EastWest Colossus Kontakt

I have been making music for 35 years, my specialty is jazzy new age - classical.

I installed Colossus on a Mac G5 running Logic 7.1.Pro. The one and half hour installation went smoothly, but the Colossus plugin would not appear on Logic's plugin menu because it failed validation. Rescanning it did not solve the problem; Logic just wouldn't load it. From that point I used Colossus in standalone mode only, where it worked well.

Colossus offers the following sounds:

16 acoustic drum kits,
10 acoustic guitars,
05 male choirs (ah, ee, oo...)
06 female choirs,
14 electric and upright basses,
45 electric guitars,
22 electric drum kits,
05 ethnic percussion sounds,
24 ethnic pitched sounds,
128 General MIDI sounds,
13 keyboard sounds,
19 new age sounds,
27 orchestra sounds,
20 pianos,
79 pop brass sounds,
77 drone sounds,
14 synth basses,
11 synth leads,
38 synth pads, and
24 eletric organs

a total of 469 sounds, the General Midi sounds being duplicates. Now, 469 sounds is the sonic palette of a single better Akai CD-Rom. Since some of those Akai Roms (e.g. the Greytsounds one) are going now for $29 on eBay, Colossus's $999 pricing remains something of a question. It is mostly the reason why I gave an 8 instead of a 10 to the collection.

The sounds are VERY clean and crafted with utmost care. Style wise they are a combo of some Mannheim Steamroller type new age, some techno / rave and some general bread-and-butter sounds. Originality-wise, I have these or very similar sounds on my Akai, and on the Akai an acoustic piano layered to an analog pad takes 10 Megabytes, not 1700 Megabytes as the Colossus's "Sundial" patch. With some Colossus sounds taking 2 Gigs, if you don't have that much RAM in your computer, you'll get sonic dropouts. On my dual 2.5 Mhz G5 I had to play the acoustic grand (Fazioli F308) monophonically (yup, one finger lines as in kindergarten :-) to avoid those dropouts. Unlike Akai patches, Colossus' sounds cannot be loaded into Logic's EXS sampler, nor into anything else, except Kontakt. The final kicker, even with one finger playing, I prefer my Triton's piano sound to Colossus's.

What to say to those who cannot use Akai CD-Roms? (People without Logic, or even an old $200 Akai sampler.) Well, if $999 is they have for a major gear overhaul, a used Korg Triton with its ass-kicking sounds, arpeggiator, sequencer (and the ability to load Akai S-1000 CD-Roms) would probably still open three times more musical opportunities than Colossus. This is, of course, just my personal opinion, I might be wrong. Happy music making!