In Italian, the word “NASTRO” means “tape,” and Soundscapes is the first installment in a fascinating new series that pays homage to the long-gone era of tapes and reels by bringing a potent 4-track tape machine experience directly to your computer. Have Audio sampled some of our favorite instruments for NASTRO Soundscapes to produce lead sounds, loops, textures, noises, and arpeggios. After that, we reprocessed the entire collection using a variety of antique tape machines, including walkmans, boomboxes, VHS, and rare cassette players, to recreate the original sound.
With 64 different sound sources, 4 playback modes, 4 independent tracks, 80 factory presets, 58 original IR effects made from old gear, and 4 additional FX macros to handle panning, EQ, compression, and distortion, you have plenty of room to express your creativity. Reel in your nostalgia and enjoy. The 64 sound sources total, each somewhat different for each track and playback mode, much as in the analog world! You can still change the playback speed for each of the 4 tracks to slow down, accelerate, and extend the reel, degrade the sounds, and alter the quality of the artifacts. Simply do the math to see that there are 1024 different flavors to choose from.
The game heavily relies on NASTRO’s Send FXs. To enhance Nastro’s potential even more, numerous hours were invested in inventing and perfecting distinctive convolution reverbs and IR effects. Have Audio captured both actual environmental reactions for organic outcomes and old plugins and equipment for wildly improbable big/small halo effects. There are also lots of tuned resonating IRs available for enhancing your patches with custom pedal notes.
When recording music on tape, everyone had to deal with undesirable side effects such a shaky frequency response, distortion, tape hiss, and noise. These historical objects are all long gone today and frequently sadly missed. In order to recreate the potential and “limitations” of their most cherished tape machines, Have Audio decided to create a Kontakt instrument. With this new engine, those that were previously restrictions can now be improved.
You will discover synthetic and hybrid samples that have been painstakingly processed by illustrious gear like the R2R Akai GX210-D, Sony TC630, Philips 4307, and rare cassette players like the National RQ210-S and boombox Grundig RR1140, to mention a few.
Normal, reverse, loop normal, and loop reverse are the four playback modes.
Three playback speeds—normal speed, half speed, and double speed—are available for each track in sync mode.
With the free mode, manually control speed
58 original IR effects made with tape and analog equipment
Pan, EQ, Comp, and Sat are built-in FX Macros.