Monday, December 30, 2019

REVIEW: CARBON VIRTUAL GUITARIST by UJAM

REVIEW: CARBON VIRTUAL GUITARIST by UJAM



Ujam CARBON Virtual Guitarist is the latest guitar instrument designed for the heavier side of music production and much more.


OVERVIEW 



GUI
(This is the Main Interface where you'll will find  the player mode, instrument mode, amp styles, effect controls, and phrases.)



This is the Instrument Mode, where you can play the guitar note by note.




This is where you select the Factory presets within multiple categories.





REVIEW


Ujam Virtual Guitarist CARBON is a sample library created mainly for implementing heavy metal guitar riffs in your productions. You get everything from modern djent metal grooves, traditional metal, and even some experimental surprises. Using Ujam instruments within your compositions saves a lot of time because they're phrase-based with the option to play the instrument note by note. However, once you start playing with the phrases in real-time, you'll have a hard time stopping because they're so much fun.

CARBON is the heaviest guitar released by the Ujam sound design time. They recorded an 8 string down-tuned guitar in the creation of this library. They also used an array of sound design techniques to manipulate the sounds into something unorthodox. It's almost like getting two libraries in one.


Let's take a look at what you get.


The GUI is a simple straight-forward design with no complicated sifting through pages, so you never lose inspiration. The built-in amps sound amazing with a lot of sculpting capabilities to find the sound you want. Carbon contains five ultra-amp simulators called 'Paranoid' (A tamer, warm sound almost resembling tape saturation.), 'Disturbed' (Typical hard rock setting with a warm and mid-based sound), 'Insane' (The bridge between classical hard rock and hi-gain metal.), 'Rabid' (Aggressive hi-gain distortion, punchy bottom end and piercing high-frequency quality.), and lastly 'Lobotomized' (The most dangerous weapon of choice that acts like an amp stack). The amp selection knob is called Condition and next to that is a Severity knob where the distortion effects in each amp can be adjusted all the way to zero to 666. Now that's a scary severity number, right?


You get an abundant amount of guitar styles and presets. There are power chords, melodies, bass riffs, and melodic riffs. Other effects are the focus, filter, mode, and finisher dials. I’m not going into detail over these, but there is a wealthy number of attributes to customize the sound and save it as your own preset.


To play Carbon, you must first understand the layout on your midi keyboard. If you press middle C, you won't hear anything, because all the guitar notes and riffs begin farther down the keyboard. Player mode starts on G#4 through D#6 with the ability to play riffs with a single note or chords. There is a legato feature turned on by default in the single-mode that allows for melodic riffing. The chord mode allows you to play power chords and so forth with the legato mode turned off. The instrument mode begins on G#4 through F#6. On keys C#1 through F#2, the keyswitches contain a variety of Common Phrases. C#1 is a silence (stop playing) key, and the rest are phrases. The black keys have Ends and Shreds articulations. After the common phrases, you’ll see the next category of phrases called Style Phrases beginning on note G#3 through F#3, which is another (stop playing) silence key. There are a total of 11 phrases for each style phrase that you can integrate perfectly with the common phrases. You can also drag and drop midi phrases in player mode, but you can read about that in the manual. The final thing I want to cover is the Layer-er feature, which gives you the ability to stack up to four guitarists and place them around a virtual sound stage. For instance, there is a left and right Layer-er mix, which can be altered by the Distance, Spread, and Separation control knobs. It's an excellent feature that allowed me to quickly nail down my mix using multiple guitars with no time at all. 


Virtual Guitarist CARBON is more than gratifying, it’s a high-octane tool that will add powerful heavier guitar riffs to any cinematic film score, video game, or other musical production. Also, if you’re a drummer, you can record the guitar patterns right into your DAW and use them as drum practice tracks. There’s plenty of bang for your buck, and I highly recommend a purchase, and they even offer a Free Trial.


Carbon is fearsome, plays precise, sounds strikingly realistic, and is a remarkably gratifying virtual guitar experience. 


5 out of 5 Stars !



















Written by Steve Montgomery
(Infinite Mindscape & Darkmood)




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