Programming wizard and all-round synth enthusiast Steve Howell has used his 30+ years of experience and knowledge of these various instruments to create accurate representations of some of the world's greatest synths, keyboards and beat boxes that he has either owned or used in a professional capacity as either a sound designer, sound engineer, player or composer in one way or another. Steve has also used his 16+ years of developing professional sample sound libraries to provide highly optimized and memory-efficient, seamlessly looped samples of a heritage of instruments that have paved the way for where we are today - over 40 years of innovation and (often naive) pioneering spirit encapsulated in one definitive collection of abject "Nostalgia".
Nostalgia includes old-skool lo-fi beatboxes, huge Gothic Tron sounds, smooth Prophet pads and strings, beefy Moog basses or leads, classic electric pianos, swirly string synths, cheezy toys, classic samplers, brittle digital synths, evolving S+S textures, etc.
The Instruments list groups the sounds into these categories:
- 01 US Classics
- 02 Euro Classics
- 03 Japanese Classics
- 04 Playback Keyboards
- 05 Organs
- 06 Electro-Mechanicals
- 07 Digital ROMpler synths
- 08 Vintage Samplers
- 09 Cheap n Cheezy
- 10 Obscure Synths
- 11 Drum Synths
- 12 Classic Beatboxes
- 13 Obscure Beatboxes
- 14 Sci-Fi
- 15 Atmosferics
- 16 String Synths
- 17 Basses
Nostalgia is available for Windows and Mac OS X in VST, DX, AU, RTAS and stand alone formats and costs US$199.95. A list of equipment sampled, audio demos and a full patch list are available from Zero-G's website.