Wide Blue Sound release Eclipse and bring the darkness
Following on from last year’s well received Orbit, Wide Blue Sound have released a similarly focused and cosmologically named synth called Eclipse. They see it as the darker relative of Orbit – where Orbit brought light, Eclipse will bring shadow, that kind of thing. They share the same interface, built and scripted into Kontakt
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was just a sound expansion for Orbit, but they are keen to stress that this is from a completely different part of the universe. Wide Blue Sound founder and composer Jeff Rona described it like this: “We wanted to take things in a much much darker direction – something you need all the time for scoring games and a lot of film and TV. Eclipse makes some truly brooding, tense and twisted sounds that are useable and musical”.
The sound engine operates through 4 channels which move and evolve over time. Each channel can be effected and shaped individually using several filter types followed by a global FX chain. Modulation is taken care of by four sequencers giving control over every parameter. There are three modes of sound design that come from the Orbit synth. Pulse mode creates tonal pulses; Chop mode brings in the stuttering and glitch effects; and Flow mode is all about evolving textures and pads. This combination gives us the inevitable “endless array of sonic possibilities”. I have to say that the amount of endless possibilities I already have in every software synth ever will probably mean that my PC will at some point achieve sentience out of pure sonic probability.
Eclipse comes with 250 presets and over 4 hours of source material road-tested by “top sound designers” and is available now for USD $119 or bundled with Orbit for USD $248. They are also releasing a control template for Lemur on the iPad or Android to give you some touchy feely access to parameters – which is nice.
A small amount of information in a really big font is available here: http://www.widebluesound.com/
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