It's ****ing brilliant. The sequencer is unbelievable - better and more versatile even than the machinedrum, but it has a similar feel to it - i'm actually thinking i may not need the machinedrum anymore.Originally Posted by auditory hallucinations
The synth side of things is pretty nice, but i haven't really played with it much yet - it sounds very nice though - i'm thinking it's more suited to lead sort of stuff rather than basslines - but i really haven't played with it enough yet to know. I've really just been using it for drum sounds, percussion and stabs etc (but i use the terms drum and percussion loosely). You can add your own wav or aif sounds as well - for the percussion and digital synth parts.
The fixed filterbank is probably it's standout feature for me at the moment - i've never seen anything quite like it - 8 parallel bandpasses fed thru amps so you can limit or emphasize whatever frequencies you want to all controllable via the sequencer. And EVERYTHING is controllable real time and individually - you can switch the patterns/sounds/riffs however and whenever you want - anything that you've got in the machine be it a pattern, a sound, a riff can be used and any time and in any combination. i.e. you can decide you want the kick pattern from your 5th song with the hihat sound from your 10th song and play it in the middle of your 3rd song on a whim and do it live while everything is going.
The most encouraging thing is that radikal really know what they are doing - they designed the hardware so the possibilities are really open ended and they are releasing new firmware upgrades with drastic new features every month or two according to what users request on the spectralis forum...
all pretty exciting really...
machina