Review: The Alchemist Bundle from String Audio

With The Alchemist Bundle’s functionality, sound shaping capabilities and low cost of entry, this bundle is a no-brainer as a tool for getting to the “right” impacts, pulses, textures or atmospheres on a deadline.

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Review: The Alchemist Bundle from String Audio

Following on the heels of their very successful Dark Matter library, String Audio brings us their latest offering – The Alchemist, a pair of libraries for creating everything from dynamic cinematic impacts and pulses to screeching, scraping, sweeping and swooning textures and atmospheres. The Alchemist steps up the game a few notches with a much more sophisticated engine that includes a large number of well-designed and organized snapshots along with a robust capability to twist and bend the sound to your whim.

The Alchemist Bundle is available on intro sale price (at the time of publishing) for $119.00 from String Audio til March 31, 2017 . The regular price will be $149.00. Each product (Cinematic Impacts and Cinematic Textures) are available individually as well.

The Alchemist Bundle sells for $149 from String Audio

Thoughts

The Alchemist is built on an even more powerful engine than its predecessor – Dark Matter. An even greater step forward in flexible sound design, The Alchemist Bundle contains both the Alchemist Cinematic Impacts and Alchemist Cinematic Textures libraries. Much of the interface will be familiar to owners of Dark Matter as it maintains the clean monochromatic minimalist interface and shares some of the same design elements. Where The Alchemist takes on a life of its own is in the combination of the six configurable independent Layers per instrument on the main engine page. You can either use the included snapshots as is, tweak them or use my favorite feature here – the “Random” button. Every time you click “Random”, the sound is morphed in more strange and wonderful ways and you really never get to the same place twice so the possibilities are endless.

String Audio really made getting to the “right sound” so much easier by employing snapshots and randomization

Distilling nearly 20 GB of sample data down into The Alchemist twins, String Audio really made getting to the “right sound” so much easier by employing snapshots and randomization into the libraries. You can be as “hands on” as you want to be in tweaking the sound or simply scroll through the more than 400 snapshots. Given that one library is Impacts and one is Textures, the sound content is obviously different in each library, but by sharing the same interface and engine design, they really click as a pair.

The interface for the main engine is a bit complex at first glance, and to be fair, there is quite a bit of functionality under the hood. Learning how to work with a single Layer will easily allow you to master working with the other five and the manual is quite well documented for each function. Cinematic Impacts includes about 3 dozen sounds for use in each layer. I like the fact that you can get really deep into the design here and control all of the parameters. I won’t go into all of them here, but in each Layer, the outer ring is Volume with LFO controls inside. Under that are Solo, Mute, Lock (freeze Layer when using Random) and Bypass (Color Engine changes). The remainder of the controls are essentially the requisite Pan, Tune, Cut and Boost dials, as well as ADSR sliders. The big highlight here for me is the Random button. It really adds so much more depth in the possibilities that you can achieve. The “happy accidents” can be plentiful as I found out working with it.

If you are working on a deadline, the snapshots provide a great start

If you are working on a deadline, the snapshots provide a great start for powerful impacts with 5 categories of snapshots; Hard Impacts, High Impacts, Low Impacts, Pulse and Sound Design. Combine these with a few clicks of the Random button and you have instantly usable sounds for Underscore, Trailers, Video Game music or other projects requiring diverse percussive tones. The sounds themselves can be sculpted in range from cinematic to industrial to ethnic and everything in between.

The Color Engine allows you to choose between 65 different impulse responses for each of the six Layers. Each IR slot has an independent Power control to toggle on/off as well as a Lock button to hold that Layer in place during randomization. The Slider controls the depth of the IR on each Layer and as well as randomizing the Color Engine, you can turn the engine off entirely.

The Motion Engine is another new welcome feature for The Alchemist. This is where the sophistication of the beat really comes into its own. I love how easy it is to control and shape the sounds here. The built in Arpeggiator is well designed with all of the controls that you need to get the groove going; Note Order, Step Count, Velocity, Rate, Edge Note, Duration, Swing, Octave, Repeat (control of number of repetition of notes per step), and an On/Off control.
I also like the addition of Amp and Pan LFO controls to alter the waveforms and rate. One thing I would really have liked to see here is a Random button to change the step count, direction and rate that would be locked against the Main Engine randomization. This isn’t a deal breaker for me as I think this is still a well-built engine.

If you are familiar with Dark Matter, then the Effect Engine is something you have seen before. A pretty straight forward set of controls for Skreamer, Lo-Fi, Tape, Delay, Chorus and Filter. All of them have separate switches to turn them on/off. All of the effects are off by default, so they are really more geared to adding further refinement to your sound choices. I prefer to mix in the room with premium plugins but found that I could be swayed to use the filter controls in certain cases as I played through different snapshots. The IRs are also something that adds color to the final sound and I found them useful as well. Some of the “happy accidents” really benefit from the IRs that end up being chosen through a randomization.

Alchemist Textures is by far my favorite here for some obvious reasons; it contains the lion’s share of content and offers a substantially larger set of tonal possibilities for Underscore, Trailers, Video Game music and even electronic and ambient music for the adventurous who are willing to explore a bit. Although it shares the same interface for all of the Engines, the Main Engine differs in the content available for each layer substituting textural samples instead of percussive samples.
I found that by loading up a single instance of Alchemist Impacts and Alchemist Textures that I could immediately create a bed of sound that works as the basis for an Underscore or an Electronic music track for one of my solo projects. The reward often comes when you randomize the sound and it just falls into place. I think you could keep going and never hit the same sound twice.

Based on the overall functionality and the breath of sound shaping capabilities, not to mention the low cost of entry (both at sale and regular price), I think that this bundle is a no-brainer for any composer or musician who is seriously looking for a tool to get the job done with diversity of tonal palette and especially those who work on a deadline. Even if you want to take your time and be a tweaker, there are rewarding sound treasures waiting for you inside these libraries.

As with any of my reviews, I would recommend that you check out the videos and demos below to assist you in deciding if this is the right product for you.

Facts

The Alchemist Bundle contains nearly 20 GB of original sample material and downloads at just under 8.5 GB The Alchemist requires the full version of Kontakt version 5.5.1 or higher. Highlights of the technical details for both products:

Alchemist Cinematic Textures:
• 18+GB of original sample material (7GB using Kontakt‘s lossless sample storage compression).
• 3000+ high-quality samples.
• 6 layers.
• 250 pre-programmed Snapshots.
• Dedicated Main Engine: Individual layer controls for pitch, volume, pan, solo, mute, effects bypass, layer lock, envelope, layer boost and cut, pan and amp LFO send.
• Powerful randomize function.
• Dedicated Motion Engine: Arpeggiator, Pan and Amp LFO.
• Dedicated Color Engine: 65 convolution Impulse Responses, Randomize function.
• Dedicated Effect Engine: skreamer, lo-fi, chorus, tape saturation, delay, chorus and distortion (controlled by the modwheel).
Alchemist Cinematic Impacts:
• 1.6GB of original sample material (full quality Wav files).
• 300+ high-quality samples.
• 6 layers.
• 151 pre-programmed Snapshots.
• Dedicated Main Engine: Individual layer controls for pitch, volume, pan, solo, mute, effects bypass, layer lock, envelope, layer boost and cut, pan and amp LFO send.
• Powerful randomize function.
• Dedicated Motion Engine: Arpeggiator, Pan and Amp LFO.
• Dedicated Color Engine: 65 convolution Impulse Responses, Randomize function.
• Dedicated Effect Engine: skreamer, lo-fi, chorus, tape saturation, delay, chorus and distortion (controlled by the modulation wheel.

The Alchemist Bundle sells for $149.00 from String Audio

Videos of The Alchemist Bundle

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