Review: Empty Fields – F.2 for Omnisphere 2 from Triple Spiral Audio

For the 1st in a 10 part series, Triple Spiral Audio has released a promising, well-balanced set of Omnisphere 2 patches and multis which will enhance the sound palette and music for anyone in the field of ambient composition, sound design, and film documentary. Natural sounds can be combined with evolving pads and deep, syncopated ARPS to produce ethereal atmospheres & textures of color and emotion.

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Review: Empty Fields – F.2 for Omnisphere 2 from Triple Spiral Audio

Empty Fields – F.2 sells for €75 from Triple Spiral Audio

Thoughts

Triple Spiral Audio is not a new comer when it comes to releasing sound libraries. The company has released a couple of other libraries for Omnisphere 2, in addition to packages for U-he products like Zebra & Diva, Izotope’s Iris 2 and XferRecords Serum. The releases are a bit hard to categorize as many of the patches spread out over different genres of music. For the most part however, the Omnisphere packages are more in the realm of ambient soundscapes. Just recently, Triple Spiral Audio has started its own “subscription” service with Empty Fields. In addition to offering this to Omnisphere 2 users, the same concept is also being applied to Empty Fields for UVI’s Falcon and U-he’s Zebra. For one set price, Triple Spiral is offering 10 libraries over the course of the year for payment in full upfront. The entry price is quite affordable and, in the case of Omnisphere 2, you will end up with roughly 700 patches and 100 multis for 75 Euro; not bad at all.

The 1st installment of Empty Fields – F.2 comes with 70 patches and 10 multis. Most of the patches are included in 3 categories: Ambience, Pads and Soundscapes. This is where you will find the strength of this library. Ambiences, for the most part, are made up of natural environmental elements that include falling rain, burning wood, bird and duck calls plus acoustic instrumentation like bells and the Kyoto. By themselves, they provide for some nice background or underscore effects, however, they can be combined with other sound elements, in a multi-layered patch, to produce some very otherworldly music.

The Pads, for the most part, utilize sampled instrumentals like strings and choirs and, sometimes, layering them with synthesis sources created within Omnisphere. The result is a slow, evolving orchestral sound. When placed within a multi, this can be combined with an arp and/or a bass patch which yields some very interesting music, especially utilizing the Stack Mode feature of the product. This allows for separating the patches on the keyboard where you can control the playing of the Pad apart from the playing of the Arp and Bass.

The above example is a multi which utilizes 4 different categories of patches. Spread out over the keyboard is the Pad “Arise” while the Ambient and Arp patches are configured from C1 to C4 and the Lead patch, “Nostalgia”, above C4. If set to latch mode, the Arp can be triggered by any key below C4 and they will play until the same key is hit again or until you disable the latch. With the drum beat playing continuously, you can them play over the rhythm with any of the 3 remaining patches though, personally, I would confine the drum Arp and the Ambient patch to below C2 as this would give me more of the keyboard to play the chromatic elements of the multi.

In general, all of the multis are well thought out and constructed. In addition, the single patches should be able to provide enough inspiration to build your own multis…that’s the fun of Omnisphere…building and, yes, deconstructing what the developer gives you. Such is the case in the library which I feel needs to be done with the basses. There are some really nice building blocks here and, with some work, can be transformed into something unique. In some of the cases, I felt the bass sounds could have used more modulation, FX or even designed as an Arp.

In one case, the patch “Adapt” has the Orb engaged however, in the Modulation Matrix, the Orb isn’t modulated by anything. In other cases, some of the bass sounds seemed mis-categorized, sounding more like plucks or keys.
While vastly under-represented, the 2 Lead sounds provided are quite useful and well designed, especially the “Nostalgia” patch which was produced combining 2 synth layers, an Odyssey PWM and something called a Sick Pitch. I personally spent a lot of time with this patch fulfilling my inner Patrick Moraz by trying to come up with the “sickest” lead jams I could create…this one is loads of fun!!

The last category I would like to touch upon is the Arps…some, I thought, were incredible and fabulously constructed especially “Strange Things” and “Minimal”…some, I thought, truly needed some filtering on the high end like the patch “Communication”, Another ARP, “Wide Space”, has an info page which describes the Modwheel as opening the filter however, on the Mod Matrix page, the Modwheel isn’t assigned to anything.

Overall, I am very pleased with the library. Aside from some of the inconsistencies, there are a lot of fabulous patches here to aid one in putting together some terrific ambient or film score compositions. With the 1st installment of Empty Fields I was able to devote a lot of time playing through and analyzing many of the patches and it is definitely a library I am going to come back to quite often…I can’t wait for the next installment!!

Facts

Empty Fields – F.2 contains 70 single patches, 10 multi patches, 43 new sound sources and downloads as 2.3 MB. Empty Fields – F.2 requires Omnisphere version 2.3.0h or higher.

Empty Fields – F.2 sells for €75 from Triple Spiral Audio

Demos of Empty Fields – F.2 for Omnisphere 2

Videos of Empty Fields – F.2 for Omnisphere 2