The story
A drone and riser you can perform. That was the idea that started this instrument.
UPDATE: Version 2.0 Now Available! An additional layer (previously not included) has been added, the GUI has been redesigned and the effects are fine tuned to more closely match the original intention.
Metallurgic Alchemy was born out of the idea of creating a drone library that had my most used production techniques at my fingertips, to create low bass drones and risers with movement. Filter cutoff and resonance sweeps, saturation, blends between layers and my personal favourite a tremolo effect all allow you to perform movement in the drones and risers, shaping the sound as you play. It provides room for experimentation, but also refinement and precise programming through MIDI CC. It felt important that all the controls could be adjusted on the fly, with common Spitfire Audio MIDI CC parameters being mapped for easy use, a library designed with the community in mind.
The sounds were generated through firstly sampling different metallic-like textures, from sounds I generated on my Arturia MiniBrute 2 to bowing and scraping cymbals, before reprocessing them through granular synthesis. Through combining different synthesised samples, I developed three textures to use as the base of the library, choosing to focus on the lower registers that had a rich tone to them. From there, it was a series of problem-solving obstacles to work through to achieve both the right sound and the performance controls I wanted.
I really hope you enjoy this library, my first submission to a community I have long admired and relied on in the past. Thank you everyone!
A FREE SAMPLE LIBRARY: Metallurgic Alchemy, the Drone Librar
Interface
Reviews for Metallurgic Alchemy
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Three for one!
Inside this awesomely designed patch you will find 3 kinds of sounds to mix and match, along with various filters and settings to play with. The overall sound signature is based on a heavy synth that may give you some Bladerunner vibes. The sampling in all three sounds is perfect and the actual sounds are super fun to play with!
The playable range is just 4 octaves long, and I find the keybed could be shifted one octave up, though most keyboards can do that easily with one or two clicks anyway. Also, the included Reverb is a little subtle, and you can't change the ADSR envelope through the GUI, which I bet some users will want to do.
In case you want to shape the envelope, you can do that by accessing Kontakt's Edit Mode (the wrench icon on the top left of the instrument panel). By default, the Script Editor might be open, so be sure to close that and go down to the Modulation panel. I personally like the attack and release settings to be a little longer! The attack doesn't seem to include all layers, but that's alright I guess.
On a final note, the size of the folder is doubled since the samples are included twice. You will only need what is inside the "Instruments" folder, so the rest (around 400MB) are unnecessary.
Flexible doom pad...
Take 3 menacing pad sounds which work really well in various combinations, add a resonant filter, saturation, mad variable speed trem effect and reverb and what have you got? A great Midi CC controlled pad of doom. Does exactly what it set out to, does it well. It's strength is in in flexibility; one you could keep coming back to.
Creepy Distorted Drones
The low end is by far my favorite part of this library. You get a really deep, subby yet slightly aggressive trailer type drone sound. The GUI is really cool and reminds me of NASA Space Pad in that, you have the ability to blend many different layers that make up the sound. The included effects are great too. I thought the saturation in particular was awesome. If gives you this really wild and crazy distortion sound. I also thought the tremolo was cool but you might want to this this with a third party plugin for more control. It gives you that intense trailer buildup vibe but there's no release control in the GUI so if you want it to cutoff really suddenly you might want to do some volume automation. Im not in love with this library but i think its really useful for a low and interesting sustained drone. i didn't like how it sounded in the higher registers much but as i said earlier, there are aspects of this library i do really like.
