Review: Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 by Triple Spiral Audio

Triple Spiral Audio present their debut sound pack for u-he Repro-1 and Repro-5, inspired by David Bowie and resulting in an interesting and varied soundset

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Review: Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 by Triple Spiral Audio

Triple Spiral Audio, led by the prolific Jaap Visser, have been cranking out plenty of preset libraries over the past 18 months. The experienced composer and sound designer has had a clear focus on the types of soft synths favoured by the composing community, such as Zebra and Omnisphere. He recently turned his skills to the two Sequential Circuits emulations made by u-he – Repro-1 and Repro-5. The collection is titled Heroes and is inspired by David Bowie, in particular his final album Blackstar and albums from his Berlin period.

Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 sells for €24.74 from Triple Spiral Audio

Thoughts

Playing through a bunch of patches it soon becomes apparent the idea was not to recreate sounds from Bowie’s work, indeed many of these are too contemporary or aggressive to relate to his own records. What Triple Spiral Audio are really getting at with the Bowie reference is more connected with his willingness to experiment and create new sonic worlds, so this preset pack should be considered more as ‘inspired by’ rather than a recreation of his synth sounds. What you get are a range of sounds from raw to ambient and experimental to detuned retro.

Repro-1 and Repro-5 are quite different synths, so I will go through each of them in turn. The former has 64 patches and begins with a decent range of arps that go from waveshaping crush to plucky percussive. The basses are super aggressive, using plenty of the stompbox style effects and the FX patches continue this hard hitting sound. The leads are entirely different sonically and get far more ambient. The Replay preset was a personal favourite with its slightly noisy soft attack that gives a very playable sinuous and snaking vibe once the effects are dialed in.

The sequences go from bleepy to plucky and use some really interesting melodies that are nicely complimented by tempo synced delay.

The synthesizer sounds get distorted then at other times more soundscape-like and with their slower attack are as much like a pad as a mono synth allows.

Repro-5 models a very different synth. For starters it is polyphonic and lacks the sequencer of Repro-1, so it is no surprise that the 64 Heroes presets reflect that. There are detuned, dystopian atmospheres and some pretty wild FX patches.

Some of the pulses are almost FX too as they get so experimental. The five bass presets are full on powerhouses and will definitely wake the neighbours. The keyboard sounds are much lighter before it again gets quite dirty and EDM on the leads. The pads are suitably trippy, but with an edge which I liked. Some of the percussion patches make clever use of the resonator effect, turning a crusty click into a punchy drum. The synthesizer patches are my favourite on offer here and are all the better for not using the effects to do all the heavy lifting. Instead the effects here seem to be used to enhance the raw sound, instead of transforming it too much. The Attracted preset is a very nice retro synth brass sound that can build to a fizzy texture using the aftertouch and the modwheel which are both assigned to filter parameters.

My main gripe with Heroes would be there is generally a lot of reliance on the effects to create the end sound. Every patch incorporates effects and most use at least 4 stompboxes stacked up. Often once you bypass the FX you are left with quite an underwhelming sound in comparison. The effects are well programmed too for sure, but it would have been nice to hear more pure synth with a subtle use of FX on some patches. Also, so many patches are distorted and as Bowie was not one for very aggressive sounds I was expecting more of a lighter and refined touch. Though, as I mentioned at the start I guess it is more inspired by Bowie’s experimental aesthetic, rather than an homage to the actual sounds on his records.

Criticisms aside, there is definitely some fine synth programming going on throughout Heroes. The presets are superbly crafted and offer some good realtime modulation options (modwheel and aftertouch are used for each preset) so the end user can easily make them more expressive and unique without having to dive into extensive tweaking. As a whole it does not hang together thematically that cohesively as there is arguably too much difference between the super distorted and more ambient patches, but on a patch by patch basis there will be much here to interest producers across a wide range of genres.

Facts

Triple Spiral Audio Heroes consist of 128 presets, which are evenly divided between Repro-1 and Repro-5. Please note you will need a full version of u-he Repro to use this soundset. Heroes is also fully compatible for NKS and includes the preview files.

Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 sells for €24.74 from Triple Spiral Audio

Demos of Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 by Triple Spiral Audio

Videos of Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 by Triple Spiral Audio

Contributor Sam Burt reviews Heroes – Repro 1 + 5 by Triple Spiral Audio
“Triple Spiral Audio present their debut sound pack for u-he Repro-1 and Repro-5, inspired by David Bowie and resulting in an interesting and varied soundset”