KQ Sampei 4+

Very good SF manager/ player

I got this as a replacement for the ageing Bismark, and it has a lot to offer. At first I couldn’t work out why Sf fonts were not showing up in AU3 mode, but the dev kindly explained they need to be activated via in-app manager. (-: So far so good, nicely stable and well worth buying!

Developer Response ,

Could you check Sound Set Manager in Audio Unit? All imported sound sets are listed, may be "Inactive". I think you can activate them. The status that you just open AU is that one default sound set is loaded. You can save the current status as AU Default on the settings.

Stonking. Mega, does a simple great thing.

KQ Sampei was languishing around the middle of the alphabetical list of my AU plugins, neglected, when I decided to try and use more orchestral sounds. Looking for a flute in particular, especially in GarageBand on my iPad Pro, a few options turned up, like other soundfont players (same soundfonts get handed round!), the actual Apple GB flute, etc. Then I found, that as often is the case, faking it is sometimes better than direct approach.

So here is the single great USP of this for me: up to four parts/soundfont instruments can play simultaneously, and there are some basic effects like reverb, chorus etc, you can add directly inside KQ Sampei. So I combined the ‘pan pipe’ type sound, plus the flute one, and got a pretty good approximation of a ‘breath-ey flute’. That’s what I mean by fake it. It sounds lieka flute but one with the recorded breath of the player cranked up.

Now I realise the trick is not to combine a trombone with a bass drum (!), but to marry up a couple of quite similar instruments/soundfonts quit often, then use KQ Sampei’s individual layer/instrument gain adjustments, to get the mix right, to often come out as if a single instrument but simply with certain ‘characteristics’ amplified, quite literally.

And, GB of course only allows 32 tracks, which was not a limit with my old iPad Pro 2 in practice, because it ran into issues long before you had a complicated 32-track with FX piece, but now with a used purchase this year of a massively-discounted iPad Pro M1 of 2Tb SSD (thank you for inventing the M2 Apple), this is a useful Audio Unit that avoids the complexity of layering-up using the scarce resource of two tracks with other single-instrument soundfont players.

Add in any palaver with wanting mono and stereo control to the max, and you are talking 6 tracks if there is a specific layering of sound you are determined to have, and maybe slide around in stereo inside of Apple’s baby DAW on iOS/iPadOS.

So just like that, KQ Sampei has suddenly become a highly-rated Audio Unit for me, easily 5-stars. Obviously, I am now off to try combining say a trombone and a trumpet, or the lower end of a harp and a bass guitar (I am not sure if you can set the octaves of the individual soundfont instruments to be different while playing live?). It’s actually a great way to squeeze a bit more out of those 32 tracks in GB (or resources in Cubasis etc of course), and is now 5-star for me. PS I also did obtain other soundfont files to try, but actually it’s hard to beat the originals at this time.