Best Service Nada – Zen State of Mind

Welcome to Music Nation TV. Eduardo Tarilonte is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable names in the sampling industry, thanks to his numerous contributions to the Best Service catalogue, his libraries often serve as cornerstone flagships for the brand. The latest release, simply titled “Nada,” aims to carry on this trend by venturing into a new and intriguing direction—ambient tantra music.

(Review updated October 2023) Weighing in at just over 9 gigabytes, “Nada” is certainly lightweight, showcasing an appealing GUI and user-friendly controls. Hosted on Best Service’s Engine 2 platform, this will pose a minor learning curve for long-time Kontakt users transitioning over. Nevertheless, a plethora of highly creative and aesthetically pleasing instrument libraries await exploration, making the time investment worthwhile.

Initial Setup and First Impressions

Installation is a little antiquated, requiring a manual download of five individual ‘RAR’ files, which then somehow you’ll need to understand what to do with. The installation manual does outline the process for guidance if you find yourself lost, but it reflects an era when software installation demanded a profound understanding of computer science.

Happily, everything went well – even after accidentally installing the required  Engine 2 core software to the totally wrong section of my computer – I managed to relocate everything correctly, the automated installer doing a great job of the process and tidying up after itself.

The 9-gigabyte main sound library downloaded lightning fast and was ready to extract by the time I had sorted out setting up the core Engine 2 software. Another quick RAR extraction of the sound library to the correct directory (this time), and everything was set.

Activation can be a little cryptic, its probably best you read the installation manual thoroughly as getting it wrong will lock you out of the software. You’ll need to copy & paste the code challenge correctly, much like the earlier stages, this just feels so old-school and outdated.

Of course, I accidentally exited the activation manager instead of clicking the accept button the first time I tried – and that counted as one of my 3 total activation allocations. Great start.

The Engine 2 Experience

Best Service’s Engine 2 software is a real blast from the past leaving me wondering if I had accidentally loaded the ‘Windows 95’ theme during installation.

Alas, no.

The very dated-looking interface is a hot mess of menus and difficult-to-read fonts. With no scaling option, I felt like a 90-year-old trying to read the phonebook, literally 5 inches from my screen peering at the horrendous layout.

Engine 2 loads either free-standing or within your DAW as a VSTi instance. Performance-wise, it loads fast and runs extremely well, notably snappier than Kontakt and East West’s Play engine.

It takes a few moments to navigate to the location for your sample libraries – cryptically located in the layers directory (!?), and then to decipher where MIDI and routing settings are defined. It’s definitely not a conventional layout, though once you get the feel for it there’s not much to go wrong and it all makes some degree of sense.

The Sound quality

The ‘meditational’ vibe is immediately apparent on the very first patch loaded. With lavish helpings of reverb and delay covering everything, creating a zen-like calmness from even the most percussive instruments, the bells, bowls, glasses and kalimba categories all provide surprisingly relaxing results, particularly when layered with one of the hundreds of meditation pads included.

As you can expect, there are tons of speciality instruments required for this type of music design. Soft gongs and flutes, calming voices and more wind chime patches than I thought possible.

The included piano category offers both acoustic and digital that both sound mediocre with limited dynamics, but with lush reverb applied and matched with clever textures they bring a gorgeous other-worldly sound.

The ethnic violin is a little too harsh for my taste, but the other stringed instruments, koto and fabulous Tanpura drones are wonderful.

In general, most instruments tend to have average dynamic control, often lacking velocity layering and round robins. However, surprisingly, in the context of the meditation theme, this approach works quite effectively in normalizing the dynamic response of all elements to a similar scale. Everything blends very well together, minimizing the potential for sudden spikes and ruining the meditative vibe.

Navigating the Library

The navigation layout is not intuitive at all. Patches are presented more as a hard drive of samples than a cohesive instrument directory. You must drill down through hierarchy folders to find ambiguously named files such as ‘Dream Pad 01’, ‘Dream Pad 01’ etc.

There are no sound previews, so each patch needs to be fully loaded to test. A lack of any kind of favouriting system also means you’ll have to just remember anything you liked.

Continued gripes about the platform aside, the presets are a total joy. The nomenclature does suggest patches get more complex as the number designation increases, which they do. So you can basically guess that ‘Bells 5’ will be more complex than ‘Bells 3’.

For me the more interesting sounds are to be found within the voices category. The female voices are all very nice with some beautiful moments contained in the major and minor phrase banks. The synth voices may be a little too synthy for my taste, but I can see plenty of scope for some music styles.

The overtone singing I found to be rather good and possibly the cornerstone element of the entire library. The dynamics and play-feel is excellent and offers plenty of flexibility in morphing the voice tone to your requirements. As with most solo elements in the library, a good underscore texture pad allows the simple voice elements (and vast amounts of delay and reverb, of course) to explore the space, slowly evolve or even jump-scare if you’re going for a darker horror theme.

I dread to mention that Engine 2 has a ‘pro-edit’ mode which allows you to dig into the sample architecture and alter the basic synthesis controls as you see fit, but for those wanting to experiment with the platforms capabilities you are in for a bad time.

The most unreadable font in the tinyest size, blue on black make everything almost unreadable on a modern, hi-rez monitor. The knobs only react to turning in circles like a real knob, so getting any degree of acuracy with your mouse in an excersise in frustration.

I gave up trying to work out how to assign MIDI CC or create basic macros. This section is really just best left alone.

Conclusion

Edwardo Tarilonte’s “Nada” stands as a sonic triumph, easily ranking among the best in the meditative new-age genre and arguably excelling in producing soft, moody textures, and ambient soundscapes in general.

It’s testiment to Edwardo’s ability to craft genuinely relaxing and immersive sounds that completely alleviate the total frustration of the woeful host platform.

I think this could be a very underestimated library, perticually since there is no demo available. Though its clearly focused on meditative music, there is a good amount of genra crossover potential here. I could easily see some of the tones fitting in well with fantasy orchestration, trailer music and even symphonic metal.

The library includes a good number of presets, although it would have been really nice to see some layered multis.

This collection is a wonderful addition to Tarilonte’s already amazing catalogue of Best Service sample libraries. Of course, new-age meditative music producers will be enthralled by this, and rightly so. However, there’s a plethora of discoveries to be made here for all genres. Priced at $199 USD, this library represents outstanding value, primarily due to the fact that the majority of its content is immediately inspiring and usable straight out of the box.

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