Koblo Vibra2000 Virtual Synth
by Barry Rudolph |
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The Vibra2000 is the newest addition to Koblo's Vibra line. Significant features beyond its $29.95 price tag are its legendary filter, powerful arpeggiator, and oscillator. The Vibra2000 is available in AU, RTAS, VST and standalone formats, for both Mac and PC; it has the classic Koblo sound found on many trance, progressive and breakbeat songs. Whether standalone or as plug, Vibra pulls meager DSP resources so you can plan on many simultaneous instances.
I installed it into my Pro Tools rig where I run it standalone or as an RTAS instrument. Running standalone, Vibra2K loads nearly instantly and seems extremely stable and reliable--I don't think it would ever freeze or crash during the best live synth solo of your life.
Vibra2000 comes with five banks of presets: Basses, Leads, Pads, Synths and my favorite, the Arpeggios with 35 different patches. While playing any preset you can browse around and see other presets in the lists.
The programming sections in Vibra2000 are familiar to any analog synthesizer programmer. The Oscillator has choices of Pulse, Sawtooth and Multi Sawtooth waves. Arpeggiator has extensive controls for building and adjusting automatic-playing patterns of notes such as Sync for syncing to your session's tempo, Tempo sets free-running speed, Range sets number of octaves, and Pattern selects any of 16 different patterns of groups played as set by dials.
The Vel (Velocity) dial will play different velocity patterns, the Stct (Staccato) dial will play a staccato note pattern, the Chord group will play a chord pattern when a chord is held down, the Slide group controls which individual notes played by the arpeggiator will overlap to the next note, resulting in a slide if the portamento is turned on.
The cool digital filter section has Cut (cutoff) to set the resonance cutoff frequency, the Env (envelope) dial adjusts the envelope generator's control of the filter, the Att (attack) dial sets the attack stage of the filter envelope while the Rel (release) dial sets the release stage of the filter envelope.
The VCA or envelope generator has three dials to control Amplitude Envelope. Att (attack) adjusts the attack rate, Sus (sustain) adjusts sustain rate, and Rel (release) is for setting release times. Vibra2000 finishes with a Hold button to keep notes playing after you've stopped, Master Level Fader, Level Meter showing output level, Pan controls the balance of the output signal in the stereo field. Koblo's Vibra2000 sounds great and runs perfectly in my rig. It is just ticket for lead lines and bass parts and I'm still exploring the excellent arpeggiator and saving many useful patches.
Get yours at: www.koblo.com/.
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