Review of MOTU's Ethno Instrument
by Tweak
Our
world is shrinking. In terms of our
connection in cyberspace, access to other cultures is almost immediate. In terms of our virtual
studios, you can now have almost any musical instrument in your compositions.
The MOTU Ethno instrument brings many worldly colors to your art. MOTU
put together a powerful and inspiring collection for you all in one simple
plugin interface. Its a great GUI. Note the little globe in the
pic. It actually spins to the region of the world the instrument you
selected comes from. It also can display a picture of the instrument, so
you know what it is.
You get 4 GB of instrument samples, all in
preset form. You also get 4GB of loops and phrases that are tempo locked
to your host software. (you can play them at their original length too
for better quality). Typically the phrases and loops are triggered by playing one
note in your midi sequencer. However, both can be "drag 'n dropped" onto
MIDI or audio tracks in your sequencer. Power users will appreciate
that some of the phrases can be drag n dropped as a MIDI track and edited on
your sequencer's grids. Likewise, some of the audio loops can be sliced
and then dragged n dropped as a midi sequence where they can be likewise
edited. Note that I said some, not all. Each instrument has different
capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Ethno has a lot
of the kind of flexibility you get with Stylus RMX by Spectrasonics, the kind
of glitch potential you get with Recycle loops and the phrase editing you get in GarageBand.
Powerful.
The Ethno Instrument is multi-timbral (up to
64 channels in one instance if your sequencer supports this) and
Multis can be saved. You can apply the usual filters, envelopes and
lfos. There is also 2 band eq and a built in convolution reverb. The
reverb sounds good, but does quickly drain the CPU on my G5, so I keep it
turned off. Many of the instruments are laid out with their original
exotic tuning, but some are not. There is no way I can see to apply a
user scale to any instruments. It's possible Digital Performer may
have another way to do this. All my tests were done in Logic 7.2.
Ethno never did crash even once. Not bad for software at 1.0.
|
Demos
are on this zZounds Page Make sure to
watch
the Movie on Motu's site about Ethno |
There is a lot to like in terms of sound
quality in Ethno. Though quality does vary throughout the categories.
Many are
stellar, most are very good, a few are not so. Oh, it's impossible to
talk about all of them, but here are some highlights. Among the non-phrased,
non looped instruments that you actually have to play on the keyboard,
the Spanish-Gypsy Flamenco guitar is my favorite so far. The percussion
is uniformly great, the didgeridoo is the best I've heard in sampled form.
Ditto on the Shakuhatchi. The
Maghreb violin is a charm! Cymbalum, Fiddle, Celtic Harp, Amajingu and
Djafe Flute, Kora, Koto (the latter two have stunning natural tunings) are all
top quality, the best you will find anywhere! The ones I did not like was the sitar and
tambura (though the loops and phrases of these were really good. There's
a wonderful acoustic bass that almost rivals Trilogy's, and a whole category
of "World Synths" that have pads that equal those in Atmosphere. Plenty
of worldly flutes, authentic sounding bagpipes, killer Steel Drums and some
awesome haunting Fairlight-like Vox samples.
Speaking of vocals, which are really hard to
include in a sample set without being corny, there are some great usable
phrases here. Lots of Arabic voices (they sound similar to the samples
from the Deepest India collection), some Eastern Europe phrases (sound
Bulgarian to me), some outstanding Cuban voices. You can stretch these
phrases to make them fit your composition and can play them at different
pitches, but sometimes they start sounding unnatural. Still they are so
well recorded you may want to adapt your song to them.
Phrases and loops. There are
plenty of these. Lots of drum loops that make it real easy to get a tune
started. Including the loops and phrases was very wise as many worldly
instruments have strange tunings and lots of inflections that single note
samples can never convey. Overall these are better sounding than your
average acid loops. Its a mixed bag, but a big mixed bag. I am
having lots of fun going through all these. The slicing and recasting of
the loops is going to take me way out there.
Summing up: I give the library an A.
Its was quite an ambitious undertaking by MOTU, and it worked. Lots
of other world libraries don't dare to try to recreate instruments beyond
simple percussion and plucked instruments. Other world libraries are
extremely expensive and well-done, like the East West RA, but don't give you
nearly as much as you get here. I evaluate MOTU's Ethno a slight notch below RA
in terms of the quality of the sampled instruments, but above RA in terms of
overall scope and usefulness. The MOTU has many hard to find instruments that
RA does not even touch. The Ethno instrument is very much like Ethno World 3
in terms of its scope, but I find the MOTU to be a cut above in terms of
sound. But like I said before, quality varies in all these sets by
instrument.
For the money spent, I rate the MOTU Ethno
instrument with the highest marks of any world collection that I have.
If you like world sounds it is a must. This is one set that I hope they
come out with a Volume II. Overall, highly recommended.
Go to the
Ethno
topic at studio-central
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