BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and this is the Muse Research Receptor, something we’ve been waiting to get into the studio for a long, long time. IK Multimedia has been nice enough to connect this with Muse to get their version of the Receptor which has SampleMoog, SampleTron, Sonic Synth, and a variety of other very high-quality plugins that are useable with the Muse Research Receptor.

Now, one of the really cool things about the Receptor is they’ve built up a strong online community. You go to KVR Audio for example, you’ll notice that a lot of the plugins are listed as to whether or not they are Receptor compatible, which is very, very useful when downloading even freeware plugins to know whether or not they’ll work with this system, but this system is designed to work with many, many plugins and most work fine with it.

You’ll notice on the front here, I have my overall master level, volume knob. Now you’ll see in the front here, I have an input which can be for an instrument or a line-level signal, so you could feed a keyboard in there and do a normal input run and then apply effects to it, or you could send a guitar through and use something like Guitar Rig or other amp modeling software.

Notice on the front here, I have my parameter knobs. These are assignable to values. You can actually assign these to whatever values you want for realtime performance when you’re playing live. Right here, you’ll see we have the channel knobs. These allow me to access the different channels which we’ll see across here. Right now I have one open, but if I use my mouse, I can go over to two, and now if I go over to two here, you’ll see it says none, but if I go up to my window, go to source, and select SampleMoog, they’ll take a second to load. Now, I can also assign my source just by clicking here and it’ll bring my source information up.

Now, channel 2 should have something on it, and you’ll see number 1 here is SampleTron and number 2 is SampleMoog. Now, what I’ve done is I’ve hit single, and I can select the patch using the second knob down here. Something to notice as I select Real Strawb Flute is that it takes a second to load. Some of these patches, especially on the Miroslav, take a long time to load because they have large samples, something to know when using this live. You’re not going to be switching patches live. However, you can set up your mixer interface up here to have up to 16 different patches available, and within those you can actually go in and set your keyboard so you could have split keys for each individual patch, so that you can have split sections on your keyboard when you play live. What’s really cool about that is then instead of having to load patches while you’re playing, you can actually switch between the different mixers, and on top of that save this as a multi.

So opening this window, the multi window, I’m just going to, let’s say bank 7, I’ll click OK, number 1 is empty, save it, and so now it says patch 1, close. So now, I should be able to load that. If I go up to my window here, you’ll see I can go. I can select Sampletank 2, Chap Stick.

Okay. So now if I wanted to load my multi patch back in, what I can do is go up to here and just select bank 7 and patch 1 and it’ll load that in. So, let’s set up more than one instrument. In that way I can show you how this really works. If I go here, just bring in the Miroslav Philharmonik, wait for it to load, and now let’s reload patch 1 and then go back to patch 2. So, if I go to patch 1, you’ll notice we only have the one SampleTron. If I go to patch 2, I push close, and you will see that I have the Miroslav Philharmonik and SampleTron loaded in here. So, you can load up all 16 of your patches and have those sessions ready. If you go up here, you load up a bank and a patch and your whole multisession is recalled. Really, really cool that they allow you to do that.

Now, you can also access your effects busses here, FX A, B, and C, and then you can use the knobs to navigate between them. So like for effects B, I could tell it to -- Hey, let’s go back to effects B, I can select all of my plugins here. I have the CSR Reverb plugins which you’ll see in a another demo. I just selected it using my bottom knob here and press the button in and then it appears up in effects B. And now what I can do is actually go here and now I can control that plugin from where I’m at right now. I can hit mix or go up here, and here I am in my mix session. Now, you can also, again, control mix right here. So, you’ll see I have 01 volume, You’ll notice up here, my slider’s going down. Let’s cut to the screen and show that.

So right now I’m turning the knob volume on the interface of my Muse Receptor, and then I can go over using the knob to 02, and then I can control that using the exact same knob. Also at my fingertips are pan control, solo, send 1: This is an effects send which corresponds to the effects send on the mix control, and then I can also control whether the effects are pre or post effects.

Now, if you look on the back side of the Receptor, there’s SPDIF, you have ADAT, MIDI in-out-thru, a keyboard and mouse control, and also multiple USB slots. So, not only do you have your controller on the front here, which you’ll see I have a Yamaha KX25 hooked up, but on the back side you can put in flash drives, your own hard drive that contains your samples for sample-heavy plugins that wouldn’t necessarily fit on the Muse Receptor. You can also do things like hook up a USB mouse or a Wacom tablet.

There’s a lot that you can do using this. And also on the back side you’ll see that you have your standard audio in/outs, and on the front side again we have another input for instruments like a guitar. It’s just like plugging into an amp. It’s that easy. It’s really, really good solution for people who are looking to get rid of their laptop or not haul around a full computer onstage but have complete access and full control over their plugins. My name is Bill Holland and this has been Gearwire.Com with the Muse Receptor.