Happy New Year everyone! I hope you are all staying safe and healthy. Sadly, I came down with Covid over the Holiday break. I am recovering well, but in case you were wondering why we haven’t done any Livestreams or had as many videos lately, now you know!
I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts today on Ascension, and its expansion packs, which are currently on sale as one of our deals.
What is it, and who would find it useful?
Ascension is a ROMpler plugin. If you aren’t aware of what that is, it is slightly different from, say, a Software Synthesizer like Serum, Sylenth, Massive, etc. Both are VST/AU/AAX format plugins that produce electronic/synthesized sounds, but where the soft synth functions like a hardware synthesizer by creating raw sounds, a ROMpler simply plays back samples of synthesized sounds. They are different, and each has its uses. One of the most well-used plugins starting in the 2000s was reFX Nexus, Nexus 2, and now Nexus 3. These are all examples of ROMpler plugins, as opposed to synthesizers like Massive and Serum.
Modern ROMplers like Ascension offer sounds that are instantly ready to use and require no tweaking. Synthesizers definitely offer more control, but ROMplers can often sound better faster by using tailor-made presets based on genres and radio trends.
I often recommend ROMplers for producers and songwriters who want to get sounds quickly instead of fussing with knobs and dials and creating sounds from scratch. There is a sort of “instant gratification” with software like this, and it’s very appealing to those who maybe want to create a beat that complies with current chart trends, or a songwriter who wants to add simple piano, strings, or a dubstep style bass to their latest song they’re recording. There are tons of presets and sounds with the included expansion packs, and the quality is consistent and will give you professional results in as little time as possible, so you can focus on creating melodies instead of crafting sounds.
Fun Facts:
It’s called a ROMpler because the original format had samples played back from a ROM (read-only memory) chip, and they combined this with the world “sampler”. A ROMpler!
ROMplers became popular in the late 80s, and included legendary pieces of hardware such as the Korg M1 workstation. Many of your favorite video game music and sound effects were created using ROMplers in the 80s and 90s!
Enjoy this quick overview of Ascension and some of the sounds you can get from it, and stay tuned to this space for more!
-Brian
