Waverley Instruments Synthetic Materials v1 1 0 KONTAKT

KONTAKT | 02/11/2021 | 5.30 GB

Synthetic Materials is a simple, but powerful KONTAKT instrument fuelled by a rich assortment of modern-day classic analog and wavetable synthesiser sounds, complete with a scale-quantised semi-generative sequencer.

All the base sounds (60 in total, approx 5GB compressed) have been sampled in 24 bit super-wide stereo, and include plenty of interesting content for long, evolving and atmospheric pads. The instrument comes with 100 snapshots plus 25 sequencer demos, but Synthetic Materials is really about making those sounds your own. There are also 50 Multis demonstrating what can be achieved by layering Synthetic Materials instruments.

Sculpt your creations selecting from two different types of LP filter (with envelope and LFO) or add some grit with a drive effect that has its own dedicated envelope. Further enhance your sounds with the instrument’s built-in effects, including 4-band EQ, stereo ping-pong delay, rotary, chorus, reverb and compression.

Add pitch-based expression with legato glide, vibrato and an effects pedal inspired pitch shifter. The pitch shifter allows you to generate up to two additional notes for each one you play, for octave or chord effects, including velocity scaling, automated pan and subtle detuning.

Control all of these parameters from a single screen on the instrument’s GUI or from your NKS controller.

Last but not least, the Synthetic Materials step sequencer has been designed to be fun, creative and musically inspiring. Despite having only 16 steps maximum, the sequencer is driven by a generative probability-based engine that allows you to develop patterns that will never sound the same twice. Step length for each sequence can be set from a sixteenth note to a massive 8 beats for evolving soundscapes. Velocity and gate is adjustable for each step, and steps can be optionally sub-divided for old-school “ratcheting” effects. Gate times can also be overlapped for glides between steps.

But the fun really starts when you explore some of sequencer’s more unusual features…

The A/B option allows you to configure musical variation with alternative pitches for each step. Add anything from subtle direction shifts to all-out chaos by assigning steps to “bump” or “jump”. All of this is probability-based of course! And finally, you can even sketch out musical ideas using the sequencer’s “shift automation” feature that auto-transposes your sequence while it’s running, with everything staying perfectly in key and in tune using the built-in scale quantisation.

The demos below were made with 100% Synthetic Materials – no additional processing aside from a little compression and limiting on the master mix.