The second card isn't quite so arresting. Overall, Dreamwaves Volume 1 is very impressive, with imaginitive use of the mod wheel and attack velocity for variation. 'Lazy Faze', 'Soft Synth', 'Pulsar' and 'The Year 1975' may not be glamorous, but they're expressive and eminently useful. There's plenty in the way of polyphonic analogue emulation, an area in which the SR's factory presets are lacking a little. Other atmospherics of real note are 'Dream Time', 'Pluto', and one deliciously entitled 'Venus in Motion'. Anyway, it's easier to adjust a sound that's a tad bright than one that's too drab and dark - normally a tweak of the HF damp parameter in the reverb patch did the trick. I guess as a bid to make the cards' sound on a par with the brightness of contemporary synths it's understandable. The sound demonstrates a slightly shrill characteristic, in common with some of the other performances on the cards. Quite rightly, the first performance is 'Sensory Whorl', a wave‑sequence of cascading electric keys, panning and modulating, with a dark sawtooth pad underneath.
Dreamwaves by name, Dreamwaves by nature, this card is full of fantastic pseudo‑analogue pads, sweeps and atmospherics. Let's do this systematically and look at Volume 1 first.
So with this in mind I was more than a little interested to check out the fruits of someone else's labour (Paul Osborn, the sound designer), as demonstrated by these two sound cards. The oft‑touted analogy about editing an SR is that it's like wallpapering the hall through the letter box, which would be rather amusing if it wasn't so true (I've tried both, by way of comparison, and can report that the results of my wallpapering were marginally more consistent than the SR editing). Me? I'm a Wavestation SR owner, and I like the sounds enough to wish that I wasn't - the more inviting user interface of an A/D or keyboard version would be preferable. Considering that the Wavestation first emerged in 1990, it's aged remarkably gracefully and, relative to some of its contemporaries, still remains quite desirable.
0 kommentar(er)
