(Update 2025)
You may have read my previous assay into the travails of Advanced Instrument Research, once the shining jewel of ProTools and now the Pinocchio of AKAI’s travelling puppet show. Start there and come back when fed up.
It’s never been doubt about sonic quality – their FX are top notch and Vacuum and Loom are near best of breed in their respective roles. I use these often – always reliable and useful. It’s more a malaise with their marketing, a long torpor of development in which the range has fallen into sepia.
Finally they have OUR NEW RANGE… or is it? Not actually new, but unshackled from the MPC production environment. The MPC is a tightly defined computer and operating system with a touch screen and unique mode of operation based around a small number of pots. Even if you use them with AKAI’s software MPC DAW you are being carefully confined to the affordance of the hardware. This review is only from the perspective of the non-MPC user. If you have the hardware add a toilet roll.
Yes they have cleaner interfaces but no they can’t be enlarged because they have to fit on the MPC touch screen. You can only have four note polyphony on the Tubesynth no matter how fancy your CPU. The interfaces have recently been enlarged for the computer screen. And Tubesynth can enjoy a larger number of oscillators … which might cause trouble when sharing with the MPC.
This is not really that different to Roland and Zencore, which also has to work across all their hardware but Roland have managed to ensure a much wider range of creative control.
The old range had near to no useful documentation and that’s been carried on as if a proud tradition. If you want to know the intricate ins and outs of Hype, then you’re shit out of luck. But then there doesn’t seem to be intricate ins and outs – instead you have a fixed depth of control for whatever is being created. If it’s an analogue style sound you have 6 parameters, fair enough. If it’s a combination of FM and samples – you still only have 6 parameters, not enough. Hype was made for MPC people, who punch music into a box quickly and efficiently. They don’t have time for fiddling and widdling settings on the touch screen. There’s considerable power under the hood, and a huge potential for Hype Professional – but that ain’t gonna happen.
TubeSynth is the ‘new’ version of Vacuum. Again there is an improvement in usability but it comes from cutting back on the versatility of the old title. You can get to where you would basically want, but it’s not quite the same depth as the former title.
I find these are really excellent tools within the MPC framework. But the idea that ‘by popular demand’ you’re going to sell them for another $150 or so … just fix the old plugins. Make the interfaces vectored, write some manuals.