum recording or dig through your sample libraries. The instrument making tool is very simple to use – just load up 4 different samples and set the different velocity amounts and hit go and hey presto you have just made a multi-velocity sample set. Now just import this into Trigger and use it.
Here you can see I have 4 different snares loaded into the instrument mare – each one has slightly less reverb than the other so depending on where I set my velocity more or less reverb will appear in the mix. I tried this out using random drum samples too and I can see that this would be useful for more experimental approaches to mixing or even full music creation.
Alternatively you can use Trigger’s MIDI Out function to send MIDI to your favourite drum instrument such as BFD of BATTERY and use the samples from there! How great is that!?
Conclusion
When using Trigger, you will hear tight, phase accurate drum triggering without unwanted mis-triggers, flamming, or phasing. Kick samples line up tight with the original kick drums, snare drum transients align perfectly, and tom fills come out exactly like the original tracks. The level of control is just what we need these days as we work faster than ever. If you are a serious mix engineer who needs complete control over those tricky multitrack drums then this is the one for you and it is as simple as that. No fuss and no hassle, just great performance all round. Its also worth noting that Trigger comes with two detecting modes, LIVE and ACCURATE LIVE and I found the ACCURATE mode is the professional studio setting, which enables Trigger advanced engine to replicate the original drum track with the most precise detail and natural velocity response.
TRIGGER PLATINUM
System Requirements
Windows® XP (32/64 bit) / Vista® (32/64 bit), Windows 7® (32/64 bit), any Intel or AMD CPU with SSE2 support, 1GB RAM, 2.4 GB free disc space, iLok dongle.
Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, PowerPC G5 or any Intel CPU, 1 GB RAM, 2.4 GB free disc space, iLok dongle.
Price
Trigger Platinum $299.00 (€235.19)
Trigger EX $129.00 (€101.47)
…the only choice for all your drum re-triggering practices…
PROS
LOVE IT OR HATE IT
CONS
by Matthew Hodson
Matt is a sound engineer and musician, you can find him here
Excerpt from:
Slate Digital Trigger review. Replace your drums!
Finding samples and remix-able music — or advertising the availability of tracks you want to release for that purpose — has just gotten a lot easier. As part of a raft of improvements to the SoundCloud service – including some nice non-CC enhancements to search and tag browsing – the service has boosted integration with free licenses. You can now search for CC content, and the license is visible directly in the player, going beyond what even services like Flickr and Vimeo have done.
You can add SoundCloud to CC-focused sites like ccMixter as tools in your freely-licensed arsenal.
I spoke to the folks at SoundCloud about the changes, and about how they see Creative Commons fitting into a larger picture. Henrik Lenberg, Business Developer at SoundCloud responds.
CDM: Can you detail exactly what’s changed?
SC: As far as Creative Commons features are concerned, the biggest changes in this release have been the introduction of a CC landing and discovery page, prominent placement of license information on track players and pages, and advanced search by license type. The basic features before provided a really simple way to select a license, and these changes make it more straightforward to find and identify Creative Commons-licensed material on the site. SoundCloud is geared particularly towards audio creators, and this release should make it much simpler to find samples, sounds, and tracks that can be used for remixes, mashups, and other compositions.
What have been some of your favorite uses of CC so far on SoundCloud?
We’re just wrapping up a series of blog posts with some of our favorite CC users on the site, which can be seen at http://blog.soundcloud.com/tag/ccinterviews. You can see there we’re getting all kinds of music under CC licenses on SoundCloud, but also field recordings, audiobooks, and plenty of other sounds. As far as samples are concerned, we’ve got the OLPC Sample collection online, which is over 6000 CC-BY samples, as well as really interesting collections, like the Stretta Samples and Karmadrums who makes on-demand drum loops on real drums. We’ve also got all kinds of sample-making companies, including Twisted Tools and Sample Magic.
How do you hope the new functionality might be used? What do you think might come out of it artistically?
I’m sure that some of the uses will surprise even us, but I’m expecting to see the same kind of outpouring of creativity that has accompanied Creative Commons licenses on other platforms. I hope there’s an uptick in remixes of CC licensed material on the site, and I imagine that video creators, podcasters, independent video game makers, and other people who need to find music for their works will begin to discover SoundCloud as a resource.
With more Music Hack Days coming up, what does this release mean for the developer community?
We’ve included Creative Commons filtering in our API so now you can build apps that let you find and use CC content in various ways. For example, one thing we expect to see is the possibility to search and browse samples and sound effects within your favorite sequencer or audio editor, then preview the results and drag and drop the sounds you prefer right into your arrangement. We believe that bringing tools and content closer together really can change how audio is shared and reused, and Creative Commons is an important piece of getting this puzzle together. We’re big music hack day fans, and glad to offer developers an easy-to-use resource for any type of CC content.
We hear regularly from the Creative Commons organization about how they perceive the business potential of artists, and why it isn’t simply creators giving their work away for free with no reciprocal benefit. We also hear from naysayers who, very often, seem to have little understanding or experience of CC. Coming at this from the perspective of a third party, what do you think the value might be for independent artists?
Well, first off, it’s absolutely true that Creative Commons licenses aren’t for every artist, and they’re not a magic bullet to finding a business model or getting your music heard. But it’s also important to note that every CC license requires at least attribution to the original artist. While there are certainly some artists who have the problem of too many fans trying to listen to their music free, many more are grappling with the issue of getting their name out there, and all of the CC licenses make sure that if your material is being used you’re still getting credit.
Ultimately, there are a lot of musicians and other artists who actually want to allow people to copy music for their friends, or to sample it or remix it, or use it in an independent film or game. Creative Commons is just about letting artists and users make that agreement in a simple and straightforward way, by granting permission in advance, and reserving the rights that artists do want to hold on to. Again, not everybody sees things the same way, and we’re not trying to make everybody use one license or another. For users who do want to use these, we’re simply giving them the freedom to do so.
What about labels, who have tended (with the exception of the various netlabels who focus on CC) not to use the technology? Is there a place to demonstrate some use to that crowd?
There may be a way to convince labels to use Creative Commons, but it’s not really something we’re focusing on at SoundCloud. Netlabels using CC have gotten increasingly popular, and there are many very high-quality ones on SoundCloud now. There have also been a few high-profile artists who have broken from their labels in order to pursue alternate distribution methods, including releasing under Creative Commons licenses, but those are still a bit rare. Maybe as more examples pop up of artists releasing profitable CC-licensed music, that will convince the major labels to experiment a bit more. We’re not here to push one business model or another, but if it ends up being something they want to explore, we’re ready for them with the features!
If you’re ready to check out SoundCloud’s Creative Commons implementation, have a look here:
http://soundcloud.com/creativecommons/samples
Find, Remix and Reuse – SoundCloud Style [SoundCloud blog]
Read this article:
Free SoundCloud Sampling with Creative Commons Search, Player; Q+A
19th August 2010: Sound Magic has announced the release of Blue Grand3D, a new piano VST instrument plug-in for Windows that Sound Magic says “achieves an entirely new level of realism and playability”. It’s available…
Here is the original post:
Sound Magic releases Blue Grand3D and announces Group Buy for Supreme Pianos
The WeatherKing Ambassador has been the industry-standard drum head ever since the plastic head was established in 1957. For toms this is true today, although some drummers employ a reinforced snare batter and a partially dampened bass drum batter.
Drummers keep hitting harder and Remo has previously responded with the Emperor X, Powerstroke-X and Black Suede Emperor, which was, according to Remo, “A response to rock and metal players looking for a little warmer sounding head that still had the resonance, projection and durability Remo is known for.” All this has led logically to the Ambassador-X.
The coated Ambassador-X is a single-ply head, like the original Ambassador, but at 12-mil is 20 percent thicker than the standard Ambassador’s 10-mil (1,000 gauge) – 0.012″ as opposed to 0.01″. It’s a subtle increase, but the white coat looks denser and creamier than the standard Ambassador.
Otherwise the head is identical in build with the same top quality Mylar exclusively supplied by DuPont. Sizes are limited to 8″ through to 18″ with no bass drums, but perhaps that is not surprising since even standard Ambassador bass drum heads are uncommon these days.
We’ve always been Ambassador fans. They sound great when they’re fresh and also worn in and starting to stretch, when you get more of the ‘blam’ factor.
The new Ambassador-Xs retain these qualities with that familiar, open, generous tone. But there’s a little more attack, warmth and richness to the sound.
Tuned high you get a timpani-like ping with a full note and defined pitch. Tuned lower you get a fat tone with lots of ‘thwack’ followed by good sustain, particularly on the bigger drums.
When we first played the 16″ floor tom it resonated forever and we had to de-tune a lug to control it. There’s certainly no shortage of sustain.
Many drummers who use normal Ambassadors on their toms require something tougher on their snare and resort to, for example, a CS batter. The Ambassador-X is that bit harder-wearing, prompting its use as a snare batter too. Rim shots ping out; ghost notes are clean and crisp.
Using standard Ambassadors for the resonant tom heads feels entirely natural and we used a medium tuning, getting the best balance of sustain, tone and response.
We tested these heads at a weekend charity festival where they were played outdoors in the open air. This is always a severe test since the sound can be cold and dissipate quickly, but the full-toned A-Xs performed as we hoped.
Evans beat Remo to market with a 12-mil head, the G-Plus, which we loved. We’re equally impressed by the Ambassador-X. You get the industry standard single ply head – the all-time proven all-rounder – with extra strength, durability and warmth.
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See the rest here:
Remo Ambassador-X Heads
17th August 2010: Variety Of Sound has updated BootEQ to version 2.1. Changes: Support for higher samplerates. Faster loading times on systems with large amounts of system fonts. VST vendor tag changed to “Variety …
Go here to see the original:
Variety Of Sound updates BootEQ to v2.1
The iPad may be the catalyst, but look beyond the platform, and you’ll see a reinvigorated examination of how to think about musical interfaces. If you’re looking to relax and make some musical noises on your iPad, check out the videos above. It isn’t actually necessary to fully understand the design work behind the interface to play and make music. But if you are interested in reflecting on the way design issues impact musical expression, and you’re a bit of a music theory nerd, read on.
Using an array of rectangles arranged in a harmonically useful way, and color coding for pitch, SoundPrism is a glimpse of a more graphical future for music software design. (Nor is this necessarily limited to the iPad in the long term – in addition to Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.10 is getting official multitouch support, which I think both validates Apple’s work and suggests we’ll see more platforms for this kind of interface.)
And, bonus, it all demonstrates why arranging pitch by the Circle of Thirds can be ideal. I got a chance to talk to the developers of SoundPrism about the thinking behind the software.
We will get a mention of Jean-Philippe Rameau. I just hope it doesn’t start a debate between Rameau and Lully fanboys again.
Sebastian Dittman, CEO of developer Audanika, talks to us about the software.
CDM: What’s your background as a developer / musician?
Sebastian: I wouldn’t call myself developer although I’ve been working in IT and digital media creation/marketing before. I come from a very-music oriented family – both parents opera singers, so I had to learn to play the piano, but can’t play it very well.
I met Gabriel Gatzsche – the inventor of the technology SoundPrism is based upon – during a colloqium for music in digital games at the Fraunhofer Institue for Digital Media Technology when he was showcasing an earlier prototype of it back then. His demo of 5 minutes taught me more about harmonic theory than years of piano lessons before. That was 10 months ago and he is now the CTO of our company that we decided to found.
Can you talk about what inspired the pitch layout on SoundPrism?
The idea for SoundPrism is quite old actually. About 22 years ago Gabriel’s father found that organizing tones of keys in a circle of thirds makes it very easy to understand basic harmonic theory because the visualization ‘just makes sense’. Back then he taught it to his two sons, Gabriel and David, and from then on they passed all music school theory exams with flying colors. He tried to convince their teachers that this method was far better for teaching children but they didn’t listen to him at all.
David studied music to be a guitar/music teacher, writing his final thesis about the didactic concept of SoundPrism. Gabriel studied media technology and wrote his dissertation about it and came up with software that made it possible to not just use the theory to explain music but also to play music with an interface that is set up like the theory.
During his dissertation he found out that lots of other scientists came up with similar concepts. He quoted them in his thank you note to the team when we submitted SoundPrism to Apple: Jean-Philippe Rameau, Leonard Euler, Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch, Hugo Riemann, Moritz Hauptmann, Fred Lehrdahl, Carol Krumhansl and Werner Pöhlert just to name a few.
The reason we are able to actually use these concepts now is that we finally have interfaces that can change visually and aren’t static. I see SoundPrism as knowledge poured into a dynamic interface that enables users to just use that knowledge without having to acquire it first.
Could you describe – for people comfortable with music theory – how it’s laid out and why?
SoundPrism is based on Hauptman’s array of thirds in its vertical dimension and horizontally on a pitch class/pitch height model by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch. We found the combination of these concepts allows musical interfaces which enable the player to control both harmony and melody at the same time in an optimal way.
This is just the very first version in the first configuration on the iPad though. There have been prototypes using Space Navigator technology, a WiiMote, Jazzmutant Lemur and also multi user augmented reality installations with camera based motion tracking.
You’d have to talk with Gabriel about this since there’s a lot more to it. The interface right now is tailored for tablets like the iPad. We’ve evaluated other representations with field tests and the current form lets users express themselves freely while at the same time guiding them gently to ‘do the right thing’ from a harmonic standpoint.
Gabriel alone has spent 5 years of his dissertation working on the concepts and there’s lots of music psychology and other really complicated concepts involved in it that I’m not the right person to explain.
Ed.: I wanted to go ahead and get this out there, but if you’re interested, readers, I’m happy to pursue.
Have you considered providing control data to other applications (i.e., routing over WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. to a computer for people wanting to use this as a controller)?
Yes. 
Obviously, at this point, you’re just waiting on Apple approval, but any plans generally for the future?
SoundPrism is really just the beginning. We think we roughly know what musicians want because our team consists of musicians. At the same time we already have other prototypes and ideas that do very neat stuff beyond the scope of the current implementation of SoundPrism for the iPad.
But we hope for lots of constructive feedback from all over the world so we can add the features people want that we haven’t though of yet. I have to say I’m a bit nervous because I didn’t think SoundPrism 1.0 would get that much attention already before we’re live.
One of our dreams is to establish the SoundPrism technology as a widely used tool. Not just for musicians but also as a door to the world of creating music for people who don’t think they can play an instrument.
What will pricing be?
SoundPrism will be at around 4 US$ initially. That might change later on and we’re also planning to include an InApp store for people to add more features, sounds and other really neat stuff.
Follow CDM on Twitter and I’ll post when the app is up.
In the meantime, here’s one more video. I love the way this sounds, here paired with a Korg ElecTribe in what appears to be a really practical live music rig:
Continue reading here:
SoundPrism – Colorful, Playable iPad App – and Organizing Tones and Harmony Visually
16th August 2010: We are very pleased to announce that SoundToys has offered the SoundToys Native Effects bundle (a $495 value) as a new prize addition to our KVR Audio 10 Celebration! Rhythmic. Creative. Inspiring….
More here:
New Prized Added to KVR 10 Celebration: SoundToys Native Effects Bundle
What we have here will be familiar to anyone with experience of the classy range of pedals made by Danish effects firm T-Rex. However, while the name may be the same, this is a brand new pedal.
The Room-Mate is an updated version of the valve-driven reverb pedal that has been around for a few years. Combining old and new technology with its valve and digitally generated reverb, the latest incarnation of the Room- Mate offers four different reverb types chosen with a mode knob.
New to this revised model is a spring reverb emulation, replacing the emulated plate reverb in previous incarnations. You also get room reverb, hall reverb and a setting called LFO that dishes up reverb and chorus together.
“The Room-Mate serves up smooth reverb that wraps around your sound.”
Also new is a decay knob, which adjusts the length of the reverb tail in all four modes. The other two large knobs on the front panel are the mix knob, which sets the ratio of effected to dry sound, and the level knob, which controls the overall output level.
The input to the pedal is controlled by a much smaller knob, a set-and-forget affair that you can adjust to your particular signal chain. As a prompt to set the level correctly, the pedal’s green on/off LED will turn red if the input signal is too high and likely to cause distortion. Another small knob offers reduction of the high frequencies in the reverb tail.
With a valve to be powered, the Room-Mate needs a 12V DC supply and comes with a suitable adaptor. As well as the standard single input and output the pedal also offers mono in/stereo out operation.
The Room-Mate serves up smooth reverb that wraps naturally around your sound, whether you just dial in a touch of ambience with the mix knob or turn it up for a more obvious effect – juxtaposing that knob’s position with that of the decay knob allows plenty of leeway in just how ‘reverbed’ you want your sound to be.
A crucial factor in any reverb is how the top-end dies off and the hi-cut control plays its part here in creating a smoother, less splashy sound, although it is subtle and perhaps doesn’t go far enough.
The room and hall modes can create the sense of space their name suggests (although high decay settings on the hall can sound weird), while the LFO mode is a gorgeous hybrid of chorus and reverb that sounds really lush, especially in stereo.
What about the new spring mode? Well, it does a pretty good job of emulating the real thing – in a side-by-side test with a couple of Fender amp reverbs and a Peavey Valverb rackmount valve-powered spring reverb unit, the T-Rex stands up well and is as close as we’ve heard thus far from a digital stompbox.
Reverb pedals may not be seen as an essential item for some, but they’re extremely useful, not just for creating specific effects but also for tailoring the sound to suit the acoustics of a particular playing space, and the Room-Mate is probably as good sounding and versatile a pedal as you’d find for the role.
What’s more, with its new spring emulation, players who regularly utilise the built-in spring reverb in their Fender amp will find it a pragmatic substitute for those occasions where, through space restrictions or the like, they are faced with the prospect of playing through an unfamiliar non-reverb amp at a gig.
So then an excellent pedal with loads to recommend, albeit with a high price tag.
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T-Rex Room-Mate