Review: Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 by PlugInGuru

Beautifully Broken expands Omnisphere’s vast selection of presets with noisy, dirty, and imperfect sounds across a variety of categories, making it a treasure trove for that “indie” sound.

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Review: Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 by PlugInGuru

If you’re looking to get away from the pristine perfection of modern sampling, Beautifully Broken is a good place to start. This Omnisphere soundset doesn’t do anything remarkable or groundbreaking in its sound design and synthesis, but it presents a lot of great and useful sounds in a noisey, glitchy, and dirty way that makes it simple to create that imperfect indie sound inside the box. It’s a very focused product that adds a lot of value and flavor to Omnisphere’s already massive pool of sounds.

Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 sells for $39.00 from PlugInGuru

Thoughts

Beautifully Broken features presets in Omnisphere’s most useful categories. There isn’t a huge amount of new sounds, but I’d consider the vast majority of them to be very useful – all killer, no filler.

As a whole package, the essence of the sounds themselves are nothing groundbreaking or extraordinary. Nearly everything is synth or instrument based: guitars, keyboards, synth pads, drums, etc. But there are two major factors that set this library apart and give it its own unique flavor. First is the imperfections – every sound is laden with noise, glitches, distortion, or all of the above. Right away, this gives everything you put out more of a “low budget indie” vibe, which is very in-vogue right now. The other defining feature is its use of extra midi CC channels to give every preset some extended flexibility. Often times you’ll use these channels to affect things such as stereo width, reverb, distortion, sample rate, and filters. Automating those values can really stretch the sounds into something beyond their simple and humble origins.

As per usual with PluginGuru soundsets, there are also some multis available. The multis are all keyboard splits, meaning the lower ranges of the keys are latching drum loops, while the upper keys are divided amongst basses, synths, and other sounds. This is a cool feature that could be useful for live performance, but I personally don’t find it very useful for composition. This isn’t a big enough knock to really count against the soundset however. The only gripe I have with this expansion is the inclusion of drum loops which take up most of the ARP/BPM category. I’m generally a big fan of drum loops, but I don’t feel that Omnisphere is the best engine for them, and they’d be better used as raw audio (which is included) or in Kontakt or Stylus. The only reason I’m counting it as a knock is because the ARP/BPM section is almost completely taken up by drums instead of synths and moving textures, which are generally my most used presets in other packages.

Favorite Patches:

KEY – MetaloPiano: A simple keyboard sound based on a metal marimba. The constant noise behind the samples really embodies the indie sound, and its simple timbre makes it easy to implement. Uses 4 CCs to affect reverb, filtering, and edge/grit.

PAD – Wicked Ana Arco: Just a warm and very analogue synth-esque strings patch. Its attack isn’t overly slow, making it fairly responsive and playable. Even if you just hold one note, the more you move the 4 CCs, the sound moves from warm and pretty to broken and disturbing.

GTR – Tormented Passionfruit: A guitar patch with a good balance between mellow and bright timbre. The distortion is fairly dirty and indie sounding. It also has a heavy tremolo effect with the tremolo speed mapped to CC4. Turning it all the way up really warps the sound into a choppy and gritty sawtooth-like synth.

BASS – Bottom Feeder: This is the bass sound I always end up wanting, and it’s basically perfect for me without any adjustment. It’s a mostly subby monophonic bass with some high end dirt/grit that makes it audible even without a lot of bass frequencies. As with all of the others, the extra CC channels do all kinds of crazy things to the sound.

BPM PAD – Dirty City: A simple dark pad with lots of dirty gritty motion up high. This would be a great way to fill in the low-mids of a mix while also adding some rhythmic movement. I feel this one sounds best when played in the lower regions of the keyboard.

Facts

Beautifully Broken features 129 patches, 15 multis, and 27 samples (from a Waldorf Pulse synth), as well as 1,020 bonus presets for Omnisphere’s Arpeggiator, FX Rack, and more. Every patch features noise, glitches, dirt, and other imperfections.

This soundset requires Omnisphere 2.5 or later, and takes up 136 MB of disk space. It is available for $39.99 at https://www.pluginguru.com/products/beautifully-broken/

Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 sells for $39.00 from PlugInGuru

Demos of Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 by PlugInGuru

Videos of Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 by PlugInGuru

Contributor Steven McDonald reviews Beautifully Broken for Omnisphere 2.5 by PlugInGuru
“Beautifully Broken expands Omnisphere’s vast selection of presets with noisy, dirty, and imperfect sounds across a variety of categories, making it a treasure trove for that “indie” sound.”