A brief overview/review, I’ve been playing it all nite: Very nice. 11 songs and a few 8th note ostinato patterns for ballads (3 major, 3 minor).
What I like about the “variations” is that they act more like true variations than the original midi patterns, which basically are “slow, medium, fast”. In other words, these new patterns are more interchangable as the variations are similar tempo-wise but not content-wise. It would be easy to take 1/2 of “variation 1” and 1/2 of variation 2 and make them flow in a cohesive phrase.
The product itself is similar to the original, there are no surprises. The patterns aren’t particularly diverse, they are fairly standard styles that are rhythmic and somewhat in the “balladeer/Billy Joel” style. That’s not a bad thing, it fills out the original patterns nicely. There are a few upbeat ones. “80’s moto” is particularly cool.
There’s a good amount of material here. That might not be apparent at first. As has been discussed on this forum, it takes a bit of digging and going through the variations/song parts to grasp how much is here. Since it is focused solely on “pop/rock”, it takes a little while to go through chorus/bridge/variations and hear how much content there is, but it’s pretty sizable. When added to the original patterns, it’s a nice little starter library.
If there are any “cons”, it would be diversity. I’m not sure that is a “con”: some people have complained about the lack of content, so there is a lot more content now. It’s just fairly focused on one area. It can be hard to judge at first since they are all in C and that can fatigue the ear, but in “real life” with various keys etc, I think most people will be happy with this new batch. Kudos to Toontrack, and especially to the pianist for doing such a fine job.
Installation was automatic. Click the installer and that’s it.
