- TV, film, advertising, games and other mediums have a seemingly insatiable need for bombastic sound design. And so a wide range of tools have sprung up to provide the blasts, booms, swooshes and impacts that these fields require. The latest of these is Sculptor from Gothic Instruments, whose Dronar Guitarscapes Module I recently reviewed.
Sculptor is a Kontakt 5-hosted sound library whose audio is divided into three parts: Pre Whoosh, Impact and Decay. Each section has a rotary dial for selecting the volume and an LED toggle switch to engage or bypass a module independently. To choose a sound for each of the three sections, you click the name currently assigned to that section and swap it out for one of the others on the list. This is particularly straight-forward in the Pre Whoosh section where a long list of options is available.
More options are provided in the Impact and Decay sections where sub-categories of Blasts, Deep, Metal, Sci-Fi and Slams can be selected, revealing a menu of options specific to each category. It's possible to change the gap between the Pre Whoosh and Impact sections with a rotary dial, so that you can produce a monstrous build and then have a tantalising moment of silence before all hell breaks loose. Pairs of keys are used to design and trigger individual sounds in Sculptor, so C1 and C#1 trigger the same sound, before D1 and D#1 trigger a different one and so on, up the keyboard. This "key pairing" process makes it much easier to play Impact sounds in a pattern. Rather than having to constantly hammer on the same key, you can toggle between the two to play rhythms more easily. Usefully, the keyboard at the bottom of Kontakt shows the current key-pairing in pink (rather than blue or green), in case you lose track of which key you pressed most recently.
Below the sound selection sections, a number of rotary dials are available to enhance the overall sound. The first of these is Velocity, which varies the extent to which your designed sound will respond to key pressure. Dialing this down to zero ensures that the impact will always be at maximum volume. Next comes Pan, which globally offsets all three modules to left or right by an amount of your choice. A low-pass filter can be engaged, too, with the Q dial to its right offering variable Resonance. This can be really effective on sounds that have been filtered quite hard, with low rumbles sizzling with increased anger when resonance is cranked up. You can decide the extent to which Velocity will trigger Filter activity with the next dial. Velocity can be disconnected from the Amplifier, which means key triggers can be set to only affect tone, rather than volume. Tune comes next, which offsets the pitch of all three modules, while Decay and Release shape the envelope of sounds, allowing them either to ring on or be cut short.
Underneath, you'll find rotaries to control sends to the in-built reverb and delay modules. Clicking the Master FX button in the bottom right-hand corner allows you to set these up. On the Effects page, you'll find these modules at the bottom. Delay parameters are as you'd expect, with Feedback and Level rotaries, while delay times are clocked to tempo with six quantise value options. Pleasingly, there's a Width control for creating wide-screen treatments here. The reverb module offers four dials to control Decay Time, Damp amount, Size and output Level. Both modules feature on/off buttons if you'd prefer to use your DAW's spatial effects instead.
But that's not the end of Sculptor's effects provision. Towards the top of the Effects Page, you'll find optional Drive, Compression and Filter modules. Drive contains Gain, Crush and Damp dials and can be used to create guitar amp or bitcrushing style effects. The Compression section provides Intensity, Time and Mix dials, the latter of which lets you easily create parallel compression treatments. The Filter module is multimode, with high-pass, band-pass, low-pass and notch options, with Cutoff and Resonance dials letting you shape tone to your choice.
If you prefer not to configure an entire instance of Sculptor from scratch, you can load one of the 82 presets. They are organised into sonic categories named Impacts, Monsta Percussion, Whoosh Impacts, Low Thunder, REV-elations, Small Percussion and Guest Presets. These will certainly help you target particular combinations of sounds and each folder contains a list of self-explanatory patches.
So, how could Sculptor be better? The effects you choose are applied to all the sounds you configure within Sculptor, so short of setting up several instances of the plug-in, there's no way to have certain keys trigger Master Effects with others sounding simultaneously dry. Similarly, parameters below the sound choice categories are global too, so low-pass filtering and resonance are applied to all stages of a sound rather than one or another, for instance. And of course, there is always room for more audio content, perhaps even including a sample import option.
However, for the price of Sculptor, I wouldn't expect anywhere near this level of flexibility. This is a sonically impressive module that successfully delivers on its narrow but popular remit. Whether you seek huge percussion, giant metal slams, transition effects that can trouble the structure of your studio's windows or any other sound that goes bump in the night, you'll find it here. And while Sculptor's focus might seem to be targeted exclusively at media composers, think again—many of these sounds will find homes in anything from techno to drum & bass and pop productions.
Ratings:
Cost: 4.4
Versatility: 3.3
Sound: 4.1
Ease of use: 4.3