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 all the time – 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 environment. The MPC is a tightly defined computer and operating system with a touch screen and unique mode of operation. These ‘new’ AIR instruments have been tuned for the MPC. Even if you use AKAI’s software MPC DAW you are being carefully confined to the capabilities 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. And there’s no update for Loom, probably because that would be a complete pain to operate on the MPC hardware. 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.
Bassline, Electric, Solina and Mellotron are all decent but greatly outclassed by existing software. That leaves Odyssey – and that was actually coded by Way Out Ware a while back. It was the leader back then, there is now plenty of competition.
When I use my MPC I find these are really excellent tools within that framework. But the idea that ‘by popular demand’ you’re going to sell them for $150 or so … just fix the old plugins. Make the interfaces vectored, write some manuals.