Albino 3 Synth
Walda Caesar
Originally released in 2006, Albino-3 was the result of a collaboration between virtual instrument designer Peter Linsener and Dutch sound designer and musician Rob Papen. Now reborn as Albino-3 Legend and with Rob's in-house programmers now at the helm they have added VST3 support, different GUI sizes, and compatibility with the latest PC and Mac operating systems and processors.
The Albino-3's key features include high-quality presets in a wide range of styles, an easy-to-use interface, highly flexible oscillators, four types of stereo filters, an enormous range of processing and modulation options, a powerful, flexible arpeggiator and a layer system that allows you to combine up to four layers in one preset.
Still one of my go-to-synths. At least for "common" synth sounds like subs, noises and pads. Not so for lead sounds. That's a matter of taste though. It does also plucky sounds or percussions very well.
The overall sound is very good, although I wouldn't say excellent or outstanding. I'd say it doesn't have its own very unique character. That I find great for layering, because Albino never tends to overlay the original sound, but very often suits perfectly to the main sound.
On my daily walks I really like looking at the sky and at this time of year the low sun often casts a beautiful silvery light, at least in the northern hemisphere. This happens when it peaks through either grey cloud, or its edges or appears as a very clear and glistening type of low cast light that beams in. This was in part an inspiration for this tracks feel. The track was made on chilly evenings and weekends.
As a mastering engineer first and foremost working with all genres of music from rock, folk, classical to dance music I need a bit of a creative musical outlet. In spare time I enjoy getting involved with production and creating compositions and sonic soundscapes. I love getting cosy in the evenings and weekends and getting lost in sounds and my DAW. Trance music allows me to experiment a lot with interesting sounds whilst still having a framework. I also like its technical challenges. I love the wide and deep mixes (that still work well in mono) it allows you to produce with copious yet tasteful use of effects processing.
All electronic drums (kick/snare/hi hats/cymbal) and base synthesis sounds, both melodic and SFX type sounds heard in this track are made using Albino 3 Legend. For drums I used sine, white or brown noise or combinations for the kick. These were great fun to make and get to sit right and took quite a bit of time. The cymbal type sound in particular was tricky and I used a compressor along with the envelopes to get the overall shape over time a little more like a cymbal.
In a few cases melodic sounds used modified presets. I have used a few chopped up / filtered break beat top loops/rolls, some TAL Sampler time stretch effects and many different external effects processes, reverbs and delay to ensure extra richness to the composition and stereo sound field.
The basslines were very carefully processed with effects that also took some time. Basslines back then often had a little bit of delay and reverb and these take time to set up, they give the basslines extra dimension, richness, width, it makes them vibrant. It has to be done with care as delay and reverbs on bass can cause a muddy mess so you want to walk the fine line of expanding dimension and vibrancy whilst maintaining definition.
Each bassline also had a top layer for every bass note (also running live triggered) which was high pass filtered to leave just the mid range, this was sent to a reverb to add a little depth. This is also quite a common technique and also adds just the slightest of stereo width to the bass without muddiness creeping in. There are many ways of doing this with the same broad goal. A little more mid range presence and dimension.
Albino 3 is a flexible synth capable of a lot of different sounds. I was also thinking about giving parts a little emulated analogue channel character of their own which I enjoy doing. Quite small in their own right but just making some small variations which I am hoping has made a little deeper and interesting sound field. Many small variations can go a long way in the grand scheme of things.
Effects also play large part in this as having many unique effects per sound differenciates them from each other, different delay/reverb timings, decay and feedback and of course filtering/eq on the returns. I wanted a nice expansive sound field when and where desireable so I could get some nice movement going with effects.
I always tailor the width of the returns to make them sound just as I want them to and use a Nugen Audio plug in for that, sometimes a slightly wider and sometimes a little more narrow. For examples ping pong delays do not always need to be as wide as they often are and sometimes sound better when narrowed a little.
I used sample and hold LFO, the mod matrix, FM, VA sounds and also some of the digital waveforms available and some presets which were adjusted to suit this track. I also used some sample rate division from inside Albino effects. I automated the sample rate division effect and bounced multiple parts out and used the best versions for textures and atmospheres, these can create some formant/vowel like sounds if you get them just right. I was having some difficulty in making a specific sound I wanted that the Nord Lead II and also Access Virus can make.
I did use a formant plug in as an effect on an Albino base synth sound that I had made so the strong an short vowel like effects in the track were coming from a plug in. I felt it fair to give disclosure on this matter. The filters can become slightly harsh at high resonance and as the track is quite smooth in nature I avoided high resonance settings. I did attempt a formant filter but did not manage, though my attempts were short.
The risers, sweeps, transitions and phaser whooshes as I fondly call them were created from the ground up courtesy of the noise oscillator and sometimes some saw mixed in. Noise can be underestimated in its atmospheric capability so I put this to work in the track. However, care must be taken to sculpt the extreme highs as outlined earlier. You may find lots of high energy peaking above 16kHz all the way to 20 kHz, too much of that can be tiring.
Online it is very easy to say and not do. I always do, to back up and experience in reality what I write about. I finished complete and lengthy tracks that have used all the techniques I write about, so you can hear real world end results. There is a very big difference between actually doing things for yourself in practice and repetition. Anyone can repeat anything, but end results speak loudly. If I write about techniques I have used them, that brings about experiencial knowledge. If you want to finish more tracks yourself try this article it might help. I believe complete, finished works are crucial to real progress.
I have a very well treated room as one might imagine, and housed within are PMC IB1S (36kgs each, 10 inch driver, 3 way design) high end monitoring. I use a Crane Song Solaris Quantum DAC and a 1 Kilowatt Hypex amplifier, that is where mastering is performed. I have an analogue rack with a MANLEY Massive Passive amongst other analogue/valve devices and an ear selected plug in suite.
If you would like me to master your music I am very comfortable with every genre please do not hesitate to get in contact. I offer some of the lowest rates in the industry so everyone can afford real professional mastering and advice/feedback without sonic compromises. My professional audio engineering background/biog:
Bit of a big one but you could have a layers section like in the old albino synth, so you could have up to 4 different layers of vital, each one a different vital setup and then have a morphing option in the matrix to morph between 2 of them!!! Would be insane.
I know but it would be so good. If it were part of the pro version only I would defo pay for it, I would pay 100 for it. Must say even as it is Vital is already my favourite synth ever after using it for a couple of weeks.
It may have been released almost six years ago, but LinPlug's Albino 3 remains a favourite plug-in synth for many electronic music producers. Indeed, you voted it at number 12 last year in our poll to find the best VST plug-in synths in the world today.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that Albino 3 is going to be discontinued at the end of 2012. It's not clear exactly why this is, but a post on the KVR forum indicates that LinPlug has a new "classic subtractive synth" in the pipeline that will "accurately play back Albino 3 presets".
However, this statement has been contradicted by Rob Papen in the same thread. He claims that the new synth won't load his 2100+ Albino 3 presets and that he will "never allow" his presets to work in the new product.
There's further confusion surrounding the issue of support for Albino 3 once it's gone off sale. LinPlug states that it'll support it for "at least a year" (and offer a crossgrade option), while Papen claims that LinPlug has told him that it will be maintained for two years.
Version 2 duly followed, adding a powerful arpeggiator and new digital waveforms, and beefing up the effects. The latest version, Albino 3, carries the flag forward a further stage. Probably the biggest news for existing users is that each preset can be made up of four individual sound layers. This literally quadruples the creative possibilities when programming individual sounds (80 oscillators per note, anyone?). But it also makes up for the fact that Albino is not a multitimbral instrument, so if you want to run several sounds at once you have to run several instances of it. Or rather, attempt to run several instances, as Albino continues to have a large appetite for CPU resources. Linplug reckon that a well-specified Mac or PC digital recording setup should be able to handle about 120 digital or 75 virtual analogue oscillators' worth of sounds. In real terms, on a dual-processor Power Mac G5 running Pro Tools LE, I can't realistically run more than three instances of it.
c80f0f1006