Sparse Soundscapes
Our Ultimate Synths get moody now with a pack covering everything from analogue chaos to atmospheric collage
Perhaps the ultimate pursuit of the sound designer, soundscapes can be anything you want them to be. Whatever genre you’re working in – from soundtrack to ambient, through house and DnB – there’s always a place for an evolving, atmospheric bed of sound to set the mood and fill out the mix.
And the best thing about cooking up one of these atmospheric sounds is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Throw a few ingredients in, and a slight tweak of the recipe can give you radically different results – there’s always something new to try.
But this infinite possibility can get too much – sometimes you need ready-made building blocks for when you’re in a hurry, or a few well-designed set-pieces to take you in a completely new direction. Well, ’s got your back as usual, with this epic collection of varied soundscape elements.
Groove Criminals
Sound-sculpting super-soldier Oli Bell hasn’t just thrown together a bunch of delay-soaked pads – he’s meticulously crafted a collection of melodic chimes and atmospheric minimal beats that are ripe for layering into a custom soundscape. And as a little bonus to get the juices flowing, he’s included eight multisampled Kontakt instruments in this pack. Here’s what Oli had to say about Groove Criminals’ contribution:
“To begin, we headed for our Dementia DM-1 Noise Synth, connecting it up to a Barge Concepts VFB-X Feedback Looper, adding a Line 6 Echo Park into the circuit and letting all heck break loose. This messy output signal was then sent to an 80s Peavey Uni Verb. We found that by just making some small tweaks on the DM-1 or Echo Park, we could entirely shift the character of the feedback loop and start off new bursts of texture. We recorded the whole sonic experiment and chopped out the best bits.
“We broke out the always-excellent Paulstretch software to heavily timestretch some hits and loops and turn them into slowly evolving textures.
“For some of the more synthetic drum and percussion sounds, we programmed a Nord Drum and threw its output through some hardware analogue delay and spring reverb before editing and processing in the box.
“We also created some textures using our growing Eurorack modular. With simple waves from a couple of oscillators, we used slow LFOs to control filter cutoffs and VCA envelopes before putting the results through Audio Damage’s fab set of modular effects, again controlled by CV via random voltages or LFOs.”
Cyclick
Robbie Stamp has left his own sonic fingerprints all over this soundscape pack, too. We hacked into the police database, tracked him down and gave him a grilling about it.
“Most of the samples are loops, and they’ve been made so that the start and end points are cut as contiguous pieces, meaning that they often appear to be clips when played ‘one-shot’, but they’ll actually loop seamlessly.
“The Cracklature Loops folder gives you vinyl crackle processed through 13 different setups, consisting of everything from crinkly filtering to massive reverberations. The reverbs come from the Kurzweil K2600r, which excels in this role.
“The Creep Vox Loops are a series of nonword vocal snippets processed through chains of reverbs, modulators, pitch processors and delays. The K2600r has an InfiniDecay parameter for some of its reverb algorithms, making for some beautiful atmospheric sound beds in the Infiniverb Loops folder, while the ReLooped folder gives you some heavily processed noise loops.
“Besides these, the pack contains burbling sample-and-hold synth patches plunged into beds of effects; noise loops with reverb from the Yamaha SPX1000; and weird vocal one-shots that’ll have you feeling creeped out with their pitchshifted and harmonised reverb signals.
“Finally, special mention has to go to the Tonal ReDraw loops, made using the Deconstruct algorithm from RX 3, which splits the noise component from the signal, leaving only the tonal parts. Check them out!”