Review: Cygnia for Omnisphere 2 by Sonic Underworld
Cygnia is a huge expansion that adds a lot of life to Omnisphere, offering a wide variety of modern and cinematic sounds across several categories that could easily take you from start to finish through hundreds of compositions.
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Review: Cygnia for Omnisphere 2 by Sonic Underworld
Cygnia for Omnisphere 2 sells for $80.00 from Sonic Underworld
Thoughts
Upon opening the patch browser in the Cygnia soundbank, you’ll be greeted with a familiar sight.
The vast majority of the presets included here fit into the categories already established by the default Spectrasonics patches, so if you let Omnisphere show “All” presets, they’ll just blend in nicely and sit with all the other default presets without adding a million new categories to look through. The well thought-out curation also makes patch browsing a breeze, though it can be annoying when you stumble upon a patch that also requires Trillian and have to exit out of an error message. I think some sort of marker like (Trillian) in parenthesis or a separate category for Trillian dependent patches would have been a nice way to save time for those of us who don’t have it!
Aside from that very minor inconvenience, I struggle to find any cons with this product. As a whole, the sounds are very inspiring to play through. I found myself with 5 completed tracks using Cygnia almost exclusively after a day of writing with this for the first time. If you write a lot of music and take full advantage of the speed and convenience of presets, products like this are life savers.
Most of the sounds are very simple (which is a compliment) – even though there are a lot of complex things I would never want to program going on in the background, the results are sounds that aren’t overly complex and are easy to fit into a mix. These patches are highly playable instruments, including the ARP/BPM Loops, which is what makes it so easy to lose hours goofing off with a keyboard and Cygnia. The modwheel is also very well utilized, with the patch descriptions telling you exactly what the modwheel is doing in most cases. Although there are a million things you can do to manipulate the presets, having important functions mapped to the modwheel makes it much easier to play new ideas conveniently.
The variety here is also very strong, with patches including simple plucks, organic guitars, pads, aleatoric soundscapes, loops, keyboards, transitions, and more. Everything you need to sculpt a compelling track is can be found in here, whether you’re looking for heavenly beauty, distorted grime, or something more neutral.
If you’re looking to breathe some new life into Omnisphere and you’re not against presets, I would absolutely recommend Cygnia. However if you’re in need of a more focused sound bank such as textures only or loops only, there are better choices out there for your money. But, regardless of your personal needs, Cygnia is a very well put together library full of fresh and inspiring sounds.
Facts
Cygnia features 400 patches and 50 Multis with a particular focus on cinematic sounds by Apparat, Ben Frost, Geoff Barrows and Jon Hopkins among others.
Cygnia for Omnisphere 2 sells for $80.00 from Sonic Underworld
Demos of Cygnia for Omnisphere 2 by Sonic Underworld
