Analog Burners

Roland R-MIX Audio Processing Software

I’ve mentioned a few times about how I’m a huge fan of Roland (and Boss) and their gear, and once again they have released another incredible product. This new release is different than most of their traditional lines of gear (besides Cakewalk), as it’s software instead of hardware.

Employing Roland’s Veriphrase technology, which is included in almost all of Roland’s latest and greatest instruments:

Because conventional samplers shift formant and pitch together, they are unable to convincingly transpose a single sample to other pitches; the result is often a “chipmunk” effect. To compensate for this, users must rely on multisampling—a process that requires not only large amounts of memory, but time, effort and experienced professional technique as well.
Solo encoding mode of VariPhrase, however, allows formant and pitch to be controlled independently via MIDI. Therefore, multisampling is no longer necessary to convincingly play a single sample across a range of keys. Users can change a sample’s pitch and time without destroying the formant simply by adjusting the Pitch/Time knobs and leaving the Formant knob unchanged. Or, by manipulating only the Formant knob, it is possible to achieve a level of expression never before possible, such as muting a trumpet sound naturally. With VariPhrase technology, musicians can work more efficiently, spending less time sampling and more time making music.

The software also includes a brand-new 21st-Century feature, the ‘V-Remastering technology’. Working together these create visual color-coded ‘clouds’ of frequencies from the audio and you can see the “energy and harmonic matter as the song plays”. This allows you to isolate and edit frequencies of the song, adding FX or changing the pitch for remixes or stripping the audio out completely for clean sampling. You can also remove vocals from songs, or remove the instrumental from a vocal track.

For my use it would be ideal for removing drums from bass or horn lines or any other sample. For a long time people who sampled had to separate elements using Hi/Lo pass filters and EQs, which works to an extent, but doesn’t allow you to separate instruments or vocals completely. That new technology combined with piecing it together with the Veriphrase tech so you can spread those isolated samples out across your keyboard/sampler pad banks in a non-destructive pitched mess is pretty unbelievable. Game changer.