void and vista strands
Void and Vista’s first product to reach the market provides enormous scope for cinematic sounds and beyond. Dave Gale picks up the Strands
The Kontakt instrument format has become a universal model for many sound creators, providing everything from sampled acoustic instruments, to the sonically diverse. All have their uses, but finding an instrument that includes both acoustic and electronic elements, and can take you to exciting creative places, is more of a rarity.
Getting creative
This sub-heading could be regarded as the main Strands mantra; it’s complete with 32 sound sources, all of which are unique, but with elements of control that invite creativity at both the sonic and musical levels. The initial sampled sound sources are divided into three categories, beginning with Bows. You can hear the rosin of the bow creeping across the string in many of the eight included bowed sounds, but there is substantial variance, such as the inclusion of an Ebow, creating an ethereal texture which resonates randomly. This sound confirms the presence of numerous round-robins, meaning that repeated notes will yield a subtly different performance.
While the Bows section is overtly acoustic, the Effects sound sources are an abstract collection of real-world samples, processed instruments and synths. As a case in point, the first sample, Cymbal Textures, is clearly acoustic in makeup, but it’s been heavily multisampled. To our ears, it sounds like a mixture of different playing techniques and processing, but whatever we think, it’s incredibly novel. Most of the other sources in this section adopt traditional chromatic tuning, with some instances providing pitch modulation, such as the Broken Tape sample. You can guess how this might sound, as the pitch meanders with Aphex Twin-style proportions.
The final sound category is more utilitarian in approach, formed from traditional subtractive waveforms and noise.
It’s the huge layer of real-time control, along with its ease of patch creation potential, that really sells this to us
Strand and deliver
Once you’ve located the sound source you wish to use, the construction process can be relatively simple -or substantial and complicated (should you wish it to be). The initial makeup centres around two partial layers, blended through the Morph control which occupies the bottom of the instrument’s window. Adjusting the Morph fader activates the central graphic, where a ghostly hand leans from one side to the other, to endorse the fader’s movement. Being within the Kontakt domain, it’s simple to assign the Morph fader to a MIDI CC. Each partial is equipped with quick-access parameters for controlling pitch, making it easy to create Morphs which appear in a different octave, although you can also adjust the pitch micro-tonally, which we discovered releases some
