As promised, here’s my take on Transfuser. Yes I know it’s a little late, but I felt that it was necessary to give it more time, even if this isn’t a full fledged review.

Please note:

I’ve filed this under review, but it really shouldn’t be concerned as such. I’ve had only two days playing around with the preview version, the same version you all have. If anything, consider this a Preview.

Interface and other yada yada…

I must talk a little about the interface. When I first saw the videos I was kind of put off by it. Not that it looked bad, but it looked messy. This is the one thing I have against Structure as well. It’s just too much. Too many windows, buttons and crap to keep in mind. I was relieved to see that Transfuser was easier (at least for me) to work in.

My first thought was that Transfuser looked like a ‘Guru meets Kontakt’ type of thing. I’m not sure if I can stick to that as you’ll see further down.

It is unstable. It even crashed Pro Tools once without any error messages at all. It messed up a few times. It didn’t claim to be perfect yet though, it has actually been said that it might be unstable since this is a preview version and not the final.

Something I most certainly didn’t expect: it’s actually ‘fairly light’ on the CPU! Even with some stuff going on. Despite some crashes (that I assume will be fixes for the final version) it seems to float very nicely. Not a hiccup when starting, stopping, previewing sounds, entering latch mode, etc, etc. Very impressive.

Sounds

I am very impressed by Digidesigns choice of sounds. Every AIR Team instrument I’ve tried sounds great, but some choices really strikes the right notes for me. First there was Hybrid, probably my most favorite sounding synth. There was something about those sound - and you really can tell this by just browsing the presets - that connected to me right away. I don’t know if synth purists like them (and I don’t really care), but to me they were the best I could imagine. I get almost the same vibe from Transfuser. The sound bank is just plain excellent. The first four or five presets I tried just struck me as great. In other words, huge props to the guy/-s at Digidesign that makes these sounds. Awesome work. And if you guys read this, feel free to contact me and share more of your presets

I find the effects very useful, and I wouldn’t be the least ashamed to use them instead of my regular plug-ins when working with Transfuser. Take this with a grain of salt, I haven’t compared the EQ or compressor against other compressors or EQs, but the more odd effects are very useful. As a fan of shit, I’ve especially enjoyed tube driver (OK, perhaps not the shittiest thing I could come up with), the vinyl emulation‚ and the spring reverb. The latter is perhaps the personal favorite. As you might know I think reverbs are boring, crappy in a non-shitty way, and just a less interesting effect than delays, but this spring reverb makes stuff sound so offensively shitty that I just can’t help to use it. I have no idea if it sounds like a real spring reverb or not and I don’t care. I just like it for what it is. I think it would be awesome if Digidesign simply decided to take up the competition with Santa Claus and just give us freebies of some of these effects as separate plug-ins.

Groove baby, groove…

I must say I was pretty happy about Transfuser after just using factory loops, sending them through some effects and draggin’ & droppin’ some own recordings in there to mess up. But once I sat down and started building my own grooves was when the “wow”-feelings appeared. I liked Fxpansion Guru for what it did, but Transfuser is on a whole other level. I’m not talking features here, I’m talking plain and simple intuitive control. I could just figure everything out because they seemed logical. M.A.R.I.O. is very cool too, and so is the simplifying knob. However, don’t get the impression that these things are Digidesign made. These type of randomization controls have been available in other plug-ins before.

What I did miss here was the ability to apply M.A.R.I.O. on the only selected notes in the pattern. It seemed like a logical function and I was disappointed to see that it didn’t work (or am I missing something here?). I also think there’s a little too much mousing around, but the more I think of it I think it’s inevitable.

A good question was asked by Chad in the comments on the previous post about what Transfusers unique features are. I think it’s definitely the right question to ask, but after playing around with it in 3-4 sessions I still can’t answer that question. Is it simply not unique? In the past I’ve been a big fan of Ableton Live and used it in a lot of sessions. I also have Kontakt 3, have used Structure a fair deal, and am definitely familiar with Guru and Synchronic. Here are my thoughts (still, may I remind you, just after 2-3 days use of Transfuser!).

• This shouldn’t be compared to Kontakt 3. Digidesign decided to release Structure, and that’s their answer to Kontakt 3. If I would compare the two I would say that Transfuser is so much easier to navigate and operate that NI should feel a little ashamed of themselves.
• Ableton Live is a separate DAW. That in itself makes a good argument to choose Transfuser over it. With that said, there’s obviously a lot of things Live can do that Transfuser can’t, because after all, it’s a DAW and not a plug-in. So again, this comparison shouldn’t really be made.
• Guru on the other hand is in direct competition IMO. There are a lot of things I can do in Guru that I haven’t seen or done in Transfuser. That doesn’t mean it can’t do it, it could might as well be me that haven’t dug deep enough in it. Again, this is a preview, not a review. On the other hand, there are reasons as for why I don’t use Guru all the time, not even for making beats. That reason being that it sometimes can feel like a workflow killer for me. If I used it more that might not have been the case. I think it’s a really good piece of software, but I can already now say that I’ll probably fire up Transfuser over Guru just because it’s so much more intuitive and easy to use. People who sit making beats all day might think differently, but that’s my feeling as a wannabe rocker with only the occasional beat-making in progress.

Finally, I would like to add what some already have pointed out, that this is most certainly a tool for more than beats and electronica. I ended up using three instances of it in a blues type of song yesterday. Sure, very progressive stuff, but definitely not a beat oriented thing. Let’s hope Digidesign didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and scared of potential customers by advertising this as a hiphop thing.

Digidesign