The story
I must begin by saying that this is my first sample pack. I never thought of making one, but this month’s Discord challenge motivated me to learn.
To make this package, I was inspired by the phenomena occurring in the universe. Therefore, after taking the resources provided by Afrorack and LABS, I tried to make the samples have a devouring, deep, cold and spacious touch. Likewise, I made an effort to give the interface a simple and modern style.
This pad pack for Decent Sampler has 4 signals:
– Pulsar
– Quasar
– Blazar
– Nebula
The 10 built-in controls allow you to vary the ADSR, reverb, delay, and lowpass filters.
I sincerely hope you like the result. I would also be very grateful if you could leave your opinion in the comments section.
Interface
Reviews for COSMOS
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
4 layers with lots of depth
The result of these 4 cleverly named layers is BIG, like our Cosmos. I certainly didn't expect such a massive soundscape, but here it is. The combination of those layers along with the included depth effects in the sci-fi themed GUI are good enough to let you create some enormous ambiences with great potential.
Smart GUI!
A very nice and clean GUI! Very simple to read and the FX help extend the sound. My only problem is that the samples used seem to not blend well together due to slight differences in tuning. I think if they were more in-tune with each other, the FX would blend very nicely. Very good effort though!
Atmospheric
If you'll forgive the pun, what with there being no atmosphere out there, the sound is as planned - other-wordly.
Crack up the reverb to max, set the volumes to about 20% / 40% / 100% / 40%, put the filter frequency around 3k and wobble that resonance slider whilslt playing a low discordant chord and... wow... my ears nearly bleed with the sound. Great!
Carl Sagan revisited!
I've said it before, and I may well say it again, but I am hugely impressed with the first-timers in Decent Sampler at the moment! Wow!
The nit-picker in me, though, notes that there's something strange about the sizing. For me, with a standalone version (tried it in 1.4.16 and 1.5.9), there are blank borders to the right and below, and the pitch and mod wheel are moved upwards, the first time that you load the .dspreset. If you resize the UI so that the borders are gone, then the pitch and mod wheel move downwards so only half is visible. This is probably going to be fixed in an update very soon!
The UI is very nice. I love the little symbols in the centre of each rotary control! (But I was initially a little confused by the two filter symbols, until I realised that the one of the left is the cut-off frequency, whilst the one on the right is the resonance!) I'm not sure about the current trend to have an on/off menu just underneath a 'mic' slider that has almost the same function, but this is a minor point. What is a major point is that the sounds are very well chosen - a nice range of thick, brittle, haunting and noisy timbres, which work well together. 'Cosmos' seems like the perfect name for the sounds, although I suspect that it will also see use in the horror genre (I loved the use of the word 'devouring' for describing the feel of the samples! Totally apt!).
I could only get the pan to work for the left-most 'Pulsar' sound, and looking at the XML code, then the position= parameters for the PAN need setting to 0, 1, 2, and 3, to fix this. Because the DS reverb blurs the stereo image, then not everyone will notice this, but I'm not everyone!
In summary, (and this is definitely a more 'wintery' type of sound (!)), this is exactly the sort of sound that would have accompanied Carl Sagan talking about space if only Decent Sampler had been available back in the 1980s... (Is Dave H working on a time machine next?) Big, bold and imposing, and a perfect example of finding something amazing that was lurking in the Afrorack source material!
GUI did not work, cool sounds
For some reason, I could not get the GUI to work, which is a bummer. After mangling with the knobs for a while I did manage to get some cool sounds, and I really loved how good these sounded. They are very cool and dramatic.
