Product: Best Service Ethno World 3 VST PC
Price Paid: US $314
Submitted
01/06/2006
at
11:21pm
by
Paul Whiting
Reviewer Background
:
Been Making music for 35 years. Play keyboards and guitar.
I use Ableton Live 5 as my sequencer and many plug-ins.
I bought Ethno World 3 in an effort to introduce a more earthy non-synth atmospehere to my music.Soundwise my music is a strange mix of folkey and synth sounds, but basically follows a traditinal song structure.
I'm using a fairly new Dell system with 2 gigs of RAM.
I mix through headphones and use edirol digital monitors aswell.
Ease of Use
:
No Opinion
The Ethno interface is based on Native Instruments Kontakt and works very well.
No problems with installation except for the usual challenge response stuff but all in all OK.
I believe midi automation is supported but I was too disappointed with the rest of the package to even get to this stage.
I guess the sounds are OK and it's easy to load them and make minor changes but overall the large variety of samples are not much good or of not much use. For example how many times do you think a song would call for tuned Mongolian bowls? That's bowls not bells.These kind of samples are all too common in Ethno World.
I was particurlaly intersted in using the western fiddle samples and was very annoyed to find that these are only supplied in the form of played loops, no keyed samples you can play. Furthermore the loops which are audio only don't transpose at all well and fair worse when attempting to change tempo.
The manual is colorful and quite useless.
Sounds/Sound Quality
:
4
The sound of the looped material is fine just don't change key or tempo. No documentation of key or tempo of looped material just rough guidlines.
The presets/samples are OK I suppose except I could produce almost any of these sounds with a good couple of soft synths.
The instrument is multi timbral and would be a fine piece of kit about five years ago.
Overall Rating
:
2
I got this a few weeks before christmas when the price dropped by 100 dollars, but even at 300 dollars this is way over priced. I would not buy this again at any price.
Nothing to love here, plenty to disslike. Hasn't crashed and doesn't hog the cpu but so what.
I wish Best Service and Soundsonline were more honest in their descriptions of their products or rather lack of descriptions. I think they should make it clear that the mp3 samples they have as demos are made up of preset loops.
I hate wasting money and I'm sorry to say this is one big waste of it.
