Product: Native Instruments Bandstand
Price Paid: USD 129
Submitted
03/02/2007
at
02:39pm
by
KT
Email: KTHawk<at>wildblue dot net
Reviewer Background
:
Film composer, blues musician, own studio, mucho gear.
Ease of Use
:
7
The whole registration/copy protection kabuki dance is tedious, but they do prompt you clearly. After that it's a piece of cake. Must point out that the DVD would not run on my modern, normal DVD drive (everything else does) and even a second exchange DVD disc wouldn't run on it, so I had to do a return-rent of a USB DVD ROM drive from Circuit City just to load the sucker. Sigh. But this program is worth it. Especially for $129 (B&H).
Sounds/Sound Quality
:
10
This is the best GM set anywhere's, bar none. Good midi files sound like actual guys playing live. It's that good. It has over 2 gigs of samples, and many sound stunning. Organic, rich, real. Plus they include this very sophisticated Reality Engine reverb (they call it just "Real") which is amazing. The samples here are pulled from a wide variety of very expensive individual instrument packages and they sound like it. For recording, you can just grab a lot of these samples and run with them as is, no bargain-basement midi cheese here.
If you went after some of these individual instruments in separate sample sets, it'd cost you thousands. Here they are presented in simplified form, but they sound awesome. And if you find you need that perfect B4 or Boesendorfer, you can always buy just that. But I think you'll find an awful lot of what you need for backing tracks is already right here. And that includes for critical recording. The basses and drums alone are staggeringly good.
Overall Rating
:
10
Here's the deal: you could bring this on a laptop to a gig and use it as a fantastic backup band, it has its own midi player. Folks who paid a lot of money for products like the Fender G-DEC series might find their money much better spent here: this GM set blows away anything in that series by a longshot. It makes even average midi songs sound great. Of course, it's also a plug-in for pretty much any music software. For me, I use it to help build midi tracks for blues-oriented songs. A good blues midi song you grab off the net just explodes in this sample set.
It has too many features to mention: Killer reverb, chorus, EQ, mixing, etc etc. If you're looking for a jam buddy who won't get hammered and hit on your GF, Bandstand is your guy.
