Audio Reward release Seurat - Cinematic Grain-based Instrument for Kontakt

6th March 2018 - KVR Audio News

Audio Reward has announced the immediate availability of Seurat - Painting In Sound, a Kontakt Instrument that offers an unconventional collection of sounds for movie scoring and sound design.

Seurat uses Audio Reward's AGRA engine (Advanced Grain Recombination Architecture). Essentially this is a highly-customisable granular synthesis engine. Seurat allows you to manipulate the normal granular controls - grain size, grain frequency, attack and release of each grain and sample position but adds a range of additional parameter controls for things like grain gain (volume), grain position (movement), the space between grains and the symmetry of grain position in the audio flow offering a range of interesting and often unique outcomes.

Seurat comes with 707 Samples, 81 Selectable Sound Sources and 175 snapshots, each grouped into separate folders for ease of access.

Here are some of the instruments and recording techniques used in the creation of Seurat:

Violin:

Mesh fabric fastened flush to the bow, creating a gritty, broken sound (used for a variety of "articulations" such as tremolo and harmonics).
Felt fabric fastened near the bridge to create a softened/muted sound (most notably for "Soft Violin" but other sounds as well).
Attaching metal and other materials to the strings to achieve a different sound ("paperclip violin").
and more....

Electric Guitar/Acoustic Guitar:

Home-made soft guitar picks or soft "found" material for the normal picked sounds.
Felt fabric and other fabrics used to mute guitar harmonics.
A technique used for the "moving" plucked and harmonic sounds was to move where I was plucking the string in order to create a different tone across the time of the sample.
Isolating and amplifying reverb tails.
Notes generated only from vibrating the strings with the left hand and fingers, no plucking ("ghost guitar").
Notes generated only from a hammeron and then turning the volume knob up ("volumation").
and more...

Bass Guitar:

Normal bowed.
Mesh fabric bowed (similar to the violin, but not as "tonal").
Bowed in a "sweet spot" near the bridge in order to create a gritty, harmonic-like, dark sound (these are the "Gritty Harmonic" sounds).

Piano:

Muted pedal sustain (pretty basic).
Muted on and off with fabric (at the strings) while rapidly pressing the keys.
Muted pedal sustain pressing keys rapidly with a varying degree of dynamics.
Live performance of rapidly playing different intervals (octaves and whole tones, "octave etude" and "debussy's dream" respectively).
And more...

Mandolin:

Bowed.
Multiple strings tuned to same note and plucked together ("mandolin unison plucked").
Basic pluck with a home-made "cardboard" pick.
Fidget spinner.
And more...

Ukulele: