These include sustains played by a stately, serious‑sounding full string section and a lyrical mix of strings and woodwinds, and some great incisive staccatos performed by various layerings of arco, col legno and Bartok pizzicato strings. The instruments includes three‑band parametric EQ controls with adjustable bandwidth.Though the main thrust of SD is creative sonic mangling, there are useful unprocessed orchestral textures in the Performer ‘Traditional’ folder. We’ll take a detailed look at all of these instruments and the powerful timbres they contain. The SD Designer offers the deepest sound‑design facilities, while the Loop/Braam Designers share their own identical design and focus respectively on rhythm loops and big, blasting sforzando outbursts.
Heavyocity refer to their other main instruments as ‘Designers’. There’s also a ‘purge’ button which unloads the selected channel from memory - useful if you’re working with limited computer resources. Unusually, the artics’ keyswitches are duplicated in low and high positions, the former starting on C‑1 (MIDI note 12) and the latter on F6 (MIDI note 101), with the playable keyboard zone positioned in between - this gives flexibility of performance, but unfortunately the keyswitch positions are fixed and can’t be edited.Įvery instrument and articulation was sampled with three microphone positions (Main, Hall and Reverb FX), and a simple three‑channel mic mixer with built‑in reverb and delay effects provides volume, pan, solo, mute and output routing controls. Once you’ve found sounds you like, you can create your own setups by using the drop‑down menu beside the slots on the interface. To get you started, each Performer instrument provides eight or so snapshots which group together articulations of a certain type - for example, shorts, sustains, swells & crescendos, etc. Any of these articulations can be loaded into one of eight keyswitchable slots on the interface, so you can switch between eight different sounds on the fly. There are eight Performer instruments, labelled Traditional, Hybrid, Damaged, Soundscapes, Traditional Pedals, Hybrid Pedals, Damaged Pedals and Damaged Guitars, each housing between 16 and 30 full‑range sources (aka articulations). Symphonic Destruction (SD for short) contains three main instrument types, the simplest of which is the ‘Performer’.
Containing over 11,000 samples, 235 snapshots and 11 NKIs, the library (16.2GB installed) requires Kontakt or the free Kontakt Player, version 6.6.1 or later.Īudio titled Heavyocity Symphonic Destruction Library Structure The project spanned roughly two years from the start of recording to the ensuing processing, sound‑design and mastering phases. Nevertheless, despite their reputation for wanton damage the company were able to assemble close to 100 musicians for their grand Symphonic Destruction project, which fuses traditional orchestral timbres with Heavyocity’s trademark face‑melting sound design.įeaturing a 52‑piece string section, 26 brass players and 16 woodwinds, the library was recorded in Skywalker Sound (recording location for Heavyocity’s Damage 2 percussion library), Warner Bros Studios, Sear Sound and Heavyocity Studios.
If I were a violinist I’d be wary of taking my instrument to a Heavyocity sampling session - these are the guys that dropped a school bus from a crane just to see what it sounded like, after which cutting a priceless Stradivarius in half with a chainsaw might just seem like a bit of harmless fun. Heavyocity take a creative wrecking ball to the orchestra.