Falcon 3 is coming!! Leaked video?

[James Steele]

Kontakt's factory libraries are WAY better and more comprehensive, and there's simply no way to get Falcon to that point in the short term, or without a ridiculous investment in money and time. The third-party libraries clinches it.

I don't know... not to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian... but I have Falcon and UVI had 2 for 1 sale on their expansions, and I have to say I have found many of the UVI libraries to be very good without the "filler" that I find in many of the third-party Kontakt libraries. Those can be a mixed bag. I also like the UI of Falcon better, but I realize that's subjective.

Granted, Kontakt will always dominate with availability of third party libraries (unless NI completely blows it in some catastrophic manner). The Beta vs. VHS thing is over in that regard. But there is a place for Falcon and UVI... at least in my studio. Like I said, many of their expansions are top notch.

[stubbsonic]

I didn't realize it when I wrote that, but I was mostly thinking about things like drums, orchestral instruments, pianos, and other "real" band instruments. I don't think Kontakt has much variety with organs. And beyond that I have little basis for comparison.

When I did a quick scan of the expansion packs for Falcon, there were quite a few offerings with exotic synth stuff, but I wasn't drawn to any of the banks in the categories in the above paragraph.

[James Steele]

When I did a quick scan of the expansion packs for Falcon, there were quite a few offerings with exotic synth stuff, but I wasn't drawn to any of the banks in the categories in the above paragraph.

That's why it may be more that Falcon is a good augmentation to Kontakt. The expansions I tend to gravitate toward are the pad and cinematic stuff. I also have an old library that dates back to the MachFive days called Plugsound Pro that may be a bit dated now, but covers some of the basics. I think it's nice to have both.

[stubbsonic]

100% Agreed. I'll think of Kontakt for pre-fab acoustic kinds of sounds, and Vital & Falcon for synthy stuff.

I want to learn more about what's possible with those sequencers in Falcon. Ordinarily I don't care about such things, but there are a few pet obsessions I have that are non-grid based rhythm elements.

As an aside, and James, I think you can relate to this, the Ensoniq EPS/16+ had this brilliant architecture whereby you could apply changes to amp, filter, pitch, at the sample level, or the layer level, or the entire instrument level. And you could make changes to values at any of those levels either absolute, or relative. So if you set a bunch of different value settings, and wanted to nudge them all up/down, it was easy. This approach made building sounds so straight-forward.

Falcon has some of this concept in that you can change things at different levels within the hierarchy. My Ensoniq background makes me appreciate this more.

[James Steele]

As an aside, and James, I think you can relate to this, the Ensoniq EPS/16+ had this brilliant architecture whereby you could apply changes to amp, filter, pitch, at the sample level, or the layer level, or the entire instrument level. And you could make changes to values at any of those levels either absolute, or relative. So if you set a bunch of different value settings, and wanted to nudge them all up/down, it was easy. This approach made building sounds so straight-forward.

I still have my Ensoniq EPS16+ as you must know. I have the rack mount version with a whopping 2MB of onboard memory if I recall. It has the SCSI connector and thanks to Rubber Chicken Software I have a device called SCSI2SD that allows the EPS16+ to see an SD card as a connected SCSI drive. I got all my sounds transferred to that in the nick of time before my ANCIENT spinning SCSI drive gave up the ghost.

Anyway... it's was an absolutely brilliant bit of technology in its day and you will pry it from my cold dead hands. A while back the display went out and fortunately I know a brilliant tech in Arizona who repaired it for me. I just love the thing. I do have several instruments I managed to port over to Kontakt. Maybe someday I'll post here and share with the community. I actually managed to create a "library" for Kontakt of my EPS16 sounds that appears in the "Library" tab of Kontakt.

The one instrument, unfortunately, I was never able to port to Kontakt or another software sampler was a factory instrument called "Miami Brass." Absolutely loved that one and still pull it up on the hardware when it feels like nothing else will do.

[monkey man]

Had the original EPS with output expansion followed by the 16+ and DP/4.

Most-used sounds were Bass & Organ, Timeless and bits and bobs from the Claude Gaudette floppy disk.

Really miss those machines, especially the 16+ and DP/4.

[stubbsonic]

I knew James was in the Ensoniq world, nice to have a monkey in the fam.

The most memorable aspects of the EPS's for me were the spectacular ways it would crash. It would sometimes deliver the digital equivalent of a descent into madness. I really should have had an always on recorder for those moments.

[James Steele]

I knew James was in the Ensoniq world, nice to have a monkey in the fam.

The most memorable aspects of the EPS's for me were the spectacular ways it would crash. It would sometimes deliver the digital equivalent of a descent into madness. I really should have had an always on recorder for those moments.

I must have been lucky. Didn't have many crashes. Actually the only ones I seem to have is I power up the EPS16+ prior to booting the Mac. Somehow some spurious data is sent down the MIDI cable that causes the EPS16+ to spontaneous attempt to a bank to disk and then crash. I've tried muting data on the cable with Clockworks to no avail.

[monkey man]

Yeah, the original EPS crashed on me quite a bit, but not the 16+.

Maybe with the original unit it was the RAM and 8-output expansions. Who knows?

Definitely obvious that the 16+ was an evolved unit 'though. Perhaps the DSP power was more-suited to the task.

[stubbsonic]

The local sales rep thought it might be the power supply.

At any rate, I've often wished someone would create a truly modern version of the EPS with modern quantities of polyphony, sample RAM, flash ROM, and hardware controls (knobs buttons), also audio-rate modulation scan, and ways to insert/send FX at the sample/layer/instrument.

Kontakt and Falcon both have aspects of it. I'm sure I'll be able to do more after I dig into Falcon. Even with the scalable interface, Falcon is not very easily readable.