A Review of the new Playa Hip Hop VST Instrument
What's Up all,
I purchased the Playa Hip Hop Vst Instrument from Guitar Center for $99 after checking out the online demo videos. However, after installing it and using it, I found a lot of limitations that shuts down a user's flow and creativity.
I submitted a review/complaints to Sonivoxmi for suggestions to improve their product. You can read what I sent them. But in the meantime, I want to make you aware of some things so you can make a better decision as to whether you want to cop this or not.
Peace,
JAB
[The message]
Greetings All,
Subject: The Playa Instrument (A New User's Feedback)
Although the product is new and different, there are a few issues that I hope you address in future updates. As of now, although you have my money and investment, there are some things that makes Playa limiting in production uses.
1. There is no browser. Selecting patches is terrible. I have to manually dig for a patch from the windows pop up menu everytime I want a new patch, layout, etc. There needs to be a down menu (e.g., web browser bookmarks menus, Spectrasonics, Native Instruments, UltimateSoundbank, and most other vsts). It stiffles creativity to have to manually dig through folders, only to find a patch that is not appropriate and go through the tunnelling all over again.
2. The way the kits are mapped out across the keys are non-inspiring and hinder creativity, because all of the kicks are contiguous, followed by contiguous snares, and so on. So if I load a kit and want to play it like a drum machine, I have to stretch my fingers out beyond recognition in order to play a kick, snare, hi hat, and cymbal live. Most plugins map kits as one kick followed by one snare, then hi hat and so on. Then repeat with the next set until the keyboard is full.
3. Please add midi-out capability like alot of other synths (e.g Fxpansion GURU). The fact that this thing can play mapped chords is awesome!!1 Being able to drive other VSTis with Playa's midi out in a host would be awesome and open up Playa as a goto tool for production.
4. When someone maps a controller to the pads (like a MPD24), the user should be able to save these settings. Instead, a user has to manually re-learn all of the pads to a midi controller EVERY time a new instance of Playa is reloaded or a project containing Playa is reactivated.
5. There is no mix and match capability to build you own kits with the internal bundled samples. It's already bad enough that users can't import there own samples. The user should be able to at least get a kick from one kit, assign it to a pad, then get a snare from a totally different Playa kit and assign it to another pad, and then be able to save that as a User Kit. This would open up Playa as a serious contender. Currently Fxpansion Guru and Motu BPM let you do this.
6. The transpose and the tone knobs essentially do the same thing. Just one is more of a cent vs. octave pitch knob. I was hoping that we would be able to transpose the actual keymapping of the notes for a loaded instrument. We can use the pitch wheel for what the knobs are currently doing. Now if you let transpose knob be able to independantly change the pitch of an individual pad or key, then this would be more useful.
7. The device does not let you play both Pads and keys simultaneously. if the user has a drum pad controller (e.g. Akai MPD24) and a midi keyboard, he/she could play the drum pads but also play the remaining unmapped keys via the midi keyboard in a host application (e.g. Sonar, Cubase, etc).
8. The note retrigger feature is a good start, but it does no good for recording midi notes in a host. It would be nice if the retrigger for a pad was set to, for example 1/32, then 1/32 midi notes should be recorded to midi in the host. Instead it just records one long note when you hold down the pad. So on playback in the host, you just hear one note. That's it. No retriggering is played back. It defeats the whole purpose of using it to compose in a host.
9. An of course, if the user could import his/her own samples to make his/her own kits (or at least purchase add-on kits from SONiVOX MI), that would make the product more attractive.
Overall, this product has good potential. But I hope you seriously consider my inquiries/suggestions. I only want to help. Especially since I am a user now. I feel to constrained with the tool to use it too often. But with these enhancements, it would definitely be a better tool. I think any user would be willing to pay for an upgrade to get these enhancements. I know I would. Thanks for your time and support.
Best regards,
JAB3