Gothic Instruments’ DRONAR finds its place in Time and Space
Dronar main page · Source: Time and Space
Dronar arp page · Source: Time and Space
Dronar effects page · Source: Time and Space
Dronar expert panel · Source: Time and Space
We all love a good trailer. All that drama unfolding in a couple of minutes that hint at some profoundly extraordinary story or climatic event, dripping with promise, drowning in cinematic atmosphere – that’s the sort of thing that Gothic Instruments aims to create with their DRONAR: Hybrid Module for Kontakt 5. DRONAR appears to mean (according to Wiktionary) either “to drown” or “the indefinite plural of drone” and actually either description seems pretty apt. Listening to the samples on the website there does seem to be the potential for drowning in the massive intensity of evolving textures in what could well turn out to be indefinite drones. So yeah, they nailed it with the name.
Gothic Instruments is a collaboration between Dan Graham and Adam Hanley, both of whom have been involved in creating sample library content for Zero-G. Dan is also CEO of Gothic Storm Music who do a lot of work with trailer music and producing sound for Hollywood. The concept was to create an engine that could generate complex atmospheres and textures from just a few notes held down with one hand while the other was free to play expressively with the controls. They plan on creating a whole series of DRONAR releases over the next couple of years, racking up huge amounts of samples for manipulation through the engine. This first release concentrates on grainy cinematic and sci-fi sounds, but also includes a lot of string recordings from the Liverpool Philharmonic.
There’s a large collection of cinematic style libraries out there at the moment and with everything from Omnisphere to Spitfire Audio we’re not short on evolving textures and purposeful strings, so it’s going to take a lot for DRONAR to stand out from the crowd. I sometimes find these sorts of libraries to be too intense to sit inside a mix of other sounds, always wanting really to be the only sonic feature, but what’s interesting to me is what the six controls can offer in terms of sound creation. You can dig down into these controls for a lot more detail but I really like the idea of being encouraged to play and see what occurs rather than aiming to create a certain sort of sound. Gothic Instruments reinforce this idea of playing and creativity by supplying a script to work with the Leapmotion gesture controller so you can control the parameters by waving your hand about – nice.
You will need to free up 16GB of space on your hard drive and it comes with 300 presets to get your textures evolving. Beneath the surface there’s multiple LFO’s and arpeggiators and other sound mangling processes all controlled by the six sort of macro knobs which affect movement, intensity, Hi, Mid and Lo notes and FX level.
DRONAR Hybrid Module is available now to download for 49.95 GBP and more will be available (at a discounted rate for existing owners) in the coming months.
More information: http://www.timespace.com/
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