
Thor, baby!
I just got my hands on EWI master Bernie Kenerson's "Thor ReFill Volume 3".
Bernie Kenerson's new "EWI Refill Thor Volume 3" is an awesome collection of Thor patches for Reason 4 and 5 that every EWI player should have in their arsenal. One thing about patch libraries is that they reflect the taste and sensibility of the author. We now know that Bernie is one creative player. His patches sound like nothing I have heard before (but in a good way!). I kept asking myself - "How did he come up with this one?" Read on for my quick review...
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a "one man band" combinator patch using a number of DR Octo Rex devices and an NN-XT for our lead sound. (Reason 5 is required for this tutorial). Dr Octo rex is great in that you can load up to 8 loops and control playback of these loops from a midi keyboard, or in our case, a wind controller. Furthermore, the loops will "cut over" to the next one on the bar, beat or 16th note.
This is just a simple organ style patch. Somewhat inspired by the Brecker patch used on the song 'Cajun' by Steps Ahead. If you want to hear some amazing EWI playing, the album 'Magnetic' by Steps Ahead has some great playing by Michael Brecker. They did a tour promoting the album and they made a live album - it's called 'Steps Ahead Live in Japan'. Highly recommended if you like jazz fusion.