PROMO GIRLS: You're watching Gearwire.Com. [LAUGHING]

JASON: Hey. How's it going? My name is Jason. I'm with KeyToSound. We're here at Summer NAMM in Austin, Texas. The reason why we're here is to show off our flagship product, the NexSyn. The NexSyn is a hybrid instrument. It's a cross between a soft sampler and a synthesizer, and it's special in a couple of different ways. Let me show you a little bit here.

The modular design is a true stereo signal path where each oscillator, filter, envelope, and matrix system can be modulated in stereo. We have three oscillator sections featuring a bunch of different oscillator types and oscillators two and three can actually load up WAV files and sample presets. We feature a 4.2-GB sample library from Big Fish Audio, a great sample house in Valencia, California, and yeah we're pushing our product here.

Another strong feature about the NexSyn is the ability to go online and share your presets with other users. It's as simple as uploading as just like you would to your hard drive but you can save to an internet-enabled public folder which then users can audition and download the presets that you make. Each time somebody downloads your preset, you're given a monetary value called NetNotes, which you can start collecting NetNotes and exchange them for other sample libraries.

The NexSyn I believe is the first of its kind to feature an online browser so you can share presets and acquire them easily. Yeah, so that's pretty much it, that's what we got going on. I'm going to play a little bit of the arpeggiator section here so you can take a listen -- have a listen to the 16-step arpeggiator.

[JASON PLAYING THE KEYTOSOUND NEXSYN]

A really cool thing, if we were, say on a laptop and didn't have a controller handy, we can also trigger and audition sounds right from the keyboard that's built into the NexSyn.

[JASON PLAYING THE KEYTOSOUND NEXSYN]

This makes it really great to preview presets designed by others in a coffee shop without losing your creative mojo while you're working on a track. One thing I personally hate is having to stop my creative process just to be able to find that one certain sound I'm looking for. With the NexSyn, there's no hesitation, there's no pause. You can just call up the NetNotes directory and peruse the thousands and thousands of presets submitted by other users until you find what you want, or you can download it and proceed to tweak on it as you see fit.

Of course, the NexSyn is MIDI enabled so that you can assign MIDI controller messages to knobs such as the cutoff filter. Right here, we have the knob there on our controller, so when we play we can actually perform with it in real time, and we don't have to have our hands on the mouse. If you notice, the knobs also are rendered in 3D Studio MAX. We took a lot of time and put a lot of thought into the interface so that it's easy to use and it's customizable so that your workflow isn't hindered. You can have multiple sections opened or closed as you go through your sound design process, and then once you have your sections mailed for that preset, you can simply collapse them and be able to still access the values of each module from the front. We find this to be very effective in composing and arranging when you have a lot of instruments open or you have a lot of modules happening with your sound design.

So, the efficiency of the NexSyn is also something we like to brag about. We do have a DSP knob here that allows you to select how much resources you want the NexSyn to use. But we found that even playing 128 oscillators with 16 filters that you're using about 15% of the CPU, and yes the NexSyn runs on both Mac and PC, it covers all platforms, and it's also a standalone instrument. So, check it out. We're KeyToSound, you're watching Gearwire, live, Summer NAMM 2006.