Hollow Sun Novachord released for Propellerheads Reason & Record

Well, I’ve been sitting on this one for weeks, but today I can finally reveal that the Reason & Record ReFill version of the totally unique Hollow Sun Novachord library is now available for sale at the Hollow Sun website.

I’ve mentioned the Novachord library a number of times before in this parish, so I won’t go into any detail in this post about it’s existence and how it came into being. However, in my last post, I mentioned I had had a sneaky peek at the Reason/Record ReFill and how nice it was. Well, things have moved on greatly since then and the release candidate that I have been trying out is even more astounding! Hollow Sun enlisted the services of Matt Black to do the Reason conversion. Actually, I say conversion…. don’t expect to see a patch by patch replication of the Kontakt library. Oh no. A new lease of life has been given here. Whilst some of the patches remain, Matt has taken time to utilise the many unique features of Reason to come up with even more sounds, some authentic, others using the Novachord samples as a basis for creating new and wonderful sounds. Excellent use has been made of the Combinator instrument.

For those who don’t know Reason, the Combinator allows a user to build one new instrument using any or all of the existing instruments and FX tools within Reason. For example, you can layer numerous NN-XT patches, tag on a bunch of FX, run it through an arpeggiator, via some Mastering tools and bundle it all up into one easy to control instrument.

In doing this, Matt has also employed the excellent Thor polysynth to take care of numerous routing and filer combinations. This also makes the ReFill only compatible with Reason 4.0. There are also collections of the standard samples, as well as all the FX Combinators that you can use in any way you wish PLUS a whole section of sounds running through some of the superb FX that come with Propellerheads excellent audio recording application, Record.

Users who have both Reason & Record (and let me tell you, the two programs seamlessly fit together and form a music making powerhouse of impeccable quality) will be able to take advantage of these. Users who just have Reason will just be given a message informing them that these particular gems are for Record users only. A nudge, if any were needed, to go buy Record!!

So, all of these things combine to form a fantastic and very inspiring set of sounds. Here’s how Hollow Sun categorise them….

The Hammond Novachord Refill for Reason & Record is structured into the following folders:
• Classic Novachord
Here you will find the classic tones of the Refill, in Combinator
format
• Esoteric Novachord
This folder contains Combinator patches with a modern
twist, including layers, splits and FX
• FX Patches
Subfolders for all the FX modules used in the Combinators:
Line 6 USB Pod Farm (see opposite) , Reverb,
Scream, Thor Modulation Matrixes and Combinator FX
• NNXT Patches
All the tones saved in *.sxt format, plus additional subtle
variants of some patches
• Novachord Amped [R+R]
Combinator patches with Line 6 amp tones for Pod
Farm. Please note that as of writing, these patches will
only load within Reason+Record.
• Samples
24-bit, 44khz samples.

I’ve been noodling with these for a while now, and they really do work well within the Reason/Record environments. The immediacy and simplicity provided by the host environment allow you to really start exploring and tweaking these sounds VERY quickly. I’ve been playing around with these in combination with the Fairlight Legacy library and getting some very satisfying results.

Visit the Hollow Sun store now to pick up your copy of this unique ReFill now!!