Product: D16 Nepheton
Price Paid: UNKNOWN
Submitted
02/20/2008
at
08:31pm
by
Bobby Fischer is alive and living in Hoboken, NJ
Reviewer Background
:
I have a Motif ES8 and a computer. I have spent the last four years composing on the Motif because I was frustrated with the state of technology (computer processing power lagging behind musical software advancements). Things have changed now and my Duo Core PC is more than capable of running any plugins I can throw at it.
Lately I have been running Ableton Live 7.02. I'm actually having fun. Waiting for the machine to blow up.... Update: today Ableton blew up while trying to render a wav file. Took multiple tweaks to get it right. Ended up just bouncing the arrangement. :(
Ease of Use
:
6
What the--? Nepheton? Yeah, it's an emulation of the classic Roland 808 drum machine. Made by a little-known company called D16 out of Poland (evidently the Polish dudes are serious about music software --check out the Arturia stuff). I'm not going to lie; out of the "box" Nepheton made me feel like a NeoPHYTE. The second I dragged an instance of it into Live it started playing a hokey pattern, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to clear the pattern and start anew. I pored over the manual TWICE before I found a little blurb about clicking the WRITE button to enable "editing." Trouble is, I associate the word "write" with recording (i.e. WRITE mode in Cubase is automation recording mode). I would have never dreamed..
After much ado, I could finally edit the notes and clear them out to start fresh. I am mystified as to why there are no EMPTY patterns available for fresh starts. I put together my own pattern and after a lot of tweaking, it began to sound decent..
NOT intuitive. Manual reads like a rough draft.
Sounds/Sound Quality
:
7
I'm not convinced the Nepheton is a sample accurate emulation of the 808 yet. I compared Rebirth 334 with Nepheton (both with minimal coloration) and Rebirth sounds better to my ear. What do you think? See if you can guess which is which. Go here to listen: http://www.motifcity.com/tracks/nephetonRebirth.mp3
What did you guess? The first beat was the Nepheton. The second was Rebirth. The third was Nepheton again. Rebirth sounds more authentic to me, especially the snare and clap.
One area Nepheton excels is sound tweaking -- VERY flexible. I was able to achieve the sounds I wanted (although I never was able to dial in that punchy snare sound Rebirth is capable of). Decent patterns as starting points too, although none of them sound like classic 808--which is weird.
To my ear, Rebirth 808 sounds closer to a real 808.
Overall Rating
:
6
Close but no cigar for me. To me, the authenticity of a TR808 is not there... and if it is, it would take a LOT of tweaking to get the sounds right. Out of the box you can't even come close to that INSTANT satisfaction you get with Rebirth. I might also note there is an issue with the snare as the only way to make it stand out at all is to accent it--which you shouldn't have to do to hear it.
Rebirth is FREE now (which is amazing) and still one of my favorite beat making soft synths due to it's awesome 808 emulation and instant gratification factor (it sounds like an authentic 808 on start up).
At this point, I'd recommend Rebirth over Nepheton. If somehow I am able to coax true 808 emulation out of it, I will be glad to update this review.
