- It's been a quiet 12 months for Ableton, following the announcement that they would be shifting the concentration of development on Live away from enhancement and towards stability. (Aside from the arrival of Max for Live in the fall, that is.) That's why it was such a surprise last month when Ableton announced that they would be offering a new range of third-party live packs called "Partner Instruments" for sale through their website. The pack in question here has been put together by sound artists at Puremagnetik. Their offering is called "Retro Synths," and it consists of a number of instrument racks built from a professionally sampled assortment of (you guessed it) retro synths.
If you're new to the live pack game, it's essentially a self-extracting compressed file that installs samples, presets and clips into Ableton Live's library. These can all then be accessed easily via the Live Browser and have the upside of using Live's own CPU-friendly devices. If you've shopped for live packs recently, you're probably already familiar with Puremagnetik. They have offered a subscription service for the past few years wherein subscribers pay a monthly fee to receive a flavor-of-the-month live pack every 30 days. These monthly "micropaks" have varied over the years from the more traditional sampled instrument choices (digital beatboxes, analog synths and the like) to weirder fare like Buddha Machines, toys, and circuit bent electronics. Retro Synths is a collection of eight of these micropaks all meant to replicate vintage synthesizers using Ableton's sample playback instruments (Simpler and Sampler).
The Retro Synths collection contains 306 different instrument racks in total, with 82 clips. Of the eight micropaks that Puremagnetik took from to build Retro Synths, the distribution between analog and digital is even, with four on each side. Representing team analog are Analog Bass Volumes 1 and 2 (which draws sounds from a Minimoog, a Korg MS-20, an ARP 2600, a modular synth and others), TeeBee (based around the original acid machine: the Roland TB-303), and finally String Machines. The digital micropaks include instruments based on four synths: Phazeform is modeled on a Casio CZ-1, P-50 Linear is a study of the Roland D-50, Vintage '80s Classics is a collection of Oberheim Maxtrix-6 sounds, and finally Vector, which cleverly recreates the Korg Wavestation.
Let's get the technical details out of the way. When downloading the live pack, you'll find the file size weighs in at 1.4 GB, but when installed it expands to take up 2.5 GB of space in your Ableton library. While normal live packs do not require authorization, the Partner Instruments utilize the same unlock method used for the rest of Ableton's native products. (Your license is associated with your Ableton login and you can authorize a limited number of times via web browser.) One nice feature that Ableton offers is the ability to re-download the live pack installer at any time in the future if needed. This would prove helpful to those of us who are loathe to use huge chunks of backup space on sample libraries.
The important question with any sample library, though, is a simple one. How does it all sound? Well, each micropak included in Retro Synths has its own strong points. For example, TeeBee only includes one preset, but that one preset is a highly polished instrument utilizing hundreds of samples and some clever programming to allow for a pretty uncanny reproduction of the full range of the TB-303's capabilities. Some serious thought went into this one and it shows in the playability of the resulting rack. The Vector instruments follow TeeBee in pushing the boundaries of what can be done with Live's instrument racks. If you've ever seen or used the old Korg Wavestation keyboards, the macro controls which emulate the Wavestation's vector joystick will take you back to '95. In a nice additional bit of foresight, the Puremagnetik guys broke the Vector presets into three different levels of granularity (down to the wave sequence level) so that you can mix and match to make your own sounds and performances.
The two Analog Bass volumes are less focused on clever programming, instead concentrating on a good old-fashioned multi-sampling instead. There is an interesting range of bass presets to be found in these two micropaks, although I would say that the overall sound is tailored towards the esoteric bass sounds found in the IDM / dubstep / West Coast electronic scene (e.g. lots of modulation and distortion). If you're looking for some low-end sub-bass whump you'll need to either look elsewhere or do some creative filtering. Additionally, at the time writing, it seemed as though there was an issue with how some of the presets in these two micropaks were behaving in Ableton. There are a few rack presets that are hampered by macro knobs that are disabled or do nothing. Many times it's a glide knob that isn't controlling anything because glide/portamento is turned off in the preset (Honest Analog for example). On others it appears to be a bug with how Ableton handles the Sampler to Simpler conversion when saving presets. Users who own the Sampler instrument can fix these presets by re-mapping to Sampler and saving as is (i.e. without re-converting down to Simpler before saving).
It would be negligent to conclude here without mentioning an interesting point discovered while working on this review, however. Before spending the $79 for Retro Synths, it would be advisable to head over to Puremagnetik's site, where they offer an "Analog Synths Bundle" and a "Digital Synths Bundle" that when bought together only cost $6 more than Retro Synths. These bundles include the entirety of the Retro Synths instruments along with four other micropaks not found in the Ableton download. There is an additional bonus for the non-Ableton users to be found in the bundles as well, as they allow for two other download formats (Kontakt and Logic) for each micropak. Despite the minor technical glitches and odd price disparities, this collection of micropaks offers a decent value for pretty much everyone. For the preset tweakers, it adds a substantial amount of new sounds that can be played and used immediately upon loading. For the Ableton tech-geeks out there, stripping Puremagnetik's presets down to their fundamental parts is a great way to learn more about what is possible with instrument racks.
Ratings:
COST: 4/5
VERSATILITY: 3.5/5
EASE OF USE: 4.5/5
SOUND: 4/5
TracklistRequires Live Intro or Live
Version 8.1.3 or higher
2GB of RAM recommended