Spitfire Audio BT Phobos £269
Electronic producer BT joins forces with the orchestral icons for this ‘polyconvolution’ collab plugin. Jono Buchanan checks it out
Phobos is Spitfire Audio’s first plugin instrument. Until now, its array of sample libraries have been reliant on NI Kontakt, and through their ever-growing collection, the company’s identity as a creator of some of the most coveted tools for media composition is well established. Phobos marks the next step in the company’s evolution, with composer/producer BT the inspiration behind its methodology.
Phobos is touted as the world’s first ‘polyconvolution’ synthesizer. The word ‘convolution’ may bring reverbs to mind, but Phobos applies convolution technology differently, sending four Source sounds through a trio of Convolver units (W, X and Y).
Source sounds are chosen from a list of Tonal or Looped options, with Looped automatically conforming to your tempo with the pitch remaining the same, and Pitched mapped across your keyboard to respond to your playing with the correct note, sampler-style.
The real fun starts with the convolution modules. These aren’t the basic clinical impulse responses you’re used to from convolution reverb, instead drawing on the same sounds from the database. As a result, the impulse response is triggered by the pitch and ‘frequency map’ of the source, causing unique and unpredictable sounds to be generated.If you’ve ever loaded a pitched or rhythmic sound into a convolution processor, you might have some idea of the basic effect, but Spitfire and BT didn’t stop there.
In the gap separating the Source sounds across the top and the Convolver modules below, you’ll find the Convolution Triangle. This provides four ‘pucks’, representing the four source sounds, that you can drag around to control the amount that any Source sound becomes a ‘trigger’ for one of the Convolver modules. If you want Source sound 1 to form a relationship with Convolver W, put its puck in the top left-hand corner – closest to that particular Convolver. If you want it to work equally with Convolvers X and Y, put it halfway down the sloping line on the right, between those two Convolvers.
You might be starting to see the power at the heart of this approach: you have four Source sounds and three Convolvers, all of which feature their own puck that can be placed in different locations. Manipulating these alone gets you evolving and morphing sounds, and there’s a whole lot on offer – each Source can be chosen from the 20GB library contained within Phobos, which is usefully broken down into logical criteria.
You can set up an envelope for each source sound, engage a high-pass filter to control bass levels, then set up the dry/wet levels – in Phobos, dry/wet refers to how much of each Source is diverted into the convolution modules versus how much is just played straight from the Sources themselves.
It’s worth pointing out that, should you so choose, you can load Source sounds and leave the Convolver modules empty, effectively providing you with a multi-layered synth patch.
Two Random options are included too, to mix things up and provide some inspiration in the process. If you don’t want to audition Source sounds and would rather fate assigned one for you, click the Wave button next to Random. Similarly, to unpredictably mix up parameter assignments relating to that sound, click the button next door. Similar controls are available within the Convolver modules too, with waveform displays in these giving you a sense of what to expect from convolution treatments when Source sounds are allocated and assigned.
At the bottom of the interface, key ranges can be set for both Source sounds and Convolver modules so that different components from the overall patch can be blended in specific parts of the keyboard, or kept entirely separate, should you so wish. However, modulation of all of Phobos’ sonic potential is a key part of its design, and there are a number of ways in which you can get sounds moving. Parameters can be automated, as you’d expect, but through Mappings you can go further, using LFOs and a number of other sources to add further levels of variation and experimentalism to your patches (for more on this, check out Magic Mappings below).
So who’s going to get the most out of Phobos? Certainly, anyone with an interest in sound design – which could well be all of us – will benefit from building their patches with it; those working at the more electronic end of music-for-picture composition will find unique tones and extra inspiration; and trailer-writing enthusiasts and EDM producers with a taste for experimental sounds will love it straight away.
Phobos takes what are, at their heart, some very complex ideas, and makes them straighforward to use. Along the way, Spitfire and BT have come up with a platform for original, highly engaging new sounds that are only ever a few button-clicks away. The audience for this plugin should stretch far and wide.