Soundiron Circle Bells

I run this on a Macbook Pro i7 with 8gb ram and an RME Fireface running Kontakt 5 as standalone or in both Logic 9 and Ableton 8. So far there has been no compatibility issues. Setup is very simple, just drop the files anywhere you keep you sampled instruments. Then open Kontakt and under the "Files" browser, locate files and load them up. As for configuration, this is as simple as it gets. The Gui offers no parameters to tweak other than the few Kontakt automatically places in there (tuning, volume, etc....). No need for a manual as this is a simple sample set pre mapped to keys. There are no real "typical" functions.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

So far, this sample set has giving me no issues. It is extremely simple so you should expect no problems. I have never had a crash and the few times I have had to save my ideas in a project, they always pop back the way I left them. I give this a big fat 10 out of 10. I needed some solid samples for a few "epic" rock tracks for a client so we split the cost and picked this up. It worked wonderfully, the samples are huge and full sounding, with wonderful sustains and releases. You also get a few different presets to choose from. These come in three flavors, Bow, Mallet and Pick. Within these three categories, you get various choices pertaining to the categories like "roll" for the mallets, "scratch" for the picks, long vs short sustains for the Bow etc... You also get patches with reverb on them. Instead of having a reverb parameter, the presets already have reverb on them. As far as I can tell, there is no wet/dry mix to these reverbs, they are just there for better or worse.

OVERALL OPINION

What I like most about this set is the Mallet category. They are high quality bell strikes that sound fantastic. They would fit in just about any movie filmed near a church or any audio track that wants that epic percussion feel (think "disarm" by Smashing Pumpkins). What I don't like is the pre mapped reverb. I don't hate it, as it can be handy if you are in need of a quick sample, but not having control of the reverb seems like a waste. It's not a huge deal because I just use the dry samples and add my favorite reverb hardware/software. If you need lovely, warm, huge sounding bell samples, you can't go wrong for $59. The precision and quality is excellent! The samples sound great and don't have any traces of looping or phasing in the release. I have used many "patches" in various synths and some loops to get this sound, but I was never pleased with the patches and using loops to get what you need usually means a lot of editing. I would definitely make this choice again. I have used this several times and never had any issues.