This was a email sent to my by Mark Pulver in response to a question I had about the Q. Thought you all might enjoy reading this....
- Access Virus Great machine, all of them are. This machine has _THEY_ best sounding digital filter of anything else on the market. Now, "best sounding" is pretty vague and personal. The thing about this filter that everyone loves is that it's the closest to the ballsy Minimoog sound. if you like that sound, then this is the digital synth that has it. The downside of the Virus is the user interface. There are plenty of knobs and buttons to twiddle, but there is a LOT of machine underneath the panel. And, you will find yourself there a lot - *80%* of the modulation is buried in the UI. The display isn't very large, and a lot of knobs have multiple functions based on what page in the display that you're on or even _which way_ you turn the knob. If you're looking to maybe use a computer as an editor at some point (like, with the SoundDiver application, then this may not be a big thing for you. The other "down" about this box is that it tends to sound big all the time. It's kinda' hard to get it to settle down and not be all over a mix. It's a wonderful sounding machine, but it's just hard to get to settle down into something like softer timbres. ----- - Waldorf Q Wow... Okay, this machine is BY FAR the deepest machine of any of the VA's that are on the market. There is a LOT here. The Q family is pretty big, with the Q keyboard, Q rack, microQ and microQ Lite. The Q and Q rack are the same hardware and only differ in the missing keyboard and the number of knobs/switches. The microQ and the microQ-Lite are totally different machines, but are running basically the same operating system and sound generation code. That's a good thing and a bad thing. The good side is that as Waldorf produces new features for the Q (and Q rack) then it's "easier" to get them into the microQ. The bad side is that the microQ doesn't have the horsepower that the Q does and may _never_ get some features, or the features that it does get may be scaled back to be able to run. For example, at this last OS run, the Q grew a gorgeous reverb and a way cool 5.1 surround delay line. The microQ got the reverb about 3 months later, and I don't think it's getting the delay. Sound wise... yeow. (I'll talk about things common to both the Q and microQ then note anything specifically different) The machine is huge... You can have up to 5 osc's per voice (you asked what a voice was and I'll get to that in a minute), and route them through two filters - each filter can be any of 7 different types (6 on the microQ) - then run that through an overdrive section, through the dual effects and then out to your ears. :) The filters sound great, but they have a specific "Waldorf Sound" to them. That's not bad, it's just a character. The machine can't get as close to a Minimoog as the Virus can, but damn it can shake the walls. Modulation has always been Waldorf's strong suite and it shows on this machine. You can pretty much modulate anything from anywhere, and do it a number of times. Programming wise, this is where the "classes" of the Q start to split apart... The Q keyboard is a dream. Tons of dedicated knobs and buttons, and there's very little buried in the UI. The Q rack is a bit different in that to save cost and panel space, the logical groups of the machine share knobs. For example, there are 3 main oscillators on the machine. On the Q, each OSC as it's own set of 5 knobs. On the Q rack, there is one set of 5 knobs and a button that selects which OSCs the knobs affect. The microQ is of course the smallest of the three, and the UI changes again. What Waldorf did here is to have a single row of knobs at the bottom of a matrix of functions. You select a "row" that has a parameter that you want to change, and then spin the knob that matches the column of the param. Other Waldorf machines have used this method in the past, and it's not bad to get used to. ----------------- Okay, that's specific babble... You had asked what a voice was... The easiest way to look at this is that a voice is a single note that you want the machine to play. If you hold down a 3 note chord, then you're asking the machine to user 3 voices in order to play those notes. Now, this gets weird. :) On both the Virus and the Q, you can program a patch in the machine to use multiple voices to play ONE note. You would do this to when working on getting a bigger, stronger, harder sound. When you do this, then the machine will use up multiple voices at once. So, if you had a patch that used 2 voices per note, then hold down that 3 note chord will now use 6 voices from the machine. Another way to use up voices is to use the machine in a "multitimbral" mode. Multitimbral (Many Timbres - sounds) is where you have the machine playing back multiple parts at once. Say, a pad sound as well as a lead and bassline. Both the Virus and the Q can handle this very well and it's a common thing to do. When you do this though, then voices are being eaten up. If you hold that 3 note chord with the 2 voices per note patch, then put a 2 voice bassline under it, and a single voice lead on top, then you're using 11 voices. I say all this because when you look at today's machines, then you have to spend some time thinking about how you'll be using them. If you're looking for a complete cure-all in that you want everything to come from one box, at the same time the you have to be worried about voice count. The alternative is to record multiple tracks to disk or tape, and then play back new tracks live - in sync with the playback. Voice count in the Q world can be tricky to work through. On the Q (and Q rack) you can get either machine in either 16 or 32 voice versions. On the microQ, things are different. The microQ doesn't have a static number of voices to give you. If you run a simple patch (two oscillators, one filter, no effects) then the microQ can give you 25 (or 12 for the Lite) voices. If you add in the second filter and turn on the effects, then the patch becomes more complex and the number of available voices goes down. Waldorf states that the minimum number of voices on the microQ is _6_, and you won't get any less than that. (I think this is true for the -Lite as well, but Waldorf hasn't explicitly said). But, remember that will also cut into any multitimbral uses. There is a "voice expansion" coming for the microQ which will kick the top-end to 75 voices. That's huge! But, the price or real availability hasn't been announced yet, so I can't recommend that you buy _based_ on tha coming out. whew. my fingers are sore. :) Okay... reading back through this, I'm obviously Q biased. :) I had a Virus for about a year, I liked it, but I came away from the machine as being frustrated with the UI and I felt that I kept looking for a sound that I couldn't get from it. Clearly though, that doesn't mean that you wouldn't love it. I also have a lot of gear, and I had The Sound Of The Virus pretty well covered in other things. My bottom line for these conversations is that the Q (all of 'em) is a monster, and it will provide you a LOT of places to explore. By the way Mark may be lurking around this list for a while if you have any ?'s for him... Kris _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com --- Drum&Bass Arena Producers Discussion List http://www.breakbeat.co.uk You are currently subscribed to dnb-prod as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
