Review: Blast by Ecliptiq Audio
Great sounding set of modern trailer hits, impacts, metallic hits, quick risers and sub booms
Great looking and easy to use Kontakt interface with great customization options
Individually mapped stutter controls for each sound within each patch
Low price
Missing some common trailer elements like risers, downers, whooshes, and glitches
Most of the sounds are wet, so full control over reverb is more limited
I wish Blast allowed you to set the start point for each sample
Ecliptiq Audio has presented a fun and easy to use Kontakt instrument that gives you quick access and user-friendly customization options for some of the most common modern hybrid scoring elements. The categories don’t cover all of the trailer elements you might need, but what is included is done well. Blast is one of the easiest tools I have used for quickly customizing trailer sounds.
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Review: Blast by Ecliptiq Audio
Over the last several years we have seen an explosion of hybrid scoring and trailer tools hit the market. From the biggest developers to small-time bedroom producers, folks are grabbing their recorders to beat every trashcan, bow every piece of metal, and manipulate every imaginable sound they can find to bring us the latest cutting edge, trailer-ready sounds. One of the greatest developments that has resulted from the recent propagation of trailer libraries is that now there is something for everyone at every price point. You no longer need to spend hundreds of dollars to access cutting-edge hybrid sounds. It is indeed an exciting time to be a composer!
Ecliptiq Audio has now entered the hybrid sounds arena with Blast
Blast by sells for $49 from Ecliptiq Audio
Thoughts
Blast is a Kontakt instrument that looks great and sounds very good. I personally love the yellow, black, and gray interface and think it looks much more expensive than the $49 asking price. Blast packs a lot of punch and is sure to bring a smile to the face of the cost-conscious composer.
Blast contains five Kontakt patches; Distant Hits, Impacts, Metallic Hits, Rise & Hit, and Sub Booms. Each patch contains one sound per note from C1 through D#4. The sounds are modern and big and should fit nicely into hybrid scoring or trailer work. However, I did find most of the samples to be very wet, so user reverb control will be more limited than what I would have liked.
For me, the star of Blast is the custom Kontakt GUI. Not only does it look fantastic, it extends the usefulness of the sounds tremendously by providing stutter customization for volume, pan, tuning, distortion, bit crush, and low pass filter. The controls are super-simple to use and make editing the sounds a blast (okay, you got me – pun intended!). Just choose the rate you want (from 1/1 to 1/32), dial in the amount of stutter you desire for each effect, and BOOM!, instant gratification. One of the best parts of the controls here is that they are mapped to each individual key.
This is such an excellent feature and could have easily been overlooked or undervalued by the developer. This makes Blast way more useful than you might imagine. This allows you to have one sound with a huge stutter effect on it, another with a ping-pong panning effect, and yet another with distorted stutter all within the same patch. In addition to these selections, there are also controls for ADSR, reverb, and delay. These controls are global and therefore will apply the same to each sound within each patch. I do miss the inclusion of a control that would allow the user to select the starting point for each sample. The waveform for each sound is displayed in the top left-hand side of the interface, so it’s disappointing that this control wasn’t included. Seeing the waveform there really leaves you wanting to play with it. However, overall, the Kontakt interface and controls are excellent.
I think Ecliptiq Audio has done a commendable job of creating a sharp-looking Kontakt instrument with modern sounding samples and excellent control features for a price that is hard to overlook. Blast is fun to use and should be a nice addition to the toolbox of any budget-conscious hybrid composer.
Facts
Blast includes 5 Kontakt patches, 200 hits and impacts inclued as 24bit/48khz wav samples. It weighs at a mere 382 MB and requires the full version of Kontakt 5.7.3 or above
Blast by sells for $49 from Ecliptiq Audio
