Sounds and Presets: A 90s Classic Gets Rebrained – New Sounds for the CS6x
Plus free sounds for Soundbox and Metallic sounds for Kontakt
4,4 / 5,0 | 
Yamaha’s CS6x often gets overlooked. A synth tech from the Midlands, U.K. reckons we need to re-evaluate our perceptions and treat it as a classic.
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Yamaha CS6x Rebrains by ACM
Ah, the 1990’s. What a decade it was. A real musical mish-mash that took the back end of the eighties and ramped it up to its messy conclusion. Rave, Brit-Pop, Grunge, Shoegaze, Acid, Techno… it was definitely the age of genres. We loved to pigeon-hole everything.
And that included our synths. In 1996, desperate to cash in on the explosion in electronic dance music, the likes of Yamaha realised they’d shot themselves in the foot by ditching analogue just as the kids were now demanding it. They weren’t alone and they had to come up with a solution.
Taking their now mature AWM2 sample libraries, they rooted around for the most analogue examples they could find and squeezed them into boxes with lots of knobs, arpeggiators and sequencers. Yamaha’s first fruit of this venture was the CS1x. This funky slice of blue sported filter controls and sounded pretty nice and I recently reacquired one after foolishly selling it some years ago.
The rekindling of the CS moniker caused some anguish amongst the cognoscenti. How dare Yamaha besmirch the lineage with such digital follies? Yamaha persisted, and the AN1x followed shortly after, appeasing many with its brilliant VA engine. A CS2x appeared shortly after, and just as the decade and century was about to end, they dropped the CS6x, and suddenly, it seemed Yamaha had got the formula right.
The CS6x, and its rack-mounted sibling the CS6r, utilised a hugely expanded AWM2-based sound source but added a raft of really powerful and useful performance features, plus phrase sampling and the ability to expand the tone generators via Yamaha’s PLG plugin board system. You could AN and VL engines and more, and have a real EDM powerhouse.
Anyway, enough of the potted history. Reputable British synth tech Keith McHard of ACM, is a fan and reckons Yamaha didn’t complete the job when it came to creating the sounds for the CS6x. It might be fairer to say that he thinks that it can be brought bang up-to-date and much more relevant in the 21st century it so brilliantly ushered in.
Keith has spent the last few years, in between his day job activities, sifting through the hundreds upon hundreds of source samples to craft new patches and performances that breathe considerable new life into this sleeper synth.
Using the extensive sound-shaping tools that adorned the CS6x, like its brilliant filters and FX, Keith has now crafted four CS6x Rebrains, as he calls them. Loading each one delivers a completely new set of sounds that are simply brilliant. Just check out the demo videos! Rebrain 4 contains 128 new patches, 128 new performances and 2 new drum kits. Simply copy the file to the memory card and install directly from there.
Keith isn’t set up for the more traditional way of buying things online, but if you email him, he will send you details on how to order and pay for your new libraries. Rebrain 4 has just been released and Rebrains 1 through 3 should also still be available. Each Rebrain costs £35 GBP via PayPal. Contact Keith at kmchard@yahoo.com.
Mechanica for Audiomodern Soundbox
I mentioned Soundbox in an edition of our Synth Journal column recently. It’s a twist on the concept of software samplers that sees you pay for the content, not the player. It’s a very clever idea that just got a shot in the arm with the release of a free library!
Mechania is completely free, contains 1GB of data and works directly in the Soundbox application/plugin. It’s an unashamedly electronic collection of sounds that fully exploits the sound shaping and performance capabilities of its host.
That host, by the way, is also MPE compatible and also affords you the opportunity to manipulate the library. If you were sitting on the fence regarding Soundbox, this might just be the thing that pushes you over the edge.
Download Mechania and the Soundbox player for free from the Audiomodern website.
Metal Pipes & Plates for Kontakt by EduPradoSounds
Everyone loves a good clank and clunk. I’m of the generation that fully embraced Depeche Mode whacking the heck out of anything metallic for the sake of a great beat or melody line. Our parents lamented the times when we’d merely smack the crap out of pots and pans. Now we were running drumsticks across radiators!
Oh, happy days! But now, sound design companies like EduPradoSounds have taken all the fun out of domestic destruction and have given us ‘Metal Pipes & Plates’, a sound library for Kontakt. Unlike my Mum’s favourite domestic plumbing appliances and dustbin lids, EPS have taken properly tuned pipes and plates as their sample source.
What they have come up with is something far more melodic than we did back in 1984 and eminently more useable, I’d wager. Each pipe or plate has been struck with various different objects, including soft and hard mallets.
The custom scripting includes a built-in sequencer so that you can properly explore the rhythmic elements of the library as well as the melodic. To their credit, this library not only works with the full version of Kontakt and is fully NKS compatible, but also comes with a free copy of Kontakt Player 7!
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2 responses to “Sounds and Presets: A 90s Classic Gets Rebrained – New Sounds for the CS6x”
My computer hasn’t got email, please could the author include Keith’s fax number.
It sounds just horrible to me… Motif is way better in every single aspect.