Making Waves... is it a sequencer, a sampler, a synth ???.... er........ By rights, this should be one of the most well known and talked about programmes going right now...... You thought Hammerhead was good ??..... Lemme tell you .... Compared to this baby Hammerhead seems like a total lamer......Just check it out ....For a start with 'Making-Waves' you get 64 note poly !!... YUP no 6 notes maximum stuff here !!
What else do you get ?.... Well, imagine hammerhead crossed with SAW +......That just about describes this programme........Now read on & drooool....!!!!
As you can see from the piccie, 'Making-Waves' comes with Tracks/Info to the left, and sample composition data to the right.....it works similarly to Hammerhead...... You select a track and click on the 'NAME' box (A).....
You can then select a .WAV file (no raw files here), and it will be assigned to that track.
Ok.........If you look across to the right of this chopped screen-shot, you'll see the far right section with the circles in (D)....this is the bars section where you piece together the patterns.... So as you can see, there are two sounds assigned at (A)....a kik-drum, and a hi-hat... each is playing 4 bars (D), and the whole thing is shuttling between bar 1 & bar 5.....But how does the single sample play in each bar ?..... This is determined by the lefthand section.....If you look, you can see (B) the 'LENGTH' box.....Here you use the arrows to scroll up or down....this changes the resolution, and as it does, the amount of 'Squares' in the (C) box changes.....In the picture above, the kik-drum is playing 4/4....and the hatz 8/4....You just fill in the squares...simple huh ??!!
You can step between one whole bar down to 32nd notes.....then just fill in the boxes where you want notes to play within a 4 beat pattern, or leave rests.
One compaint about Hammerhead was that you had no velocity info, so the only thing to do was to use 2 kik-drums, and make one louder than the other for your velocity...... This really was a problem, as Hammerhead had only 6 notes/samples to start with... Well, not with 'Making-Waves'....... Cos you've got 64 juicey samples to play with, so it's a snip to use 3 or 4 hi-hat or kik or whatever samples assigned to different tracks to create your perfect velocity pattern....You can always solo those 3 or 4 tracks, then stream them to .WAV file & re-import that wav file as a sample loop to save memory if you like to add many more parts to the composition !
Ok....so you create your patterns either with individual samples, or with loops or with both.....But there's more !!
Lets say you add a loop to the track as you would with hammerhead, but it's too slow or fast for the pattern you are making.... Simply use the PITCH control to tune the loop up or down.... If you know the original tempo of the loop, then simply set it's BPM in the BPM box, and then when you adjust the whole track tempo, the loop will follow as in Hammerhead.... Cool huh ?......You can also use the 'OFFSET' to adjust the start time of the sample, this trims the start from the sample in divisions of milliseconds..... But there's yet MORE !!........You can use the software to also play a single sample as a melody !!!.....
All you do is keep increasing the bar resolution or 'Length', and after 32nd notes, it changes to a musical note icon.....Just double-click on the icon, and you are into the 'Melody' section....
Yup.....as you can see, you get a nice grid to work on, there's even a yellow cross-hair that follows the mouse around so it's easy to see where you are placing a note.....So, just sling in some notes (here we are working with a simple TB-303 one-shot sample.....and hey presto......check it out...
CLICK HERE, 
to hear what the above screen sounds like....remember, this was done with 4 samples...(3 hits, and 1 loop), in about 10 minutes... Remember the 303 melody is coming from a 1-shot sample !!....and you've got another 60 tracks to play with above the 4 I used !!!!!......
So... stop yer whining, there's yer Hammerhead alternative, it works just the same but much much better in my humble opinion, and you've also got a nice CPU monitor added to check the strain on your processor, it saves as a song, or you can stream to audio to create a .WAV file (with registered version) plus plenty more things you can do (read the manual/help).... and ain't it a killer people..... Steinberg are gonna have to come up with something pretty damned good to beat this for facilities-to-price ........ only 50 quid to register....that is rediculous !!!......so....
Get it downloaded.... PLUS.....you do get a few samples with the demo, and there's a selection of .WAV files to download in the files area of this site, .....aint I good to you or what !!?!!!
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