This manifested itself in the rather too frequent glitching of audio, and there was a very noticeable time lag between the clicking of buttons and the required function happening. Indeed, Brass 's built-in CPU meter never seemed to drop much below 40 percent when playing one instrument at a time, and averaged around 60 percent when using ensembles in Riff mode. Even when running Brass as a stand-alone application, it wasn't long before the cooling fans were running at Warp Factor 5, a sure sign that the processor is under heavy continuous load. But right from the off, the program left my 1.8GHz G5 iMac huffing and puffing. The minimum spec for running Brass on a Mac is quoted as a 1.5GHz G4 (for a PC, a 1.5GHz chip is also quoted as the minimum). While everything in the garden might seem lovely and brassy, I need to sound the first of several sour notes and highlight just how very processor intensive all this activity is. Even so, they are still a cut above your usual lifeless synth or sample-based brass patches. By comparison, the saxophones seemed to be lacking in credibility and in sheer brassy presence. My initial impressions were that the trumpets are uncannily realistic and that the trombones were pretty good, and though less 'realistic', were certainly interesting as virtual instruments in their own right. Running through the presets is also a good way of getting a sense of the range that Brass is capable of. The trumpet, for example, comes in 30 flavours and with names like 'Classical section', 'Classical soloist', 'Jazz soloist', 'Latin lead' and so on, you get the idea of the kind of general sound each of them is intended to represent. With each of these instruments you get a number of presets to choose from. In Live mode, you can only play one instrument at a time: three main types are offered in the left-hand menu, and a natty spinning graphic of the currently selected one appears in the main window. But as you never quite know just how much earth, wind and fire goes into tweaking product demos, I was looking forward to giving these horns a blast in the comfort of my own studio. Particularly as the impressive audio demos on the Arturia web site (indicated that the company were not just blowing a load of hot air. So it was with great anticipation that I listened for the postie's tread on my front path as he brought me Brass in its box.
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