Review: Cinematic Synth Collection by Zero-G

This huge bundle from Zero-G offers hundreds of inspiring and useful sounds with an overall Avant-Garde flavor and no shortage of customization options. If you regularly make modern cinematic music, there’s a ton of great material in here to fuel your creations for years to come.

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Review: Cinematic Synth Collection by Zero-G

The Cinematic Synth Collection from Zero-G contains six unique libraries that cover different aspects of modern cinematic music, each in their own way: analogue synths turned into eerie drones, electric guitars tortured into ugly hits, or even raw recordings of insects in the jungle. There’s a lot to say about each individual product in this bundle. But as a whole package, this collection is extremely inspiring to play through, whether you’re just browsing presets (of which there are many) or tweaking knobs and faders to warp your own sounds. If you regularly make modern cinematic music, there’s a ton of great material in here to fuel your creations for years to come.

Get the Cinematic Synth Collection for €99 (reg $371.95) for a limited time at Audio Plugin Deals

Thoughts

As this is a bundle of six products, I won’t be able to go as deep into each one as I would in a normal review. But I will give my overall thoughts and impressions on what I think each library does well or not so well, starting with the interfaces as usual.

Epica Bass for Kontakt

Epica Bass is the only one of these products that is compatible with the free version of Kontakt Player. The interface is what you’d expect for a synth. It works well enough and it’s laid out in a clean manner everything nicely labeled and readable, with separate tabs for Amp, Modulation, Filter, LFO, Arpeggiator, and FX.

This sample library does a really good job of pretending to be a synth. Every preset I touched (and there are a lot of them) sounded fat, warm, and very analog. The presets are categorized decently, although the list gets so long that a more detailed breakdown would be helpful for browsing. That minor gripe aside, this library is packed with great and useful synth sounds. These are all relatively “retro” as Epica is meant to be more of a synth emulation than a modern sound design tool. There’s also a big selection of “waveform” presets that just load up an unmodulated waveform of your choice, so you can start from scratch as you would with a hardware synth. I’m pretty confident that next time I need a touch of classic synth, I’ll be reaching for Epica.

Analogue Workshop Vol 1 and 2

These two libraries have my least favorite interface, as it’s definitely designed to appeal to the hardware synth-heads. Luckily you don’t need to use it much to get a lot out of these volumes thanks to the solid selection of wacky and heavily warped presets.

The sounds you’ll find in here are much more “manipulated” and “designed” than those in the Epica synth package. But it’s still quite clear that all these sounds came from synthesizers – you can still hear the “raw” oscillator characteristics. For some people, that can come across as cheesy or campy, but it’s an interesting combination. If you’re looking for heavily distorted and unusual synth sounds, these libraries are a treasure trove.

Extreme Environments

Extreme Environments and Extreme Vocal Environments both focus on sounds based on actual audio recordings rather than synthesized signals. They sport a more modern and clean interface with three layers that can be manipulated in fairly basic ways. This style of interface is pretty straightforward and easy to wrap your head around, which is always a plus for me.

Extreme Vocal Environments

Extreme Environments uses ambient recordings of environments, such as the rainforest or a train station. Extreme Vocal Environments is powered by recording of human voices.The results you can get using the three-channel engine are very inspiring, as demonstrated by the presets in both libraries. Due to the ambient nature of EE’s sound sources, there are a lot less tonal/tuned presets and more that are purely aleatoric and textural. EVE, on the other hand, does have a decent amount of patches that are more like playable instruments. Both libraries are extremely cool and produce really ethereal sounds. Horror or suspense music is where I believe these would shine the brightest (or darkest).

Surface Tension

Surface Tension is my absolute favorite of this collection, including the engine. There are two layers, and the layout of the interface is very intuitive, allowing you to fade between the two sources while modulating the master with LFOs, along with the other expected basics.

Sonically, this is the most impressive library to me. Every sound in this package is derived from an electric guitar. The result is a good variety of playable instrument patches and aleatoric effects with a timbre that isn’t quite synthetic, but not quite organic either. It really is a perfect tool for writing modern tension/suspense tracks that don’t crossover into the cheesy synth realm. It’s also worth noting that many of the one-shot presets, such as the hits, have some nice details and surprises if you hold the key long enough. It’s obvious that a lot of love and care went into this one!

Get the Cinematic Synth Collection for €99 (reg $371.95) for a limited time at Audio Plugin Deals

Facts

The Cinematic Synth Collection contains the following Zero-G products:
Analogue Workshop Vol. 1 & 2
Epica Bass
Surface Tension
Extreme Environments
Extreme Vocal Environments

These six libraries are aimed toward modern productions using synths and organic sources to create textures, playable instruments, hits, and other FX. This bundle requires 11.3 GB of disk space installed, and uses the full retail version of Kontakt 5.6.0 or higher. It is available for $371.95 at https://zero-g.co.uk/products/zero-g-cinematic-synth-collection

Get the Cinematic Synth Collection for €99 (reg $371.95) for a limited time at Audio Plugin Deals

Demos of Cinematic Synth Collection by Zero-G

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