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Micro-Q Dance & Techno Construction Set

When it comes to presets for synths, there are two kinds of people. Thos who hate the thought of using someone elses sound, and therefor program everything themselves. Then there are those who want to stick to the composing itself, and sometimes modificate a preset a little. Personally I belong to the later category, and therefor it was great fun to go through Waldorfs latest soundbank for their popular Q and microQ. The sounds are delievered on a CD, and there's pretty many sounds: 300 singles, 20 multis and 2 drumsets. Just like the title of the soundbank tells, these are sounds for modern dance music, where dancemusic means techno, trance and house. I've split the sounds into five different categories: lead, bass, pad/strings, drums and arpeggiators. There should also be considered that the sounds are tested on a microQ and the polyphonic limits which I will get to in a minute, do not affect the big Q in the same way.

LEAD

This category is by far the biggest, and from those 300 patches, about half of them are lead sounds. The programmer Steve Kay is without doubt "in love" with stacked leadsounds, and then often with a touch of FM synthesis. There's a wealth of this kind of sounds, and even tho it might get a bit boring at the end it's nice to have lots of different variations. This type of sounds are after all pretty common within the popular trance styles. The synths possibilities in wavetable-synthesis are used too, although not as much as the FM synthesis. But there arn't just stacked FM leads. DeepHouse is the name of an awesome organ which suits great in any loudsounding house-track. Overall there's somewhat a 'bad' (<- not that bad, but couldn't find a 'gentler' word). collection of good organs, but there's a lot of other very good sounds. Lovely 808 state-ish 5thleads, Kraftwerk-inspired blips, acid/303 sounds and fuzzy synthbrass- sounds for those right housechords.

BASS

The bass-sounds aren't as 'wide' as the leadsounds, but are clearly made for the trance/techno music. There are fat pulse-basses, 90-s inspired manchesterbasses, subbases and bassounds that are cut and distorted for dark 'death techno' ;) The programmer even showed his love for FM here, but not at all as clearly as in the lead category. There are in fact traditional analog bass-sounds, but not so many. A usual problem when it comes to choosing bass is that it's hard to know which sound actually works in a mix. When I do housemusic I usually often use a pretty discrete, but '?? stuffed?' bass. There even are a few of those in this collection, even tho they aren't too usual.

PAD/STRINGS

I am as known crazy about -??- pads and analog strings, but unfortunately the pads in this collection was somewhat of a disappointment. Not that they're bad, but in my opinion there are too few. Overall the sound is good. They're airy and take "much space". This is both for good and bad, and most of them work best where the mix isn't so filled with other instruments. Here I by the way ran into a surprise. I actually found a pad which "clipped" a few voices when I playd a couple of regular 7s (?) This means in clear text that the voicepolyphony is down to 8! Talk about pushing the limits of the machine.

DRUMS

A big plus with waldorfs Q-family is that they have specialy soundstructures for drums (something I really miss in my much-spoken-of Virus). With the soundbank there comes two drumsets: Dance drums and Kicks & snares. Even though I expected something more from these the quality is good. Especially the bassdrums have nice punch. Snares are also OK even tho there are fewer than the bassdrums. What I was somewhat disappointed about was the hihat section which didn't have those classic 909-hats. When I worked with those new drums I mostly used only the bass-drums (?) and used hihats and cymbals from Native Instruments Battery instead.

ARPEGGIATORS

The maybe nicest thing about the whole Q-series are the arps which probably are the most advanced on the whole market. (Ok, not taking into account the Korg Karma). Contrary to it's brother, the Waldorf XT, the Q-series can play chords with arp-rhythms, something that this soundbank uses a lot. Among the best arp sounds there are "???" (nice) basslines that more or less feels like finished songs, or rhythmic 'noice'.One of the absolutely greatest experiences was a really cool sound that I've almost forgot exists. It was a modulated acid'blip', just like the acidmusic sounded until the 303 took over and "???" all acid music. Lovely 'plastic' and totally useful today. Even tho the Q's arp sounds impressive at the beginning, it sometimes is hard to really use these in a song. A tip is then to let your Q synth send arps to another synth so it's easier to get right sound-image without loosing the rhythm.

FINALY

As always with soundbanks there are tops and bottoms, and thos goes for the Dance & techno construction set aswell. It covers a wide range of sounds, and covers really much of the modern dance music. This has to do with that it actually contains over 300 sounds, which - when you listen to all the sounds - are pretty darn much! The tops in this collection are a handful, and are really, really great. When I had gone through all the sounds, no less than 100 sounds from my "??" microQ bank got to ???? for sounds from the Dance & techno construction set. Many of the greatest sounds have a 'special' characteristic which makes you suspect that the programmer intentionally are trying to drive the music styles ahead, which as known are really really hard. If you do it wrong, it all becomes "pancakes" (lol). Luckily, it's not like that with the Dance & Techno Construction set. Can be used by microQ or Q.

Translated to english by Alex Odden