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Channel Robot announce Orchestral Dust - an orchestral underscore and pad instrument

Lindon

VST/AU Developer
OrchestralDust.png

Channel Robot are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Orchestral Dust a dual voice ROMpler aimed at orchestral pad and under-score sounds. Orchestral Dust features version 2.5 of our innovative granular engine AGRA and offers a new approach to generating sounds using granular synthesis and produces some truly different and unique sounds, but always in the "orchestral" area

Orchestral Dust features 12 different multisampled orchestral instruments - and each has a set of articulations and ensemble sizes.

Orchestral Dust allows you independent maximum control over the grain playback for each voice. You can select gain(volume), audio file position and pitch of each grain, and within each of these you can set up your own loops for modulating and evolving sounds.

Orchestral Dust also includes many "classic" synthesis controls, like Attack, Release and filters, as well as a set of classic granular engine controls, like grain size(length), grain density(Rate), grain stereo spread(Width). All of these add up to the ability to create unique evolving lively sounds for your orchestral underscore.

Alongside these features Orchestra Dust has a powerful set of effects tracks and gates. There’s a send effects rack (with 4 different slots). There are also 4 convolution spaces for each voice, Overhead, Room, Studio and Hall. There’s our innovative and powerful tempo-based gating system that extends the normal trance-gate approach (which is volume-based) to add additional gating effects using things like different filter types and distortion effects.

We included our innovative scene controls too - you set three "Scenes" or key frames for volume, pan and pitch in each voice and use the mix control to morph between them. We even added our Drift Engine for subtle pitch drifting.

Orchestral Dust is available for Kontakt 5.8.1 and above and comes with nearly 3,000 multisample files and over 60 snapshots.

https://www.kontakthub.com/product/orchestral-dust/ (List price is £65.00, on introductory offer now (for only £16.25) at www.kontakthub.com)

Orchestral Dust is also part of our Everything-4-Ever members service. Members pay a monthly fee of £8.95 and have life long access to every single Channel Robot product, even if they decide to stop being members. The list of products included in the membership is now:

- Orchestra Dust
- The Modernist Marimba
- The Modernist Xylophone
- The Modernist Glockenspiel
- Electria
- Mechia
- Atmosia
- Ambicon - For UVI Falcon
- Folio Bass
- Recoil
- Grid Machine Drums - all the Grid Machine Drum Sequencers
- Drum Factory Collection - All 5 Drum Factory Instruments
- The Grid Machine Collection - all 4 Grid Machine instruments
- The Slice Bundle - All 6 slice loop playing instruments

More details on Everything-4-Ever here

 
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Orchestral Dust in text (also Orchestra Dust once on Kontakt Hub) but the logo typography is Ochestral Dust. o_O :)

Is there going to be a patch walk-through video?
 
wow I never even noticed my typo in the product title... duh! - too busy getting it to sound right I guess.

The sound cloud demos plays the first 13 patches but I can add a video if its what everyone wants.

Though fair warning my keyboard skills are those of a guitar player...
 
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Right well first up an amended video.....now without added typo!

(its the same video so if you've watched the other nothing new here to see...)

 
Which instruments included ?
Bassoon, Cello, Clarinet, Contra Bass, Flute, French Horn, Oboe, Trombone, Trumpet, Tuba, Viola and Violin. Most with Large ensemble, Small Ensemble and Solo, and their respective articulations...
 
Well the sounds get passed into the granular engine, where they get (huh) processed, which makes the whole multiple round-robin thing a waste of time - the granular engine is "modulating" the sound in interesting and unique ways so round-robin differences are rendered pointless/inaudible, so I could avoid having to manage those, the same is true of nuanced velocity layers, the granular engine is taking care of that in ways that give you new sound timbres to play with so again - no point in lots of those either. Thus I had a quite a bit less audio to wrangle. Having said that there are over 1600 separate audio files being used as source material for the granular engine - so that's quite a bit more than you would find in your "normal" granular-based ROMpler.
 
OK, here's the first 25 snapshots played with my marginal keyboard skills, so please dont judge the instrument on my ham-fisted guitarist approach...no additional processing this is just "raw" Orchestral Dust.

 
Got this one yesterday. Had not much time to play around with it so far but it does what I hoped: as I am not really good in adjusting the granular things I thought it would be great to search for a snapshot I like in case of its "granular" sounddesign and then adjust the instruments to my liking. This seems to work in general and I am really happy about this. More in detail after longer testing. The randomn button seems to bring interesting results to but you have to have some time with it cause it seems to be "real" randomn so it does not always bring useful results.
 
A little addon and a little request already :).

I tried it now on a first track to bring some "bassy-soundscape-background" and it really worked well as I hoped with a snapshot that brings the "granular athmosphere" and then a Cello and a Cello ensemble for the instruments/sounds needed.

Now the request: I really have problems with the included convolution reverbs. Maybe its only my lacking knowledge to imagine what "Hall 2 5 seconds" would mean in comparison to what I am after but for a quick try I just found nothing that brings what I am searching for. On the other hand I really wont like to do what I have done now and bring in another Convolution reverb after it (I used Meldas free MConvolution cause it was just the first on hand) cause I dont think its really needed as one is included. For the sketch it was just a "Dark Hall" that fits all my needs. And I would like something like "cave" and so on for quick inspiration, so maybe its just a naming problem. Not sure if you get what I am after :).
 
Have to add another kind of addon/question. Even if I seem to be the only one who is just overwhelmed by the SARP I really wonder why this is not included in all new instruments ? No problem at all (at least in the daw I use) to put one instance before Orchestral dust but this is so strong and so I really wonder WHY.....
 
A little addon and a little request already :).

I tried it now on a first track to bring some "bassy-soundscape-background" and it really worked well as I hoped with a snapshot that brings the "granular athmosphere" and then a Cello and a Cello ensemble for the instruments/sounds needed.

Now the request: I really have problems with the included convolution reverbs. Maybe its only my lacking knowledge to imagine what "Hall 2 5 seconds" would mean in comparison to what I am after but for a quick try I just found nothing that brings what I am searching for. On the other hand I really wont like to do what I have done now and bring in another Convolution reverb after it (I used Meldas free MConvolution cause it was just the first on hand) cause I dont think its really needed as one is included. For the sketch it was just a "Dark Hall" that fits all my needs. And I would like something like "cave" and so on for quick inspiration, so maybe its just a naming problem. Not sure if you get what I am after :).

Yeah I get where you are coming from with the convolution reverb naming. Naming is (generally across everything) a problem - what is "Grandmas House" to me might be "nightmare fields" to you...so we opted for the most descriptive - in terms of the length of time dialed in (or available in the spaces).

Yes I know there is a LOT of IRs in here. 90 of them to be exact - more than some "IR's ONLY" products, so auditioning them can be a long process, but we felt that we had 'em so we should include them - we actually culled about 40 IRs to get down to this amount.
 
Have to add another kind of addon/question. Even if I seem to be the only one who is just overwhelmed by the SARP I really wonder why this is not included in all new instruments ? No problem at all (at least in the daw I use) to put one instance before Orchestral dust but this is so strong and so I really wonder WHY.....

So the answer here is always about compromise.

As a developer we love adding functionality to our products - often its useful stuff we've already built. like KarlHeinz suggestion here. But....

Adding stuff makes it (in almost all cases) more complicated to use. The Sequencing Arp is non-trivial, yes it's enormously powerful - but it takes a little wrapping your head around, which is why we gave away the free version - so you could try it out stand-alone.

So if you look at the control interface for Orchestral Dust there's a LOT of controls on there - a consequence of offering such a powerful granular engine, so in the end two things decided us against including the SeqArp:

1. Complexity vs usability - it just seemed one set of controls too far....especially when we considered...

2. Utility - we attached the SeqArp on the front of Orchestral Dust and tried it - yes there were some nice outcomes, but in a small but significant proportion we couldn't get the SeqArp to work well with a given sound source.

So given these two we decided against it.

As KarlHeinz says you can of course download the (free!) version of the SeqArp (called SARP) from our website and add that in front of Orchestral Dust or any other sound making plug-in you have. Simply go register on our site (its free, and we wont spam bomb you too much) then go to the Free Stuff page and download away.
 
Quick note: Only 12 hours left of the intro. sale - get in now.

https://www.kontakthub.com/product/orchestral-dust/
 
Just a quick note to say we are trialing our demo-version system using Orchestral Dust. If you head over to Channel Robot and follow the menu item "FREE STUFF & DEMOS" you will (eventually) get to download the demo version of Orchestral Dust.

https://channelrobot.com/free-stuff/

As the info. says its a single octave of audio but all the functionality is there so you will be able to see/hear how it performs.
 
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