Review by Katie Tarrant
Developer: SoundMorph
Contributors: Michael Leaning & Rostislav Trifonov
Elemental is available here: https://www.soundmorph.com/product/53/elemental
SoundMorph are a renowned name amongst the audio industry and deservedly so. Founded in 2013, they have brought out a collection of impressive libraries, including the likes of Dust, Sinematic, and Robotic Lifeforms. The company’s intention is to create “audio products that embrace the evolution of sound”. Alongside their excellence in the fields of futuristic, fantasy and sci-fi content, they also tap in to some more niche areas, such as their Road Riders library (a collection of Ducati motorbike sounds) and Lost Transmissions (a library full of electromagnetic and radio sounds).
For this review, I will be exploring the realms of their Elemental library; a complete collection of ethereal magic sounds. Elemental focuses on the 5 main elements of magic: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Ether, but also includes a huge range of additional material to allow you to cater the library to your needs.
This library was worked on for over a year with a number of award-winning sound designers and features a staggering 650+ sounds, all in 24bit/96kHz stereo. The 650+ sounds total over 3.2GB of content; all kindly laden with metadata to be compatible with Soundminer and Basehead.
One of the greatest assets of this library is that it provides you with three components for your sounds: designed, sweetener layers sand raw source.
The ‘Designed’ folder includes the bulk of the library’s content with an eclectic range of ready-to-use sound effects. The sounds stand strongly on their own, requiring no tweaking, and can be simply dragged and dropped for whatever purpose you require. Some of my favourites include the ‘acid casts’, and the ‘good casts’ out of the ‘good and evil’ selection. The designed sounds are of varying lengths with some short one shots and slightly longer loops, and are all packed with an incredulous amount of detail.
The second folder contains the ‘Sweetner Layers’ which are split in to the five elements mentioned above. The sweetener layers become a nice touch as they provide additional sonic details that can be integrated either with the library’s designed sounds and raw source, or different sounds entirely. These layers are not only based on standard environmental material such as rock crumbles and fire burning, but also instruments such as chimes, a harp and drums. The track length varies greatly throughout the sweetener sounds too, with some only a few seconds long and others as long as 5 minutes.
Finally, the ‘Raw Source’ is particularly useful for allowing you to exercise your creativity; experimenting with creating sounds from scratch and also using Elemental in collaboration with other sounds that you own. It revolves around a nice mixture of unique source such as ice cracking, bowed glass and pans sizzling. It is probably the smallest folder in terms of content but is perfectly adequate with what it includes.
Overall, Elemental is stuffed to the brim with a wide array of strong material, including a generous amount of variations for each sound to ensure that you will never be caught short. SoundMorph have developed an incredibly unique aesthetic with all of their libraries and Elemental is no different. The sound of magic can be fairly open to interpretation but the team have strived to meet your expectations with their design choices, whilst still including their iconic flair.
As well as the audio itself, SoundMorph provide a nifty spreadsheet of the entirety of the libraries contents with its relevant metadata and information. This is incredibly useful for a quick-view of Elemental’s content and easy navigation to the sounds that you need, rather than having to dig through the folders every time. SoundMorph maintain this consistency and buy cialis jelly organisation throughout all of their libraries and it truly makes them a pleasure to use. The spreadsheet also does nicely to credit the designers for each sound and, alongside the listing of SoundMorph themselves, credit is due to sound designers Michael Leaning and Rostislav Trifonov for their exemplary work on this product.
Elemental comes in at $149.00 which is a more than fair price for not only the amount of content included, but the sheer quality of that content alone. Alongside their individual products, SoundMorph also offer their Universe Bundle which includes all of the company’s current products, as well as their future products for a year. If you want to hear Elemental in action, SoundMorph have created a promotional video in which it is possible to see a demo of some of the sounds with some appropriate visuals. They also have a SoundCloud clip on their product page that demonstrates the library in much greater depth, so you can experience some of that fantastical goodness!
Elemental is available here: https://www.soundmorph.com/product/53/elemental
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