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A First Look at Hybrid: Digidesign’s New Software Synthesizer
This week’s installment of the Pro Tools
Corner has us taking our first look at Hybrid,
Digidesign’s latest addition to their RTAS software
instrument lineup. If you read our recent installment on
Xpand!,
Digidesign’s free workstation plug-in, you may recall
that it featured a clean and easy-to-use interface. Fortunately,
in a world of seemingly endless knobs and sliders, Hybrid
has also been designed to provide an efficient and intuitive
way for building and tweaking interesting patches without
a lot of hoopla.
For this discussion I have created a stereo Instrument track,
assigned my MIDI controller as the MIDI input and loaded
Hybrid as the first insert.
To load a preset into Hybrid, you would click
on the Librarian menu and choose a patch. However, we are
going to roll our own patch here, so just start with the
default empty preset.
Hybrid is based on a combination of subtractive and wavetable
synthesis, and provides two synthesizer elements per instance,
called parts. The two parts can be used in combination in
a variety of ways as a single patch, and saved as a preset
as you would any other plug-in in Pro Tools.
Hybrid is divided into seven pages. Click on the Presets
tab to access the Presets page which is used to load presets
into Part and B:
• For Part A double-click on 16 Keyboards and then Amped EP
NH.
• For Part B double-click on 01 Soft Pads and then Rich String
Pad.
Make sure that both the Part On A and Part On B buttons
are active at the bottom of the plug-in so that when you
press a key on your MIDI controller you hear a layered sound
consisting of an electric piano and string section.
The Part pages enable you to adjust the sound generating
parameters for each part:
• Click the Part A tab and set the Pan to L27 in the Amplifier
section.
• Click the Part B tab and set the Level to -12.5dB in the
Amplifier section.
Hybrid boasts two independent step sequencers; one for each
part, which can be used for creating sequences/phrases, arpeggios
and control sequences for modulation:
• Click the Part A Sequence tab and choose Step Sequence for
the mode, the tempo of which will follow the tempo of the
session.
• Click and drag above or below the sequencer line for the
desired steps on Note display to create a pattern of notes.
• Shift-click and drag over the sequencer line on the Velocity
display to shape the dynamics of the phrase.
The Effects page contains two Insert effects for each part,
and a Master effects section:
• Increase the Drive on the second insert for Part A to 67%.
• Choose Rotary Speaker for the Effect on the first insert
for Part B.
There really is a lot going on under the hood
with Hybrid, and although though this wasn’t an exhaustive
exploration of all that Hybrid is capable of, you can see
just by working with these basic concepts how easy working
with this synthesizer really is. There are plenty of patches
and presets to twiddle around with and get started with (check
out the 00 Meet Hybrid presets, it is chalk-full of great
sounds), but shaping your own sound really is as easy as
what we have looked at here.
Listen (hybrid_patch.mp3) to the patch, make some of your
own when you get your hands on Hybrid and let me know what
you think.
Pro Tools Tidbits for the Week
- Digidesign has
released Pro
Tools HD 7.1cs5 and Pro Tools LE/M-Powered 7.0cs5
- Sony is
offering a promotion that anyone who purchases either
an Inflator or
a TransMod between
6th March 2006 and 31st March 2006 will get the other
for free when registering their plug-in on Sony’s website.
These are both, really amazing plug-ins! (RTAS and TDM)
- Waves has
added Doubler to the Native Power Pack, Broadcast & Production
Bundle, Gold Bundle, and Platinum Bundle. Owners of
these bundles who are covered under the Waves Update
Plan are
now eligible to receive Doubler for free. (RTAS and
TDM)
If you have a Pro Tools related question that you would
like me to take a shot at answering or have any feedback,
please send it to scott@audioMIDI.com. I will do my best
to select the questions that seem to stump the most people.
As always, stay tuned to the audioMIDI.com eNews for the latest reviews and new product info.
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