Review: Flow by Triple Spiral Audio

Flow is a great choice for ambient pads, soundscapes, and textures, offering a powerful, yet user friendly interface, and packs in a lot of content for the price.

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Review: Flow by Triple Spiral Audio

Flow is the second Kontakt library from developer Triple Spiral Audio, a company which previously focused mostly on releasing custom soundsets/banks for popular software synthesizer plugins (Omnisphere, Zebra2, Serum, etc.), often rooted in textural sound design. While this venture into Kontakt territory is fairly new for the company, the experience gained from their previous releases is very noticeable with Flow, offering rich sounds, and powerful effects, contained within a nicely presented and focused library for Kontakt.

Flow sells for €45.45 ($50.97 USD) from Triple Spiral Audio

Thoughts

As the name may imply, Flow focuses on motion based pads, textures, and soundscapes, which are imbued with a general sense of motion and movement. Upon loading up the single .nki file, the visual interface immediately sets the tone, with a spacey, dark blue background and glowing neon controls. Visually, it feels very similar to the art style of films like Tron: Legacy. The main page of Flow contains four main modules, where you can choose from 192 different sound sources to load for each layer. The 192 sound sources are categorized into four different sections: pads, textures, soundscapes, and ambiences. There are also a myriad of knobs represented on the main page of the GUI, including individual layer controls for panning, ADSR parameters, filters, LFO controls, and various global effects in the very middle.

The sound sources themselves are very good, and even sound great just on their own (you can solo or mute each layer as you see fit). There’s a very nice selection, from soft, feathery textures to thick, synthesized pads. Some feel more “busy” than others, with various harmonics or subtle changes in pitch coming into play as you hold the note longer.

Flow “Sources”

For instance, “Pad 33 – Frozen River” is very ethereal and beautiful, giving a very magical, whisp-like sound with some beautiful floating harmony. A sound like this I actually preferred on it’s own, as opposed to layered with 3 others. It’s definitely worth soloing a layer, and really taking the time to listen to the detail and character of each sound, as you may find hidden details that get lost when you layer 2 or more sounds together. For instance, some of the sounds are best played as single held notes, while others really shine when playing chords.

The “textures” contain some really unique sounds, like “Text 10- Moonlight”, which is very magical yet a bit mysterious and has a bell-like phrase which plays as you hold down the note. Details like this make it perfect for using it as underscore, just holding one note down as you build on top of it. Another one from the textures category, “Text 21 – Silent Dreams”, gives me the feeling I am standing in an enchanted forest surrounded by birds or animals. There are no distinct animal sounds, as I believe it’s mostly synthesized, but the sound design really captures that feeling, and is very impressive.

Flow “Sources”

Next I jumped to the “soundscape” category and was struck by the name of “SC 10 – What’s Coming”. This sound has a lot of white noise, which almost sound like cicadas or insects chirping in the middle of the night, and again I hear a strange animal noise, almost like a cow mooing, or a giant tree creaking. It’s all very evocative, and sounds a bit haunting. I loved It but also raised a small critique, which is that I wish the sounds were further categorized sometimes. Certain soundscapes sound similar to some of the pads, and then others (like “What’s Coming”) contain unique “artifacts” and details that make them really stand out. For instance, some are very airy and more organic. Others are thick and synthesized. Some really give off a magical vibe, while others are more dark and haunting. I’ve noticed quite a few of them contained animal sounds, (such as “Amb 44- Frog Lands”, which evokes the relaxing sounds of chirping frogs on a lake), or were at least designed to emulate animal sounds, which you could argue they deserve their own category – almost. It’s a small critique for what is a quite impressive library.

All in all, there are a nice variety of sounds on display, and they all have one major thing in common: nothing feels static or boring. A sense of movement and motion is embedded into each and every one of the sounds, and it gives Flow an exciting, “living and breathing” feeling. The combination of layering four separate sounds together, plus the various effects, mean that Flow is just waiting for you to dive in and experiment with all it has to offer. While it is a ton of fun to go crazy with the effects and LFO’s to get wild experimental sounds, I was truly impressed just as much with scrolling thru each layer individually, which is a testament to the time and passion that went into creating these imaginative and detailed sounds. Flow offers an impressive amount of possibilities, from deeply relaxing nature-like soundscapes, to aggressive, distorted, and twisted atmospheres from hell. When you factor in the relatively low price tag of Flow, it feels like a huge treasure trove of sound design possibilities and a total bargain.

Facts

Flow retails for €45.45, which is approximately $50.97, and requires the full version of Kontakt (version 5.8.1 or higher) to run. The library is about 1.1 GB installed, and while it has only one .nki file, it comes with 100+ snapshots for instant inspiration.

Flow sells for €45.45 ($50.97 USD) from Triple Spiral Audio

Demos of Flow by Triple Spiral Audio

Videos of Flow by Triple Spiral Audio

Contributor Brian Freeland reviews Flow by Triple Spiral Audio
“Flow is a great choice for ambient pads, soundscapes, and textures, offering a powerful, yet user friendly interface, and packs in a lot of content for the price.”