Distant Echo by Ohm Lab
Today we take a look at the recent release Distant Echo, a collection of drones and textures, from ModeAudio and let you know what we think!
As many of you know, OhmLab does a lot of work with deep and atmospheric cinematic audio. So when it comes to reviewing drones and textures, like what we find in the Distant Echo sample collection from ModeAudio, we approach it with an equal measure of excitement and skepticism. Normally, the drones and textures we work with in the studio are created from scratch and specifically for the project they will be used in. So we were a bit surprised to get so caught up in these sounds!
The crew over at ModeAudio has never let us down, and the Distant Echo pack has just soared up toward the top of our list of favorite releases from them. At first glance, the thing that stood out the most was how the sounds in this collection are organized. Distant Echo contains 120 samples, each running up to a minute in length, which are broken into the following categorizes: Additive, Bass, Contour, Granular, Inharmonic, Noise and Tonal. What a brilliant way to approach this type of pack!
We do a lot of sound design work, so this way of organizing the sounds made a ton of sense to us. And simply from a music making perspective, this naming convention is ideal for these types of sounds specifically. Think about how you decide what kind of drone or texture you may need for a certain project. You're probably thinking something like, I need something slightly inharmonic here and probably some kind of high end texture over here And Distant Echo was obviously produced with this creative process in mind.
The sounds themselves are really quite nice. Full bodied, but not overly saturated or processed in any way, leaving you plenty of room to customize for your own needs. And after playing with them for a while, it's easy to imagine scoring entire films with little more than the sounds found in the Distant Echo collection. The diversity of sound types and range of ideas explored in each category all add up to a truly wonderful collection and we would happily recommend it to anyone looking to add power, depth, atmosphere, presence and/or ambience to their music, or for those who work in the film and gaming industries.
For the demo, we chose a dozen samples at random and made sure to include something from each category in the Distant Echo collection. This is only 10% of the total number of sounds in the pack, but it was plenty to make something immersive and inspirational. As always, we did not process the sounds (aside from some subtle panning and some very basic EQ work, for separation) for the sake of transparency. So what you hear in the track below is what you can expect to hear yourself when you open up this pack. One sound was also time stretched a bit to help it fit the overall mood of the mixer. We explored a few common soundscape ideas and feel that this is a fair representation of the sounds that ModeAudio put together in Distant Echo.
[Please check out the original review page to listen to Ohm Lab's demo]We give this pack two big thumbs up and happily recommend it!