Two more of Independence's edit screens, accessed via the top row of buttons. On the left, you normally see a list of all the loaded patches or 'layers', in Yellow-speak , and detailed information relating to the currently selected layer, and on the right, eight different editing areas appear, selected with buttons along the top.
All in all, it's an effective interface, and I found it easy to get going without needing the manual. Hmm — the manual While it tries hard to be comprehensive, it's frequently obscure, partly because of some clunky English translation. At times it falls seriously short — for example, the description of how sample 'zones', 'sections' and 'alternates' interrelate is not clearly explained.
Another quick criticism is that there appears to be no way to change the behaviour of mouse drags for adjusting the knobs: they're circular only, which is at odds with every single other bit of software on my Mac. Being capable of playing back so many multitimbral layers, Independence needs a useful effects and mixing environment — and it has one. Each layer gets a mixer channel, and these are supplemented by stereo and mono output channels, bus channels for shared effects, and so on and the mysterious 'custom channels', actually a kind of group.
All have unlimited insert effects slots and except the bus channels five bus sends. There are plenty of options for managing mix views and layout, and a track grouping feature too. However, I found the latter very unstable, and most attempts to use it led to uncharacteristic freezes and crashes of my DAW, Digital Performer. Automation of mixer faders and, indeed, most effect and Quick Edit page parameters is possible, but it has to be laboriously set up in tandem with the DAW, using numbered 'host control' links.
External control is also possible via MIDI, using a similar scheme, but at least individual layers can be set to respond to MIDI Continuous Controllers 7 and 10 volume and pan messages. They're grouped into nine logical categories and include all the usual EQs, compressors, delays and reverbs you'd expect to find, and a few things you might not.
Added to this is a bunch of 'Helper' effects — not very sexy but immensely useful gizmos such as a gain stage, stereo width control, metronome and reference tone generator. Finally, taking pride of place, there's Origami, a convolution reverb with a bundled IR library, and three modellers, for preamps, cabinets and mics.
This is Independence's mixer in its 'Full View' mode, occupying the whole window. Within those sections, patches are helpfully grouped and categorised. Much of the library is extremely impressive. Both acoustic and electric basses are outstanding: meaty, with plenty of articulation options and lots of life and presence.
The Majestic supplementary library adds yet more depth. I found the guitars almost as good — and I'm not usually a fan of sampled guitars. These are easy enough to fix in 30 seconds, but it's a shame you have to.
Saxes seem to be a sort of 'acid test' of programming and sample provision, and on the average hardware ROMpler keyboard are frequently dire. Percussion, especially the 'ethno' variety, is yet another strong area. There's a thunderous Taiko set, which seems destined for numerous nature documentary soundtracks, very good cymbals, and more extremely usable stuff like barrels, a cajon, talking drums and tabla.
So if these are the star turns, what of the remainder? I'm less enthusiastic about the pianos. The combination also provides a convenient means of product activation for their range of virtual instruments. The range can be installed on as many computers as you like — as long as you have that dongle with you, the program can be run — and only one dongle is needed to run any Yellow Tools program.
However, Yellow Tools warn that if you lose your dongle, they will not replace it, so if you don't plan on buying Independence a second time, you'll need to guard it with your life. The instructions for installing the software and supplied library and 'activating' the dongle are ambiguous an unfortunate by-product of the user manual's less-than-perfect English translation but once understood, the procedure is straightforward, if long-winded.
During the program installation, you will be asked if you wish to install the ' Independence Basic Path' to your main drive. This tells Independence where your main sample library resides. However, as it's now common practice for people to have dedicated drives for sample streaming, I recommend saying 'no' to this, and setting the Basic Path to the drive of your choice from within Independence after installation is complete.
Next, the Key Manager should be installed. If your computer is connected to the Internet, activating the dongle is simply a matter of clicking the 'Activate Product' button and typing in the Activation Key which is subsequently generated. If your studio computer is without a Net connection like mine , Key Manager saves a small file which has to be emailed to Yellow Tools for activation in my case, they mailed it back within half an hour.
You then put the activated file back into the Key Manager folder on your music computer, run Key Manager again and click on 'load file' to authorise the program for your specific USB dongle. Installing the supplied 16GB sample library is simply a matter of copying the files from the three DVDs to the hard drive of your choice — which should also be the location you specify as your 'Basic Path'.
The library is of consistently high quality, though the choice of instruments is slightly lacking in variety considering the disk space they occupy, and contains little in the way of surprises. There are orchestral strings, woodwind, brass and percussion all derived from the Kirk Hunter orchestral library , acoustic and electric pianos, guitars and basses, alto and baritone saxophones, a selection of world, tonal and ethnic percussion, electric and acoustic drum and percussion kits, some synth waveform building-blocks, and a handful of the above instruments with Indian or Turkish tuning models pre-applied.
The orchestral strings, brass, woodwind and saxes make good use of keyswitching, although I encountered some severe glitching with these instruments, making their use a rather hit-and-miss affair.
Since the main body of this review was written, Version 1. Also included are features designed to enhance live performance. Firstly, there's now a 'pre-cache' option which to quote Yellow Tools , allows you to 'pre-load Layers into Independence which are available immediately when you activate them, without any additional loading time' These pre-loaded Layers can then be instantly activated using MIDI program changes.
Two pre-caching options are available for Layers: 'All' and 'My Favourites'. I tried the 'My Favourites' approach first — and sure enough the three patches I had saved to that folder opened instantly when selected from the drop-down menu. Frustratingly, though, I could find no way of calling them up using program changes. The 'All' option fared less well; after an interminable wait my computer slowed to a crawl, was eventually brought to its knees, and had to be shut down.
Improvements to the 'Slice Mode' are also mentioned, but apart from the addition of an automatic BPM calculator, no details are given; otherwise, this appears to function exactly as before. It could certainly be useful in a live situation. When started, Independence defaults to the Modules view, which is divided into three panes: the left pane is where Layers, or instruments, are loaded. Adjacent to this is a list of parameters that apply to the overall Project and the currently selected Layer Set and Layer.
The larger panes on the right offer six available views: Modules the default view seen opposite , Mapping shown above , Performance, Mixer, Preferences and Key Status. Most of the detailed editing is done from the Modules and Mapping views. The Mixer view shown on the last page of this article affords access to Independence 's output, buss and auxiliary effects-routing options, whilst Performance view deals with the setting up of note repetitions referred to as 'Alternates' and Advanced Legato mode see overleaf for more on this.
Key Status informs you which Yellow Tools products are currently activated on your dongle. Mapping View, including the waveform of the currently selected Zone, with its start, end and loop points. The Zone's velocity crossfade area can be clearly seen. Like any sampler, software or otherwise, Independence has a hierarchical structure.
The largest element is the Project — that's everything loaded into the current instance of Independence. When you load an instrument from the library, it appears as a Layer which can be assigned its own MIDI channel, output and other settings. Layers reside in turn within Layer Sets,of which 16 are available, labelled A to P, and each can contain an unlimited number of Layers, although only 16 MIDI channels are available to each instance of Independence.
In programs such as NI's Kontakt , keyswitches trigger different groups of samples from within a single instrument patch. This requires either having such a patch already designed, or custom-building one from scratch.
Independence operates this way too, but has an additional trick up its sleeve — you can also keyswitch complete Layers. So you could load separate marcato, arco and pizzicato instruments Layers into one Layer Set, then configure those complete Layers to be keyswitchable. Repeat use of such a setup is very easy — saving Layer Sets to disk enables you to recall that 'super-strings' setup at will.
Each Layer has its own set of global parameters. Besides the standard volume, pitch, pan and MIDI channel settings in the Basics section, you can select from a library of more than 50 special tunings, among them Arabic, Indian and Chinese scales. Disk streaming can be turned off individually for any Layer. That Layer's samples are then loaded into RAM, which reduces the workload on your overburdened hard drive! Another nice touch is RAM Auto-Clean — when activated, samples not being used in a song are deleted from RAM, again reducing the load on your computer's resources.
A global Auto-Clean switch would have been useful to clean up all Layers in a Project at once, rather than having to treat each individually. Performance View, with various samples set up in the upper half of the window to play as Alternates for more realistic note repetition. MIDI Extended parameters allow the setting of velocity range, key range and delay in other words, the time elapsing before a Layer sounds after receiving a 'note on' message. The Scale parameter defines a Layer's response to velocity within a restricted range, and is useful for matching 'switchover volume' between two velocity-switched Layers.
Dynamic Range parameters further tailor a Layer's volume response to velocity, including the response curve of the Layer itself and the received MIDI velocity curve from an external MIDI controller keyboard, which can compensate for weighted keyboards with particularly heavy actions or steep velocity curves. This is also where you specify trigger keys to enable keyswitching between complete Layers, as mentioned earlier.
Finally, the Polyphony parameters dictate maximum polyphony for a Layer, release time for 'killed' voices when that polyphony is exceeded, the maximum number of voices played by any single repeated note independent of the maximum polyphony and release time for those 'killed' voices.
Both these release times eliminate unpleasant 'clicks' when voices are killed by excess polyphony, and can even be used creatively to ensure monophonic sounds move from note to note in a smooth, legato fashion, particularly when using slow attack and release envelopes.
A close-up of the Advanced Legato parameters in the lower half of the Performance View. Whilst it's possible to obtain basic monophonic legato effects by restricting a Layer's polyphony to one voice and adjusting the Layer Release parameter to 'paint over the cracks', Independence has a purpose-built Advanced Legato Mode that deals with this in great detail. Found in the lower pane of the Performance view, the parameters for this address a variable set of conditions.
Finally, 'Threshold' sets the attack time of the incoming legato note, and 'T Curve' adjusts the attack time response curve. This alone would satisfy most applications — but Independence has grander ideas! Legato can be applied not just to an entire Layer, but to individual Sections and Alternates — and with that in mind, the additional Option and Target parameters offer some very neat tricks.
In the Option line, for example, you can specify the behaviour of additional sonic details such as the guitar finger noises, breaths and squeaks that might occur between notes.
It's even possible to decide which noise variations are heard depending on your keyboard playing direction — eg. For really realistic legato, the Target line allows you to specify a further sample layer eg. And as icing on the cake, a 'ghost' note, such as a creak, click, or even a sigh, mutes the final note of your phrase.
How's that for detail? Layers can be subdivided into Sections and Alternates. Sections are collections of samples Zones within one Layer, used to sub-divide it into easily manageable 'groups'. For example, a single Layer might contain a complete drum kit with the drums 'sectioned' by type: cymbals in one Section, toms in another, and so on.
It's worth familiarising yourself with Candy's soundbank, however, as it contains some real gems. Each instrument is played in pretty much every way possible. You'll find falls, long, short, sforzando, vibrato and FX loops.
There's a part to fit virtually every application you can think of, and if you layer them up you can create some excellent ensembles. Candy does enable you to produce very authentic sax parts, then, but as with all instruments like this, the credibility of the sound is highly dependent on a sympathetic keyboard performance.
Candy's performance-centric editing parameters certainly give it an advantage on this score. There's stiff competition for your money when it comes to virtual saxes, but Candy is certainly one of the most flexible and realistic.
MusicRadar The No. Home Reviews. Our Verdict. Pros Great sounds. Good editing features.
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