East West Fab Four

INSTALLATION

On a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac running OS 10.4.10, installation was zero hassle. Well, except that I’d misplaced the document on which I keep all my license information; as Fab Four requires an iLok dongle (which isn’t included with the software), I had to dig out and provide my iLok serial numbers and all that rot. Upon successful installation of the content on the boxed CD, I went online to download the update that added bug fixes and RTAS compatibility so I could use Fab Four in Digidesign Pro Tools LE. It too installed without a hiccup and I was off. I had one unexplained and unrepeatable crash using standalone mode, but the RTAS version was rock-solid.

INSTRUMENTS

Standouts for uncanny realism include, well, pretty much the entire library — the guitar sounds are so authentic they could have been lifted directly off the original multitrack session tapes. A detailed rundown of the instruments and amps used is provided in the PDF manual, which is actually a pretty good read. Out of respect for copyright, none of the preset names in Fab Four quite match the names of Beatles songs, but they’re close enough that even casual Beatles fans will have no trouble ferreting out the sounds they’re looking for.

The amount of sweat, money, time, and love that went into the guitar sounds in particular is evident, as every note in each articulation is sampled at multiple velocity levels. Where there are rhythm riffs to reconstruct, clever use of articulation keyswitching makes some guitar-playing gestures a lot easier. The swing-eighths, alternating fourth-and-fifth rhythm riff common to so much vintage rock and roll is achieved on the “Revostortion” patch by playing one note in the right hand and rocking back and forth between the two intervals with a pair of left-hand articulation keys. This way, you can play that very guitaristic riff in any key using just a single octave of “playable” keys. Clever.

Predictably, right after the product’s release, a few haters surfaced in various forums. One online rant mockingly claimed that you could get better guitar sounds out of a General MIDI module. That is missing the point in the extreme. If one could gripe about anything, it’s that the guitar patches replicate particular songs’ signature sounds too accurately; they tend to focus on articulations used by the Beatle who originally played the part. As long as you want to stick pretty close to the kinds of parts the Beatles played, idiomatically speaking, you’re golden.

Technical editor Stephen Fortner, on the other hand, found the guitars to be inspiring for a broad range of styles, commenting, “I’d use the ‘I’m a Blackbird’ preset for my main guitar sound on just about anything that required a steel six-string patch. It’s beautifully recorded, and two of the 14 articulations are a sus4 chord and it’s major counterpart. Combined with the round-robin programming on each note, it let me nail that ‘Pinball Wizard’ rhythm guitar style from another great British band, the Who.”

Six drum kit instruments (plus a few patches where a new snare is surrounded by a duplicate kit from one of the other patches) are just as spookily authentic as the guitars — even the aforementioned haters praised these drums. Unlike the hapless TV producer in the film A Hard Day’s Night, you can now play the kit that looms large in Ringo’s legend without George Harrison telling you off: “Don’t touch his drums — he’s very fussy about his drums.” Here, there, and everywhere, the recordings are very clean, but you can hear the artifacts introduced by the vintage compressors and mixing desks. A set of cymbals heavily modulated by a Fairchild compressor can be subbed in for any kit’s cymbals if you choose; they offer that authentic, supernatural bloom captured on many Beatles hits.

For keyboards, we have the intentionally over-compressed “Lady Madonna” piano, a delicate Baldwin electric harpsichord, one Hammond organ registration, a harpsichord-like sound from the Lowrey organ used in the intro to “Lucy in the Sky,” a Clavioline lead sound, a harmonium, and the iconic Mellotron flutes everyone knows from “Strawberry Fields.” All are totally spot-on, and there really isn’t more to say. They sound just like they do on the original recordings — seriously. I have a complaint but I’ll say in the same breath that it’s a little unfair: East West didn’t apply the same obsessively detail-oriented approach to giving us Billy Preston’s Wurlitzer electric piano. What about more Mellotron sounds? Well, all of those are available elsewhere. Fab Four offers many specifically Beatle-y keyboard sounds not widely available before, but they aren’t really intended as a complete compendium of Beatles keyboard sounds. East West has already posted one instrument and sample library update for Fab Four in the support section of their web site, so here’s hoping future ones will expand upon the keyboard category. Fortner wished for “a preset that does a perfect layer of the piano from ‘Let it Be.’”

Also, though it’s easy to moan that the Beatles’ really wild sonic experiments (“Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite,” etc.) aren’t represented at all, it wouldn’t be feasible to include that stuff in a way that let you do your own thing with it. Can you imagine producing a whole chromatic octave of the “Mr. Kite” circus effects?

IN USE

I’ve been working on a cover of Nick Lowe’s “Peace, Love, and Understanding” (made most famous by Elvis Costello) and struggling to get the right drum sound. I’m taking it in a Motown mid-tempo direction that wants drums that are assertive, natural, snappy, and old-school. I own many drum libraries — for Reason, for Sampletank, for Garageband — but didn’t have anything that really brought the track alive until I got hold of Fab Four. The “Ticket To Drums” patch gave me a killer-sounding natural snare, with good selection of ruffs, fluffs, and rolls with which to humanize the groove, and the exquisitely musical response of the hi-hat added even more humanity. It was as if I had a mutant mashup of Bernard Purdie and Stewart Copeland playing Ringo’s kit. Nice! East West’s new proprietary sample-playback engine, simply called Play, offers a facility for mixing the drum “stems” via four little sliders (see Figure 1 on page 59); with them I could bring the cymbals and hi-hats down to a reasonable level relative to the toms and kick/snare, which were grouped on the other two sliders. I tried a little of Fab Four’s fantastic Artificial Double Tracking (ADT) effect on the kit, but the smear it introduced on the attacks and the swirly sound on the cymbals were not to my taste for this particular tune — you may feel differently. As for reverb, I found that I got enough implied ambience simply by raising the Stereo Spread knob to around 48%.

Next, I wanted an arpeggiated part on a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar for the B section (“And each time I see it slipping away”). This was where ADT and the reverb really shone — with a single pass, I could ape the effect of two passes on the Rick. The drift between the two parts was magically real and organic. The two sides of the stereo field took turns leading and lagging, yet there was none of that obvious cycling that would give it away as a digital effect. The part I had in mind could be easily played on the patch as-is; had I wanted hammer-ons à la the Byrds, or slides into certain notes, I’d have been out of luck, as these articulations were not played by George Harrison on “Ticket To Ride.” I fell in love with the sound of the guitar kissed with a little of East West’s Fat Hall reverb, plus and a half-second delay mixed about 30dB down.

For this track, I preferred the slightly clanky tone of the Rickenbacker 4001 bass Paul McCartney used later in the Beatles’ career over the tubby Hofner sound from the early days. I was playing kind of a funky part, and the mutes, thunks, and bips accessed by keyswitches (under the right hand this time, in an upper octave) let me pour a little more greaze into the proceedings. Because Paul always played with a pick, so does Fab Four. As long as I kept the note velocities in the lower third of the response curve, the pick clank was pleasant but not overbearing. I wished for a little EQ; maybe some shelving EQ modeled after Abbey Road’s famous EMI REDD console, because the Rick bass is not renowned for big bottom. Fab Four isn’t to be dinged for this accurately growly and 100Hz-lite portrayal, though, and it would be just as easy to add some junk to the trunk with a third-party EQ plug-in.

It seems the Play engine keeps most of the sophisticated, er . . . stuff under the hood; other than the envelope controls and those for the effects, there isn’t a lot that’s tweakable. No filter, no EQ, nothing “synthy.” Interestingly, the user interfaces of other Play products from East West loaded up on my Mac along with Fab Four. All three — Gypsy, Ministry of Rock, and Voices of Passion — display controls for the ADT effect developed for Fab Four, though they swap its onscreen position with the reverb.

CONCLUSIONS

If you ever wished you could cop Beatles instruments and recording signal chains and do your own thing with them, Fab Four will aid you in that, though it won’t give you fodder to emulate their more whimsical sonic experiments. In the manual, East West producer Doug Rogers says, “I don’t imagine that people are going to use this virtual instrument to make Beatles music; that wasn’t my objective. I’m hoping they’re going to use it to make new music.” You can certainly do this, though I do think the guitar sounds that make up nearly two thirds of Fab Four’s bulk are best suited for Beatle-y things, or more generally, for music that has a retro-Britrock vibe. In fact, for that, they’re unmatched anywhere.

The Beatles’ bass, drums, and keyboards are as impeccably recorded as the guitars, and useful in a greater range of genres. Fab Four absolutely nails the iconic instrument sounds created at Abbey Road Studios by the Beatles, George Martin, Ken Scott (who worked on engineering Fab Four, in fact), Geoff Emerick, Alan Parsons, and other producers and engineers on the Beatles’ many brilliant albums. It should also be said that if you’re looking to recreate the Beatles sound with other libraries, you really have to know what you’re looking for. In Fab Four, so much of the work has been done for you that, uh, all you need is love . . . of the Beatles! Bottom line: Fab Four is a major accomplishment, and entirely worth the money.

CLAIM CHECK

Doug Rogers, East West producer, says, “I always admired the Beatles’ ability to create unique sounds for the songs they wrote, something that in general is missing in much of today’s music. They evolved from very basic instrumentation in the early ’60s to songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ ‘A Day In The Life,’ and ‘Revolution 9.’ They weren’t afraid to think outside of the box with their use of Indian instruments, backward effects, distortion, and anything they could find to color the sound in a unique and sometimes bizarre way. It was this fascination that led to this production. I think the sounds are iconic, and different to what you usually find today, so that was the motivation for creating Fab Four. I searched the globe and found the exact equipment they used to create these sounds, and enlisted Beatles engineer Ken Scott, and Paul McCartney and Wings members Laurence Juber and Denny Seiwell to help recreate the sounds. If you find sounds in this collection that add a unique and interesting color to your music, we will have achieved our objective.”

For a complete list of the instrument presets used in East West Fab Four, visit www.soundsonline.com/fabfour.

SPECS

Virtual instrument dedicated to Beatles instrument sounds.

PROS
Killer, spot-on recreations of iconic Beatles instrument sounds. Drums are especially excellent. ADT effect sounds fantastic. Interface makes it easy to focus on musicmaking rather than engineering.

CONS
Could use a wider variety of Beatles keyboard sounds.

$395
East West www.soundsonline.com