Here’s a preview of the Nord Wave – Vintage Digitals Vol1, by Don Solaris.
Here’s what he has to say about the sound library:
Instead of going for the factory presets of various machines and sampling those, we went one step further. We went for the original ROM waveforms. And more importantly, their original loop points. The goal was high – to ensure 100% authentic sound. No cross-fade looping techniques here, everyone can do that nowadays and did we mention it totally kills the soul of the sample (due to the x-fade process itself).
Hence we used totally different approach and you bet these loops in here required a lot of screwdriver work to match original factory loop points. But the result is 1:1 original playback where you can no longer distinguish a copy from the source.
This Nord Wave library is 99 multisamples made from the following machines:
- Roland U-20
- Roland JD-990
- Roland JV-1080
- Yamaha SY-22
- Yamaha SY-85
- Yamaha TX16W
- Ensoniq SQ-1
- Kawai K-1 rII
The video above is part 1 of the sound library demo; part 2 is below:
Nord Wave – Vintage Digitals is available the 39 Euro at the Don Solaris site.
These are lost on me?
ehhhh considering that he is just copying the original waveforms and then selling it, it seems a bit awkward to pay for it. a VA engine and company relies a lot on that to get their sound, and this just abuses that.
pass 🙁
expensive joke
factor in labor, quality, time and access to the machines. but yeah, if you can do it yourself, then don’t buy.
I can’t believe people buys expensive synths then need help getting sounds out of them.
Seems rather weird, Why not buy an Akai sampler, half the price , ten times the specifications.
Loads of outputs, effects and editting.
Wow sounds excellent, great work. My Nord Wave is happy.
The Nord Wave is a nice synth with a sample-playback section, not some evil upstart who robbed your granny. The sampled synths are out of production by miles and its the raw waves only. That’s very much in line what many others do to feed the demand for “vintage” sounds. You have to have a certain mindset to use the Wave, because its a power synth, not a workstation. The internal sample memory is not huge, so you have to personalize a bit more than usual, but that’s how you get it to speak well. Its a good set to have and a fair price for hours of programming work. Trimming samples can be maddening, but with a few sets like this, you won’t need to dabble in it much. Nord’s free, downloadable library is very respectable. Now all I need is the money for a Nord! 😛
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may08/articles/clavianordwave.htm
@Joe Momma: I agree. It’s “abuse”. You’re free to go the other route to get access to these classic waveforms. And that is – to buy: U-20, JD-990, JV-1080, SY-22, SY-85, TX16W, SQ-1, K-1 rII, Prophet VS, Akai S3000, E-MU Emulator IIIXP and E4. To cut long story short: I wish you good luck getting all these waveforms for a total of -39,00.
@Acid Boy: I have Akai S1100 and S3000XL but I’m not sure i understand what you’re saying. The point of this library is to give Nord owners simple and cheap access to 99 classic waveforms from the 80’s/90’s without then spending all the money on these synths. Not to mention sampling them and then looping 900 waveforms manually one by one.
@Fungo McGurk: Yes, unfortunately they are expensive. But boy do they sound good! I got so addicted now i want Lead 2X. Kinda pity Wave was discontinued. Mine was actually last in the store (got it last summer). Beware: presets are horrid!!
I used to own a few of those older digital synths. I think you did one hell of an excellent job with this library. Too bad the Wave was discontinued together with the Nord Modular which I feel were their most interesting instruments.
Unfortunately, I do not own a Wave… BUT if you ever decide to “teleport” this library to NI’s Kontakt, then you have me in!
Negative comments are pointless unless they are constructive so I would not bother with those frustrated people. Thumbs up for your work!
And yes, when a person works hard on something, they should get paid for it (music, sounds, VST synths, photography, video, art), a fact more and more people seem to forget today.
Cheers,
Loic
The zoo of Nord keyboards confuses me. Can you use these waves with the Stage, Electro, or Piano keyboards?
Yes, the Stage and Electro will also accept samples from their library and use the same editor the Wave does. You kind of need the editor because the onboard sample RAM is underpowered, so some swapping in and out is required, but it works all the same. I don’t think the asking price for the set is too high. When I drop $59 on a new Alchemy library, I get the useful base set and the starting point for a second one. Its an investment you build on brick by brick. A patch set is not much different from a new pedal or adaptor cables.
The sounds your advertising without being to opinionated , sound pretty crap and I would be surprised they have any place in any interesting music, maybe prove us all wrong by letting us know how many you sell.
If someone has such a keyboard and they can’t get decent sounds out of them , then that is comical .Should they really be spending that much if they can’t ‘synthesize’ something good.
@ Acid Boy: hummm… let me guess, you just turned 20. Your mom and dad bought you some DJ software; you use Magic Music Maker Hip Hop and House… any music written before the year 2000 is unknown territory to your senses. I bet you produce tracks restricted to one particular style of electronic music and any elements that are foreign to that, suck in your opinion.
I usually would refrain from commenting on negative statements but here, I feel something must be said about such ignorance. Your comment shows you missed the point… and the sad thing, there are too many close-mined musicians like yourself out there.
Creativity in my opinion is about learning as much as possible about the type of art (in this case, music) you wish to produce.
That is a great response to Acid Boy…brilliant! Hey, I think Mr. Solaris’ work is excellent. The examples were inspiring to me. While I am probably not a potential customer of this product I really do appreciate the time and work involved in producing this collection.
Acid Boy the only crappy thing i see here are your comments. Please go troll some other place. Thanks!
I like what Mr. Solaris has done- you should all be thanking him! What’s wrong with you people?
This sounds digital to me. And digital isn’t as good as analogue.
Did I ever tell you how every individual analogue synth sounds slightly different from the next? But not like one is better than the other, they are all magical in their own special way. Almost as if the sound has been sprinkled with pixie dust…
well, I thought it was funny.
Those are DIGITAL synths! … nothing analogue here. That is the point of this library.
Exactly my point, they sound thin and digital. I’m not sure why these couldn’t have been done using analogue circuitry.
Because they’re complex waveforms, and you can’t just whip up a circuit to generate sounds like these. It’s hard enough to build a circuit that gives you a stable, tunable sawtooth wave, let alone something as complex as one of the samples from this pack.
I know. It was a joke.
Trolling? Or the emperors new clothes.Is it bad for business that someone buying a 1500 quid synthesizer can’t make their own sounds on it!!
Sounds comical, you buy a synth to synthesize .
the sy85 “mellow” sound is one of my favourite sounds of all time. tg500 has it too! i love it.
Don Solaris is wicked! If i had a nord wave i would totally get this.
j
0=0
You can’t sample digital synths/wavetables. this guy just opened himself up to dozens of lawsuits. I implore the Synthtopia mods to make Don aware of this.
Who says you can’t sample digital synths? There are dozens of sample libraries on the market with sampled digital synths.
I think you’re right. He specifically says that he did sample the original waveforms – and they’re the ones that are copyrighted (the ROM).
For instance UVI have been doing this for a long while, but they don’t sample the original waveforms, they sample new patches created on the original synths (to my knowledge).
Other than that – sounds good!
Only illegal thing would be to digitally copy the ROM content by reading the chip and getting the binary data out. Bottom line: This is just another sample set, nothing different from the others on the market. There is no rule that says a patch needs to have envelopes and effects applied before it can be sampled.
If you don’t “get” these sounds you are probably too young to appreciate them. Just like analog is all of the rage today there was a time when analog was out of fashion. Now, these sounds will come back into fashion since they are old enough, misses, and are classics to people who started making electronic music when these machines were new (’87-’96), right around the time when people were thinking analog sounded crapy and lame. Things have come full circle again. And yes, you can just sample (808’s anyone?)
Again, if you don’t “get” these sounds you are just out of the loop, not in the club, not nostalgic for late 80’s/early 90’s digital synths. But don’t hate, just accept. It’s kind of like some Hammond B3 rocker guy who’s prime was in the late 60’s dissing the TB-303 since it does not sound like a real bass guitar and the TR-808 since it sounds like the rhythm accompaniment in a church organ. He is out of the loop, see how that works?
If only Lead 4 could download samples.
It is a vain and artificial limitation for keeping 2 product lines separate…especially as Clavia is so small company, that it can rarely make a synth, as well as have strength to support it(well, Clavia does remarkable work in supporting their synths…usually. Of course some exaggeratedly bitter Modular owners whine for ever and ever).
And arpeggiator should be programmable.
I think that the work made to get these dones alone is worth the money. I got a Nord Stage 2, whose synth engine is akin to the Wave, and I see the value in these samples, its like some other VAs who have oscillator waves “emulating” other synths.
@Don if you are reading this, how much does the average sample weigh? In comparison to the NW with 180Mb for user samples and 99 locations, the NS2 has 380 Megabytes of sample memory, up to 999 Sample Instruments. So you could say us Stage users have even more room for more samples!! But at the same time I do not want to sacrifice other important samples I use.
@Gustavo: There was total of 215 MB of sample data and around 900 samples. Let’s see: 215 / 900 = 0.2388 x 1024 = 244 kB per sampled key. Each multisample consisted of 9 samples so that’s 244 x 9 = 2218 kB or 2.16MB uncompressed. But we need to add compression ratio which at 16bit/mono was around 50% (sometimes even better), so this gives us around 1MB per multisample. Hope this helps!
Any chance of him making these available for ableton’s sampler?