HIT'N'MIX RIPX DEEPCREATE | REVIEW

Hit'n'Mix RipX DeepCreate

MSRP (UK) £  (US) $

Nick Jennison reviews the newest member of the RipX family. DeepCreate is a unique, easy-to-use, yet powerful audio system that inspires you to generate original ideas and create music from scratch using any instrument, MIDI/MPE controller, microphone or samples. DeepCreate integrates seamlessly with the DeepRemix stem separation & DeepAudio pro-editing and clean-up workflows. Use alongside your DAW or as a standalone app. What you see is what you hear, and once your music is inside DeepCreate, you won't need to think about audio and MIDI—they become one, inspiring boundless creativity!

Back when I was working full-time as a lecturer, one of the questions I'd regularly get from my first-year production students is "can I remove (X instrument) from this song? My answer was always the same: "unless you have access to stems, it's impossible". I'd usually use an analogy like "trying to remove the drums from a finished mix is like trying to remove the flour from a cake - unless you do it at the mixing stage, it's not possible".

Well, turns you you don't know what you don't know, and as the kids (translation: people in their 20s) would say: "we have an app for that now". RipX is the brainchild of the clever folks at Hit'N'Mix, and it essentially uses the kind of digital wizardry I haven't a hope of understanding to take an audio recording and separate it out into its constituent parts. Drop an AC/DC song into the "Ripper" and (after a minute or two of witchcraft) you'll get a version with independent tracks ("layers" in RipX parlance) for Angus, Malcolm, Phil, Cliff and Bon/Brian which you can manipulate to your heart's content. Doing a guitar cover of Thunderstruck? You can mute just Angus's guitar. Karaoke? Mute the vocals. Wanna learn exactly what Malcolm is playing? Solo his guitar. Wanna use the drums from If You Want Blood for a demo you're writing? Solo those.

RipX comes in a bunch of different flavours, with various levels of complexity. We've covered the most basic version ("DeepRemix") in a previous edition of GI, but today we're taking a look at the version aimed at musicians and songwriters: "DeepCreated". This edition keeps all of the same powerful features as DeepRemix, but with several new creative tools. For example, you can take any "layer" and manipulate the pitch, timing and inflexion just as you would in DeepRemix, but you can also use these layers to trigger virtual instruments. There are several of these included, but you can of course use your own favourite VSTi plugins too. For example, if you don't own a bass, but want to play a part in on a recording you're working on, you can play the idea in on your guitar, drop it by an octave, then replace it with an electric bass sample. Then, if you weren't happy with the notes you'd played, you can tune them, adjust the timing, change the pitches… whatever you can dream up.

If you're doing a cover of, say, a live Jimi Hendrix track, but you feel like the drums aren't punching hard enough, you could isolate the kick drum and blend in a sample with the original for more "oomph". Or, you could take the original kick drum and turn that into a sample, which you can then layer over another instrument. If you want the "When The Levee Breaks" kick as an instrument you can play, or just the guitar chucks from "In The Midnight Hour", you can grab then with absolutely minimal effort.

In to fully explain the feature set of this incredible piece of software in a written review would take the entire magazine, so instead, I'm going to recommend that you go grab a trial version and start playing around. The interface is simple enough that you'll have it figured out in minutes, and the results you can get will leave you amazed - I certainly was!

For more information, please visit:

hitnmix.com