With my M1 now up and running, I started looking for some new sounds and synths to add to my collection. An ad for a new subscription version of UVI’s “Falcon” showed up in my email so I was curious to see what it offered. I was already familiar with UVI, both through their fantastic Drum Replacer Plug In (which I own) and the free version of Falcon Workstation (offered briefly in Pro Tools).
For $ 24 a month, you have access to a giant library of sounds that operate within the Falcon Plug In. The sounds are in categories that are similar to those in Kontact. The well designed website and portal make it easy to check out the different and varied packages that are available, from synths to realistic sounds. You can download and try, then uninstall if you don’t like.
I jumped in with the ” Augmented Orchestra” which is a very dynamic and dramatic set of orchestral patches that sounds like it’s aimed at the film and video composer. Many of the patches are very deep and the evolving motion of many of them can be manipulated with the mod wheel.
The next group I downloaded was ” Soul Drums”. The title is somewhat of a misnomer, as many of the kits are outside the realm of ” vintage” that the name seems to suggest. There are loads of kits and drums and they sound like they were put together with a lot of care and imagination. I love that the kits are both quirky yet usable. It’s fairly easy to customize your own kits too.
Their actual Orchestral download was a mixed bag. Full orchestra patches are impressive and definitely useful, the section patches are good but the solo instruments don’t seem to be up to the task. In fact, I found the Logic factory patches to be more realistic.
The Falcon Workstation is also included and this collection leans heavily towards ” synthy”. Some very impressive and useful (and unusual) sounds that really come alive when you manipulate the macro controls in real time.
So overall, Falcon looks like a winner. One caveat: this is NOT an intuitive synth to program. The structure and routing are very deep.
