Review: Brood by AudioReward
If you are looking for an instrument that can produce dark, ominous pads, then this instrument is for you. There’s also some extra inclusions like effects, and the unique style arp that makes it slightly different than other soundscape pad-style instruments. This instrument will work great if you need something to lay down dark soundscapes, or ambient backdrops. You can then use the effects and arp to create extra movement with the sounds.
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Review: Brood by AudioReward
Brood is a dual-voice orchestral sampler, which caters towards dark soundscapes and pads. Brood uses Audio Rewards unique DOSA system for slight variations on the sounds, each time you play back, which gives a nice organic flavor to the instrument.
Brood by AudioReward sells for £35.00 from KontaktHub
Thoughts
This is great instrument to use if you’re looking for something to give you dark, and ominous pads sounds in your compositions. And like the subtitle of the instruments suggests, ‘Dark Foreboding Pads’ it does exactly that. Most of the patches are these long, evolving soundscapes that impart a dark and brooding feeling when heard.
You have two voices where you can select a sound for the voicing. The categorizations of the sounds in the voices isn’t your normal naming convention for sound patches. It’s got things like Restless, Unsettled, Awkward and Nervous. So it’s definitely going full on with the ominous feeling of the instrument. So choose a mood/feeling to filter the search selection for the voicing and then choose from the filtered options.
Also you can set a key range for each voice, which is pretty cool. Maybe you want a restless voice to only be between C2-C3. Then with an Awkward voice in voice two, you want this to spread across from C3-C5. So you do have some customization as to where the voices are being played and these key ranges reflect on the keyboard in Kontakt. Voice 1 = Blue, and Voice 2 = Yellow. And Green is if both voices play out on an area.
And on each voice you have a filter and LFO you can add. I found these LFOs worked great in creating some extra movement with a patch. With the Freq and Reso you can dial in an interesting filter on the instrument, and then you can LFO modulate between these filters for a unique synth sound.
You can send the voice to 4 send effects: Reverb, Delay, Flanger, and Phaser. These are basic effects on the instrument, but they do the job,and allow for extra processing of the audio signal.
Now, the Mix dial works in a pretty different way. There are 3 positions on the Mix and you can basically save three screen shots of the patches. It’s like snapshots of your instruments settings. So, once you get your head around that it’s not actually a dry/wet mix, it’s pretty handy as you can mix between different snapshots of the 2 voices.
The Drift control is my favorite feature. It emulates what happens with analog gear when it passes through the circuitry. There can be some slight pitch variations, and this now allows you to vary the pitch of your voices on the instrument.
Now, the Arp on this instrument is quite different than your standard Arps on other software instruments. With this one you can set up to 8 notes to play. Each one can have their own amount of steps within each note pattern. Which makes it quite interesting as you can build up quite complex Arp rhythms with this drone-type, pad instrument. The sounds can also be quite atonal, so most of the times you only need to play one note to get some pitch variances.
At the bottom of the main page, you can see each voice has a gate that can be setup. This works great in giving a slow pad a sort of percussive rhythm.
If you are looking for an instrument that can produce dark, ominous pads, then this instrument is for you. There’s also some extra inclusions like effects, and the unique style Arp that makes it slightly different than other soundscape pad-style instruments. This instrument will work great if you need something to lay down dark soundscapes, or ambient backdrops. And then you can use the effects and Arp to create extra movement with the sounds.
Facts
This is a 4.3 GB size library Kontakt Synth Sampler instrument with 150 custom designed audio sources and 100 Snapshot presets. The instruments has two voice patches where you can select you sampler categories and sounds. There’s also an included Arp, and Send FX section to the instrument.
Brood by AudioReward sells for £35.00 from KontaktHub
Demos of Brood by AudioReward
