Product ReviewsMultimedia software
When sample gurus EastWest first announced Fab Four, the promise of a Beatles-inspired sample library recorded on vintage instruments, played by ex-Wings personnel, routed through authentic period EMI valve mixing desks and outboard gear, engineered by a veteran of five Beatles albums, Ken Scott, and carefully assembled at the historic Cello Studios in Los Angeles, we were very excited. And when someone has apparently spent more than a million dollars creating a sample library as a labour of love, it's not unreasonable to expect superlative results. Disappointingly, while the finished product is good - very good in places - it's not great overall. The problem is simply that some sounds lend themselves well to virtual instruments and other's don't, regardless of the vintage nature of the equipment used or the amount of money spent recording them. Thus, all the drums in Fab Four sound great, with up to 16 velocity layers and alternate sounds per hit for ultra-realistic variation; most of the keyboards are pretty good, and impossibly rare, in some cases; and all three of the bass sounds are fine. Unfortunately, the guitars are a little underwhelming, as stilted as sampled guitars inevitably are, even once you master the art of switching between the available articulations while playing. It's an immutable law of recording: if you want a great guitar performance, play a guitar. A Midi keyboard just isn't the same, no matter
This is a shame, because the instruments captured for this library are the real deal, and include period classics from the likes of Rickenbacker, Gretsch, Epiphone and Martin. Likewise, the bass sounds (generally more usable than the guitars) were recorded using Hofners and Rickenbackers - McCartney's early and late-period stalwarts respectively. However, this is not to suggest that any of the sounds included in Fab Four are redundant. For example, they work perfectly well when used as layers behind real-world recordings to flesh out the tone. Likewise, the audio-to-Midi features of a program like Celemony's Melodyne can be exploited to extract the feel of a real performance, which can then be used to trigger a Fab Four instrument. Furthermore, once you start combining Fab Four sounds - backwards guitars, sitars, a Ludwig drum kit - the whole trip takes on a suitably groovy retro vibe. It's hard not to like a program featuring presets with titles like 'Baby I'm a Clavioline', 'Bass Tripper' and 'Day In The Drums'. The knobs of the Vox Amp-styled interface also extend the usability of the stock sounds. There are controls for stereo spread, delay and a neat software implementation of ADT, the automatic double-tracking Abbey Road innovation enthusiastically embraced by The Beatles. There's also an envelope section with the typical AHDSR controls, capable of transforming, say, an acoustic guitar sample into something other-worldly. Convolution reverb is also part of Play, but the CPU tax is so high that it remained a wistful dream for most of our testing - switching it on invariably caused everything to grind to a halt. Like most people, we wanted Fab Four to please, please us and on the whole, we dig it. The guitar sounds aren't great, the total number of instruments is shorter than you might expect and the CPU hit of the reverb was shocking, but once you go beyond the stock sounds and start experimenting, Fab Four yields impressive, pleasingly evocative results. By Jonathan Wilson
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