Developer: Tom Wolfe
Focusing on atmospheric, cinematic-style ambience, Astralis features 100 presets for Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2. With an emphasis on light, airy sounds, this soundbank will allow you to add a delicate, atmospheric ambience to your music in an instant. Full of cascading pads, floating soundscapes and serene sequences, Astralis is bursting with atmospheric character. If you’re looking to add some soft, cinematic flavour to your tracks and cues, look no further.
FLOATING IN THE ETHER
All 100 presets included in Astralis are brimming with delicate, atmospheric ambience. Full of cascading pads, floating soundscapes and serene sequences, Astralis is perfect for adding soft, cinematic flavour to your tracks and cues.
SHIMMERING BEAUTY
By using Omnisphere’s Granular engine and some rather unconventional methods, Astralis has been infused with a gorgeous, shimmering reverb to add a whole new level of luscious, serene beauty to ambient and cinematic sounds.
MADE FOR MOVEMENT
All of the presets in Astralis come with the Mod Wheel and Orb pre-mapped, allowing you to easily create movement in your sounds. Whether adding rhythmic elements or sweeping filters and distortion, you can keep your sounds evolving with your tracks.
WHO THE F**K IS TOM WOLFE?
Tom Wolfe is a British sound designer. Also an award-winning independent film composer, Tom is a prolific voice in the synthesizer preset world and, through his store tomwolfe.co.uk, has released soundbanks for some of the biggest and most popular software synthesisers and effects plugins on the market.
With his presets being celebrated for their uniqueness, creativity and usability by users and critics alike, Tom has worked with a number of industry-leading companies and his sounds have been used by Oscar-winning film composers, Grammy-winning record producers and AAA game composers.
RMS asked Tom some more questions about this release
What inspired this collection?
A huge inspiration for Astralis was the score for Soul by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I’ve always been a big fan of there’s, and this score just blew me away. It just has this gorgeous, surreal, floating quality to it that just captures the emotions of the film so perfectly. As soon as I heard it I knew I wanted to create something inspired by it, but it took a while to come to fruition. Another big influence was Cliff Martinez’ score for The Wilds. His blends of glass-based instruments and synths is always something I’ve been drawn to, but this score really stands out as a brilliant example of using ambience to create atmosphere.
What are your top picks from the collection and why?
The pads and textures are the main focus point of Astralis, and the pad I always come back to is Rays Of Light. It has this really delicate, serene foundation but slowly moves into a swirling shimmer reverb as the notes are sustained. When creating this soundbank I discovered that I could use the Granular engine’s Wild mode to create constantly rising pitched grains, which when run through reverb makes a beautiful take on shimmer reverb. This preset is a perfect example of how incredible that can sound. Another one is the preset A Thousand Souls from the Textures Soundscape category. This preset essentially takes one sound source from the factory library, so isn’t too complex, but the processing amplifies it and gives it a luscious floating quality.
What is it about Omnisphere that you love? What sets it
apart from other synths.
I love most things about Omnisphere to be honest, but what really makes it shine as an instrument is the huge range of soundsources. Spectrasonics have such a rich history with sampling that the soundsources are vastly unique and creative. They just make it possible to create so many rich, diverse sounds with relative ease. Other companies have come quite close to matching the capabilities of Omnisphere, but the one thing they’ll never be able to match is the quality and quantity of those samples.
Favourite factory patch or soundsource.
I’m very much a soundsource guy, as I often prefer to use my own presets. I’m a huge fan of the Distorted Reality soundsources, as they’re so harmonically rich and endlessly creative. They give such a vast range of options - a single soundsource and some creative manipulation can result in numerous presets, all of which have a completely different character. I also love the weird and wonderful Reaktor soundsources such as the Pressure Node samples, Bottom Feeder and Cable Bugs. Running them through the granular engine can provide such dark, rich and completely odd textures. There’s something about the unusual sound of them that just draws me in!
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