Review: Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Spitfire Audio taps into Hollywood’s premier bespoke instrument designer, Chas Smith, for one of their most experimental libraries to date. New sonic wonders pierce, chime, pulse, and drift with a deft organic colour for inspiring otherworldly scoring.
Jump to the Videos of Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Jump to the Demos of Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Review: Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Chas Smith is the secret weapon of top composers, including Hans Zimmer and Charlie Clouser, who has created one-of-a-kind instruments that have been featured in a range of sci-fi and horror movies, such as Dune, Interstellar, and the Saw franchise. Now a number of these largely metallic creations have been sampled by Spitfire to create over 600 patches hosted within their new synth plugin, Solar, enabling them to be deeply manipulated. This engine mimics the familiar eDNA engine they created for Kontakt, but with extra features and an easier-on-the-eyes interface.
So, we have something of a double whammy to explore here; the unique organic samples of a maverick ex-welder and the reinvention of the Spitfire trademark eDNA engine.
Mercury normally sells for £149 from Spitfire Audio
Thoughts
The 300 presets are the best starting point to explore Mercury. They take you through 14 instruments with names like Pez Eater, Que Lastas, and Lockheed, each referring to a specific creation from Chas Smith. In the real world, these take the form of metal rods in a helix spiral, bass strings over a steel sheet, and a whole other manner of tubes, plates, resonators, turbines, and pickups. You can see how they resemble industrial metallic sculptures, but they are ingeniously designed to also accurately play musical notes.
Presets can be starred as favourites and also quickly auditioned. With quite a list, being able to hear what each sound is before uploading it has always been a nice touch in Spitfire’s own plugins (albeit overly loud compared to the main plugin volume). Searching by keyword is possible by selecting descriptors on the left, but the window is so small only two categories can be seen at once which means a lot of scrolling and it is generally just not well designed. Clearly as one of the keywords is Mercury itself, the plan must be for the Solar plugin to house several libraries in the future that will all respond to keyword searching, much like how LABS is now.
Preset Selector
The first section of presets focuses on a single instrument in both bays. Bay A hosts the Core samples; these represent the raw original performances which can be bowed, hits, textures, scrapes, and a variety of other methods of playing the instruments, depending on how they each best respond to the human touch. The Core sounds all have this amazing quality of being upfront, but with a particular ambience to them. I don’t think it’s the room sound, but the inherent characteristic of vibrating metal, similar to how plate reverb sounds. Certainly, none of these presets have any effects applied. It is within the Core samples that we best hear the intentions of Chas Smith. The tones are all of a cold, metallic nature and full of complex character. Some are more playable like pads, or tuned percussion and bells, whilst others are better suited for long soundscapes or atonal, punctuated sound design.
By moving the mod wheel the sound fades into Bay B, which features the sound-designed variations of the original samples. Each Core sound has a number of corresponding sonic warps shown in parenthesis; Awash is lush, ethereal reverb; Destruct is heavy, outboard saturation; Weight is bass hyped using EQ, compression, and transient shaping; Cascade is delay-based textural ambience; Molecule is direct sounding, granular morphing. These are tastefully done so that there is a distinct change to the sound, whilst still preserving the soul of the Core sample. The mix of Bay A to Bay B can be static of course, but the magic happens as you fade from one to the other to create movement and timbre changes. Depending on the chosen samples this can be quite radical or subtle.
By clicking on the individual Bay slots full access is given to all of the 762 samples (Core and designed), enabling any combination desired to create weird hybrid monsters of Chas’ already weird hybrid creations! Somewhat annoyingly, they are not alphabetically listed – another interface niggle.
Bay Articulation Browser
Here the browser is more detailed so you can search by instrument type and also by feel. The result is getting to that elusive “sound in your head” pretty quickly. I would love to have the instrument name as a category also, so you only see Copper Box samples for example. This mix-and-match feature between bays is also reflected in the main preset browser where we can find patches further down the list that blend different instruments; those are the ones that lack the inclusion of the instrument title and instead are called things like Rogue and Neon. These patches do include the implementation of the eDNA engine and showcase the flexibility of the samples when you start to program them with a synth-like approach using the new GUI from Spitfire.
The top part of the interface will be very familiar to any users of Spitfire’s own plugins. We have expression for volume, the mod wheel for blending between Bay A and Bay B, and the big knob in the centre. The latter can be quickly assigned to a midi CC and programmed to control the HPF, LPF, and attack for each sound bay. It’s a shame you can’t group them to be able to control both sounds with a single CC and a bit annoying that the source list disappears when you move the controller.
Faders and Dial
Below that is pretty much a carbon copy of the eDNA interface from Spitfire’s Kontakt engine, which is to say you get all the basic parameters you would see on a synth; amplitude, pitch, high and low pass filters, filter modulation, ADSR, tuning, pan, trim, glide, and bend. A handy clone function duplicates the settings for ease of micro-tonal thickening, octave layering, or just plain wonky doubles. There is still no ability to specify how much velocity controls volume so you are stuck with the factory set sensitivity.
eDNA Main
The two sound bays can be blended using the horizontal fader at the bottom. As already mentioned this is tied to CC1 by default, but can also be connected to a dedicated LFO with four waveforms. I found the associated mixer start position fader to not be working past 50%, so it might need a fix in an update. The second page in this section reveals more of that previous Kontakt engine in the shape of extensive effects to either totally transform the sound or to apply more gentle contouring.
eDNA FX
Each sound bay has its own bespoke effects, plus Master FX that apply to the global signal and Aux FX (like delay and reverb) which either the individual bays or the master can send to. It all amounts to some very powerful sound mangling power. Spitfire has done a great job on the quality of the effects, not least the Convolution which offers some pretty radical spaces, and the Grain which takes you down an experimental granular rabbit hole. The final piece of the eDNA engine is on the third page and concerns the Gate Sequencer.
eDNA Gate Sequencer
It is pretty effortless to use with two lanes (one per bay) and up to 32 divisions. The depth and smooth controls help dial in just how tight the gate is, meaning it’s easy to set it up for a sharp pulse all the way to something with just the barest amount of undulation. Stop On Release will effectively turn the sequencer off once your finger leaves the key, though this is not visually represented as the sequencer lights just keep on going! After Layer FX, I found it most useful for ensuring a long reverb or delay will still get gated – with it off, any long tails will smear more, though that might be just what you want also.
Whilst I think there is some scope for interface improvements to aid usability, generally, the porting of the Kontakt eDNA engine into the new Solar plugin has been nicely accomplished. I have not directly compared the sound quality of the FX, but have no complaints there and it certainly looks cleaner and crisper than the blurry graphics in Kontakt. You also get options not possible in Kontakt, such as GUI resizing via dragging and options for gain units.
Settings
Mercury is a unique library born from a unique craftsman and his collection of incredible musical inventions. As marvelous as it is, the range of sounds you can get does have some limitations. It is firmly metallic and resonant in nature with a cold, mysterious and often caustic feel. There is a strong focus on atmospheres, textures, drones, and percussive sound design, though there are still plenty of playable pads. This places it as an ideal library for sci-fi, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and dark, disturbing drama. What was particularly well captured here is what has attracted Hollywood’s finest to Chas Smith’s door and that is the ability to create otherworldly sounds that are not made from synthetic sources. We get something that is at once both acoustically recognized, yet utterly unfamiliar. Mercury has the fantastical character of a well-programmed synth, but without any of the artificiality a synthesizer often gives and with all of the gritty, random fluctuations of metal vibrating. No wonder such sounds worked so well to help depict the dusty planet in Dune.
The raw sounds alone would make an excellent library, but the superb sound designed warps and housing it all in the powerful new Solar plugin makes Mercury even more flexible and with near endless permutations. Notably, the refreshed eDNA technology makes it easier to create playable keys, pulses, and rhythmic patterns, none of which are obvious features of the original samples themselves.
I have to admit, at first I found Mercury to lack variety, and to an extent you are limited to a metallic palette, but it really rewards you for digging deeper into the presets and pays back even more when creating your own bespoke patches. The more I play with it the more I like it! It won’t be for everyone, but if you want to stop reaching for your synths to conjure up unusual timbres, then Mercury might be just what you need, especially at the very reasonable price point.
Facts
Mercury is an 8.2GB download via the Spitfire App and works in the new Solar plugin. There are 762 samples spread across 14 instruments and a number of sound designed warps. A minimum of 8GB of RAM is required and it works with the new M1 Macs.
Mercury normally sells for £149 from Spitfire Audio
Demos of Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Videos of Mercury by Spitfire Audio
Contributor Sam Burt reviews Mercury by Spitfire Audio
“Spitfire Audio taps into Hollywood’s premier bespoke instrument designer, Chas Smith, for one of their most experimental libraries to date. New sonic wonders pierce, chime, pulse, and drift with a deft organic colour for inspiring otherworldly scoring.”
