The unrivaled, non-aliasing Expression Engine™, exclusive to Cakewalk Instruments, is at the heart of their unparalleled sound quality and capabilities for creative expression. Expression Engine provides rich resampling and synthesis, while simultaneously giving access to extended performance characteristics of sound programs.

Years of Development

rgc:audio was acquired by Cakewalk and René Ceballos joined the Cakewalk Instruments’ development team in January of 2005. René has been developing this instrument engine technology for years under the industry-acclaimed SFZ name, expanding its functionality, and optimizing audio quality and performance with each new incarnation. Expression Engine represents the evolution of rgc:audio’s SFZ engine, providing improvements in sound quality and efficiency of the engine, while advancing expressiveness through an extended definition list.

Multifaceted Instrument Engine

Expression Engine is a multifunctional engine, providing capabilities for several types of synthesis under one hood, including multisample rendering, wavetable synthesis, REX playback and manipulation, waveguide synthesis, and an extensive DSP library of effects.

Unparalleled Sound Quality

Like all digital instruments, Expression Engine’s audio engine relies on extensive audio resampling in order to generate musical instrument sounds. Expression Engine’s resampling leads the industry in clean, anti-aliased real-time sound production for multisample audio playback. (Aliasing is unfavorable digital distortion inherent in the process of resampling).

Expression Engine’s wavetable synthesis provides a resampling technique, which comes even closer to anti-aliasing perfection than multisample rendering. Wavetable synthesis utilizes a single, inaudible, one-cycle waveform, and through analysis and resampling, synthesizes this sound across the entire MIDI key-range. This process is similar in some respects to the propagation of simple waveforms found in analog modes of synthesis.

In addition, Expression Engine provides waveguide synthesis, a form of physical modeling that simulates the properties of real acoustic environments.

Sinc Interpolation Off		Sinc Interpolation On

Extended Performance Characteristics

All Cakewalk Instruments utilize the SFZ definition file to provide a detailed and flexible method by which to communicate with the Expression Engine. While the SFZ definition file is primarily used for defining multi-sample regions, it is useful for all types of synthesis as it can also be used to define any performance characteristic of a sound program. In addition, Expression Engine equips Cakewalk Instruments with incredibly sophisticated, yet elegant EG, LFO and other modulation capabilities.

Here’s a short list of some of the notable capabilities that the Expression Engine can add to a Cakewalk Instrument:

• Samples of any bit depth (8/16/24/32-bit)
• Samples at any sample rate (44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz, 384 kHz)
• Mono or stereo samples
• Compressed samples with the capability to combine compressed and uncompressed samples in the same program
• Looped samples
• Unlimited keyboard splits and layers
• Unlimited velocity splits and layers
• Unlimited regions of sample playback based on MIDI controllers (continuous controllers, pitch bend, channel and polyphonic aftertouch, keyboard switches) and internal generators (random, sequence counters)
• Sample playback on MIDI control events
• Unlimited unidirectional and bidirectional exclusive regions (mute groups)
• Unlimited release trigger regions with release trigger attenuation control
• Unlimited crossfade controls
• Body damper simulator
• Waveguide synthesis per bi-directional delay line

Capabilities for Unique Instruments

Depending on the feature set of a Cakewalk Instrument, it may access all or a subset of the capabilities presented by Expression Engine technology and the SFZ definition to meet its unique needs.

For example, let’s compare Dimension Pro which emphasizes the Expression Engine’s multisample rendering, to Rapture which emphasizes the Expression Engine’s wavetable synthesis. Dimension Pro provides sample offsets, key shifting, and vector mixing, useful for working with multisamples, and mixing instruments and program variants. And Rapture uses oscillator multiplication and detuning to create fat sounds, along with step generators for trance-style modulation. In addition, instead of a vector mixer, Rapture provides an X-Y controller to extend parameter modulation even further.

Rapture product pages

Dimension Pro product pages

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