Pour by Medway Studios
ModeAudio have another excellent sample pack focusing on ambient drones, subs, and noises called Pour.
As we've come to expect with all their releases, the sounds are dripping with personality and perfect for a broad range of musical styles and applications.
A few minutes of the demo track included on the product's page should be convincing enough to show the depth possible when stacking these sounds.
Let's take a look, however, at exactly what you'll get for a measly £15.
What's Included
Pour includes 150 main samples, all over 10 seconds in length, broken down into six different categories:
- Ambiance
- Contours
- Grains
- Noise
- Subs
- Synths
The Sounds in Detail
The Ambiance section really grabbed my attention from the very start.
Forget dull and lukewarm sounding drones, these samples cut through in a very modern way while still achieving their intended purpose.
Apart from helping construct an ambient style atmosphere, they're perfect for dropping into a break or signalling the end on any type of electronic production.
We continue with the Contour folder. Here a cyclic filter type of processing is imbued on some of the samples that helps create a more transition effect.
These samples would work well in bridging together different sections of music.
Next up, the Grains section takes things into more esoteric territory when a more atonal or agitated feel is needed.
Think choppy, stutter FX laced with only subtle hints of emotion on some samples.
Noise samples go one step further in allowing complex textures to be created, yet still retaining the quality of atmosphere exhibited by the previous samples.
When you need some warming up, the Subs folder contains the perfect blend of deep, rich, and evolving tones to compliment the harsher noise and glitch sections.
We end the main portion of this pack with a collection of Synth drones. These share many of the qualities of the first Ambiance section.
In fact, many of them could be interchangeable there, with just a subtle tilt towards more synth-like characteristics.
Tails
As a bonus there is an additional collection of 42 tail sounds.
Although the product pages describes all the samples in this pack as being over 10 seconds, the tails are actually just a few seconds each.
This is perfectly fine, however, is that type of length suits their purpose.
After you've arranged out the main samples to create your arrangement, these tail sections provide a more elegant way of ending the tones without needing to apply automation.
A clever addition and by reversing these samples you'd also end up with some interesting transition effects that can be useful for bringing in new sounds, not just ending the main samples themselves.
Conclusion
I very quickly came up with combinations of ambiances and feels just by layering samples from different types of folders available.
Unfortunately, there is no key information displayed on the samples, but usually a few semitones up or down had them all singing in unison.
Once again an excellent choice of sounds here from ModeAudio.