Aug31

Written by:Bruce Richardson
Tuesday, August 31, 1999 6:00 PM

SurReal is a straightforward, single-page, polyphonic virtual MIDI module.

SurReal comes complete with the entire Reality sound set, and utilizes the same synthesizer engine and solid latency / polyphony performance that makes Reality such a workhorse. It also may be the very best and cheapest software Soundfont player available. Soundfont support by Seer Systems is as good as gold, and was developed and tested in cooperation with Emu. You can be sure that a Soundfont played on SurReal will be exactly as its author intended.

Reality users may well find themselves looking towards SurReal as a simple, low-overhead way to load up a full MIDI port. For live performance, it's a great front end.

The interface consists of a sort of space-age looking panel. An included sequence player can hold a list of imported sequences - very handy for all sorts of applications. There is a built-in reverb and chorus section, with several presets from which to choose. Below are sixteen channel modules. Clicking the turquoise "patch strip" brings up a dialog with all the patches from the loaded Bankset. Others can be imported. Changing patches within the dialog instantly and seamlessly changes the sound currently playing in that module - quite nice. One can leave the dialog open in a live performance, for instance, and simply change sounds with the scroll keys.

Another great feature of SurReal is the "vari" knob on each module. Depending on how a sound was originally programmed in Reality (or in the included content), the Vari key can be mapped to any number of different controls for realtime manipulation.

For users that would rather not design sounds, but are still looking for high quality soft-synth performance for their productions, SurReal works. It's a far better alternative than hardware modules that cost up to six times its price. And even users that already own Reality may find SurReal to be a valuable addition to their system.

Seer Systems is preparing to launch a SeerSounds series, similar to the BitHeadz Black and Whites product. This will provide SurReal users with another great source of content.

For more information go to http://www.seersystems.com

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