Product Reviews by KVR Members

I have a couple thousand dollars' worth of drum plugins, and right now Sitala ($0) is the one seeing the most use.

The developers seem to have zeroed in on the most important features for a user like me. One knob controls for envelope (shape), tuning, compression, tone, pan, and volume. Any pad can trigger any other pad. Any pad can choke any other pad.

It's so easy to use. There's a great graphic window for whichever control you are adjusting. Too long a tail on your one shot drum sound? The shape knob will show you the changes to your envelope as you turn it. So in addition to listening, you can see how much of the tail you're cutting off. We all know you can't mix with your eyes, but the visual component comes in handy when you know you want to shorten it just a bit, or shorten it so much it almost sounds dry again. The visual feedback gets you in the ballpark of what you're looking for much faster.

I would gladly have paid money for this. I would definitely pay for a version with a few more features, but take that with a grain of salt because the beauty of Sitala is its simplicity. The biggest feature I'd like to see is a 4X4 grid view to match the layout of many drum MIDI controllers. I'd like it if clicking on each of the 6 knobs would toggle it with its 0%/center value. I'd like it if there were a way to cut highs and lows on the same pad. And I'd really love to see some kind of fine tuned filter>velocity setting for those of us who want our one shots to have a little sonic variety each time they hit. Very few drum instruments do that though. But you know what? Very few drum instruments do the simple things Sitala does so well.

May thanks and eternal gratitude to Decomposer.

EZbass sounds great but does not - in my opinion - live up to Toontrack's EZ line of applications.

I am a loyal and happy Toontrack customer. My Toontrack product manager tells me I own 93 Toontrack products. I have had nothing but great results with EZdrummer 2, EZkeys, and EZmix 2.

I do not find EZbass easy to use at all. I've watched the Groove3 course for it, and while I found the course informative, I never reached a point where EZbass was anything other than frustrating for me to use. My dream bass player is probably Adam Clayton, so it's not like my expectations are inordinately high, either.

I tried importing a chord progression from EZkeys and got puzzling and unusable results. I tried programming by hand and found it frustrating and unrewarding (and unusable). I tried playing in parts on the keyboard and concluded that if I had to do that, I'd rather be using something else.

I am aware of and happy for the MANY satisfied users of EZbass.

One final observation: The exclusion of a simple (or even complicated) way to create parts exclusively for a four string bass - as opposed to five string - is mind-bogglingly inexplicable. If I were to list my top seven thousand albums of all time, none of them would feature a five string bass.

I encourage other EZbass users - especially satisfied ones - to review this instrument.

Despite my rating of 8, Beatstation is the best drum sample player I've used, and I've used a bunch of them. Beatstation has tons more features than just drum sample playback, including bass and lead sections, and REX and MIDI file loading and playback. I recommend checking out the full feature list via Toontrack's website or online demos.

If you use EZ Drummer or Superior Drummer, Beatstation is a no-brainer. Beatstation will load your samples and MIDI libraries from either of those products and their expansions. It will also load all your .wav samples that you have all over your hard drive. Sometimes when I want to layer sounds under an EZ Drummer part I've created, I'll copy the MIDI to a new track and load up Beatstation with samples I want to use to augment whatever kit I'm using in EZD.

Even used by itself, layering of drum sounds is what Beatstation does best. You can have up to five samples per pad, each with its own volume, pan, pitch, and envelope. Just loading two samples to the same pad and playing with their envelopes allows me to use the attack from one drum and the body from another. Suddenly I'm a sound designer! Velocity can be toggled on and off per layer.

The big hidden feature that I use most is the EZ Mix style effects. Each pad can have its own insert effect, but like I said, these are EZ Mix style effects, so its actually a chain of effects designed for your kick or snare or cymbals or percussion or whatever. There are also two fx sends and those effects are simpler, like just compression or just reverb or just flanger. You can send the whole pad (up to five layers) to the send fx, but each layer also has controls for the sends too. Between the envelopes and pitch control and all the available effects, it would be super easy to take 16 generic drum samples and make your own original drumkit.

As for why I didn't rate this a ten, there are a couple of things that could use a little improvement and one thing that needs a huge improvement. The main thing is the appearance. Despite having many available skins, they all are garish or have graphics that can interfere with easy reading of the interface. As I once shared with a Toontrack employee (apparently to no avail) the skins look like 1990s Geocities web pages (anyone of a certain age will know what a slam that is!). While I love the envelopes, the little envelope window is so small that it is hard to grab the points with my mouse (and I use a big monitor). Lastly, I'd like to see the dropdown FX menus replaced with menus like their other products have.

Beatstation is an amazing piece of software, and despite my criticisms, I prefer it to all the other programs of its kind that I have used. I gladly overlook its few shortcomings because they do not affect its functionality. I hope Toontrack give it a little TLC soon, because in my opinion the way it looks is the only thing keeping it from being as successful as it is good.

Egoist is an amazing loop slicer / re-arranger, a beat and bass machine, and a per-step multi-effect that is so creative and unusual. Unfortunately, the GUI is not resizable or even scrollable, and for several users, myself included, the bottom part of the GUI can not be seen. I give it a ten for features and sound, and a two for usability, averaging out to a six. If this (known) issue is fixed in the future, I will note it here. Caveat Emptor.

I love Mello.

The lo-fi nostalgia that comes from the 'tron is well known and has been sampled many times for various VSTis, but here in UVI's Mello I think it sounds the best. There are fewer patches than its competitors have included, but what is here has that sonic mojo that the Mellotron is known for. I hope to see UVI expand on the available sounds in the future.

This thing has a juicy, grungy, living tone that can add character to your productions. For even more vibe, I ran it through a rotary simulator and it just oozed out of the speakers. I was fortunate to once see Nosferatu and Phantom Of The Opera accompanied by a cinematic organist. Mello nails that old dramatic sound perfectly.

In addition to the soundbank selectors, there is a nice sounding fx section with reverb and delay, controls for tone and pitch, volume controls for key noise and mechanical noise, a 3 band eq, a switch to give you the full range of notes on your controller (original 'trons only played a couple of octaves), a few switches I didn't delve into, and an "under the hood" panel that lets you mess with ADSR and filter settings. All of this gives you a lot more ways to manipulate your sound than an actual Mellotron would, so that's not only fun to play with, but could result in some useful sounds as well.

I can't recommend it more highly.