If you are into performing or producing digital music, you’ll find everything you need and more in the Total Studio 2 Max collection from IK Multimedia. This collection of software will enable you to create more than 16,800 sounds in addition to recreating 350 guitars and bass sounds, and then mix and master them just like a professional sound studio. And, you can do it all from your laptop.
Total Studio 2 Max comes with six major digital music features:
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Synthesizer
Creating the majority of unique music sounds in the last 100 years, synthesizers revolutionized modern music. Now you can recreate the exact sounds made popular by 17 of the most classic synthesizers made.
Acoustic & Electronic Instruments
Why settle for a couple Midi piano sounds when you can have 1,000’s of instruments at your fingertips. SampleTank 3 includes 4,600 different instruments in 21 different categories. More than 7,400 drum sounds are available along with full kit loops played by renowned musicians. 3,500 MIDI patterns are included.
Cinematic & Orchestral Instruments and Groups
With the included Miroslav Philharmonik 2 collection, you’ll add another 2,400 orchestral instruments with strings, woodwinds, brass, voice, drums, and percussion.
Iconic Bass Guitars
Physically modeled bass guitars will bring realism to your creations like nothing you’ve seen before. MODO BASS is included, giving you maximum control over your bass guitar sounds with unlimited customization options.
Mixing and Mastering
Two separate collections with have you fine tuning your pieces to their ultimate conclusion. T-RackS 5 suite gives you a mighty selection of 38 processors – including EQ’s, channel strips, limiters, amplifiers, reverb, echo, harmonics processors and special metering. The Lurssen Mastering Console is the official emulation of Lurssen’s own unit enabling digital delivery mastering (DDM) for iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and more.
Guitar Amps & Effects
Why spend tons of money on expensive guitar amps and gear when you can duplicate them all in the guitar and bass tone studio. Replicate 350 pieces of gear including 90 classic amplifiers, 102 cabinets, 8 pedal effects, 26 rack effects, 19 studio microphone collections, 29 vintage and modern speakers, 2 tuners and a simulator for dual 3D microphone positioning. Top it all off with an eight-track recorder and looper.
Be aware
With all this awesomeness, I would caution you that you are going to need a great deal of hard disk space and a great deal of time to set everything up. I opted to download everything to an external drive that I could use either at home or on the road. All the assets took up just under 350 GB and it took me days to download. Opt for the USB package if you can. It’s the same price and will save hours of downloading.
Then there’s the installation of all these packages. Again, it took days to register each package, unzip the contents and install each. Each individual sound library needs a separate installation. You may not need everything immediately, but if you want it all installed and ready to go from the outset, you need a good few days.
Lastly, I’d suggest turning off Norton Antivirus if you have It installed while you are loading the programs. It caused many of my installations to fail, so turn off Norton during the installation process and then turn it back on again after the install is complete.
Not ideal on high-res screens
For those of you with high-resolution screens like my 3200×1800 Lenovo Yoga 900, the Sample Tank & Miroslav applications will not enlarge to fill your screen, so you’ll need to lower the resolution of your display or the app will only take up a small fraction of your screen. You can enlarge it to 850×770 pixels by right-clicking on the Sample Tank icon and checking the “Override High-DPI scaling behavior”, and by setting “Scaling performed by” to System. It’ll still be small, but more readable.
To be clear, Syntronik, MODO BASS, and T-Racks 5 are all adjustable, and, I’ve been told that they will be addressing Sample Tank & Miroslav in an upcoming revision.
Once you’ve got Total Studio 2 Max all installed – you’ve got the makings to create the next best thing in music. Enjoy!
Disclosure: IK Multimedia provided the Total Studio 2 MAX for us to try out for this review. Opinions, as always, are strictly our own.
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