ENSEMBLE

Some weeks ago, I was given a rare MTI ensemble unit by a good old US friend of mine, Dan McCullough...

It's a crusty old bugger and a clone of the Solina/ARP string synth ensemble/chorus effect. It's different to normal chorus units which are typically a single delay line modulated by an LFO which can be a bit 'cyclic'. The MTI, on the other hand, has three 'bucket brigade' (i.e. very analogue) delay lines modulated by an analogue LFO at different phases resulting in a gorgeous and mushy smear of richness and a degree of 'lofi-ness'. Furthermore, it responds nicely to some slight overdrive - not harsh digital clipping or extreme distortion, just a nice 'edge' ... which has been exploited.

The first thing I did, out of curiosity, was to feed The Lab's Dotcom modular through it - three VCOs on full tilt through the 'Sea Devil' EMS VCS3 filter for some nice non-linearities and then through the Dotcom Fixed Filter Bank and then into the MTI and came up with this...

I've sampled from C-1 (almost subsonic) to C7 with long samples lasting in excess of a minute or more to allow the samples (and loops) to really breathe and evolve. There are eight waveforms to play with, selected by the WAVE control ... unison but detuned sawtooth and ramps, PWMs, squares, triangle and sine combinations plus octave combinations too. On their own, they sound mighty; through the MTI, they sound gorgeous. If you are at all familiar with sketching with soft pencils or pastels - it's much the same as smudging the clean lines to blend them.

And then we shoved them through a chain of multi-FX...

Two-band EQ > Phaser > Chorus > Rotary cabinet > Delay > Convolution reverb featuring 24 custom impulses from grungy springs, plates, rooms, halls, churches to wide and expansive ambiences. And we've laid them out like a pedalboard of stomp boxes to make things simple.

All together, 'Ensemble' is a strong tool for sound design and music making in any number of genres. Despite what the audio demo might imply, this is not another 'pad machine' (although it's very good at that) but capable of a wide range of sounds and textures including big basses, sub-basses, polysynths, leadlines and so on.

'Ensemble' comes with a variety of presets to get you started - basses, pads and a variety of other stuff.

NOTE : It will work with the Kontakt Player but only in 'demo' mode and the session will be time limited. The full version of Kontakt 4.2.4 or higher is required and recommended