Review of Synth-Werk – Going Kraftwerk all the way, or…

August 5, 2011 · Posted in Uncategorized 

We have had the pleasure of reviewing the recently released sampler studio called Synth-Werk from Best Service, powered by Yellow Tools’ Engine 2. The product was originally released under the name Kraftworker based on the clear fact that with this sample library you get basically all possible sounds inspired by this legendary band.

Our first impression, browsing through this 7,7Gb large sound library, is impressive. Every possible sound we are trying to think of, coming out of the old studio in Düseeldorf, is there in one form or another, everything neatly packed into its respective catalogues; i.e. FX, Bass synths, Vocoders, Lead sounds etc. Although with a slight overweight, in our opinion, on the more recent sounds pertaining to Kraftwerk’s latest release – the “Tour de France soundtrack”. Which in no sense is bad, since a lot of those nice metallic echo based sounds used on that album will easily fit any modern electro, EBM, synth pop, trance type tune.

The favorite section is probably the one containing bass synths since they faithfully reproduce several of those unique and groovy synth bass lines that has made the sound of Kraftwerk so characteristic. This especially true, for several of the sounds using arpeggiator or other types of sequenced rhythms. Forest Kingdom is also something that sounded completely amazing to us. If you compare it with TITAN which we would assume is one of Best Service’s top selling products, and somewhat marketed as a “Kraftwerk-sounding product”, we can easily say that Synth-Werk takes you 10 miles deeper into the realms of the Kling Klang studio. One possible down side is the way all these samples have been named. They are more or less all, in each catalogue, branded as Bass 1, Bass 2, Bass 3 etc, making it very difficult to track which tunes you wanted and, thus, making the built in search function pretty useless.

Synth-Werk comes bundled with Engine 2, a sampler instrument developed in cooperation with Yellow Tools, a product that can either be used as a VST or stand-alone instrument. The use of Engine 2 is something that has generated a lot of debate on various forums (like KVR for example) – stating that they would prefer a more general wav library so that they can use any program they like, e.g. Kontakt, and that they do not need yet another VST or that it makes their systems slow. We loaded Engine 2 onto a MacBook Pro and can at least from a performance perspective say that Engine 2 was easy to install and ran smoothly all through the trial period.

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