Big Fish Audio has released Zodiac, a unique-sounding Virtual Instrument designed to provide composers and producers with a collection of original sounds and instruments suitable for film or TV scores, video games, and all types of ambient and experimental music.
No synthesizers were used to create the instruments in Zodiac. Instead, all instruments were created from organic sources such as found sounds, sonic manipulations inspired by classic Musique Concrete, Experimental and Avant Garde Music compositions, prepared or heavily processed musical instruments, and audio recordings subjected to extreme sound design techniques.
Zodiac features over 150 different instrument patches (over 8GB of uncompressed WAV data), divided into six categories:
- Pads & Atmospheres.
- Melodic Instruments.
- Bass Instruments.
- Percussive Instruments.
- Experimental Instruments.
- Zodiac Kits.
Zodiac's instruments range from beautiful and ethereal soundscapes to wildly inventive percussion and mysterious, haunting, atonal and experimental sounds that defy easy categorization. Search through Zodiac's patch folders, and you won't find anything like a regular bass, guitar, keyboard, or drum set. Instead, you'll find a collection of sounds that are quite unlike those made by any standard instrument.
Not only does Zodiac feature a constellation of ready-to-use instrument patches, it's also a powerful sound-design VI. Use Zodiac's simple but versatile controls to dramatically alter, sculpt, or tweak and customize sounds to fit your individual style. However, you don't even need to touch a single control to get a variety of sounds from Zodiac's preset patches.
Zodiac is made for experimentation: hold down a key on many instrument patches and a sound loops and morphs, revealing surprising musical timbres and harmonic strata. Play an instrument one way and it has a percussive quality; play it another, and the notes expand into a pad or atmosphere. Play a patch in one octave and it sounds dreamy and surreal; play it in another octave and it behaves and sounds quite differently.
Price: $199.95.
Zodiac is powered by Kontakt 5 Player. It is compatible with VST, AudioUnit, AAX (Pro Tools 10) and RTAS (Pro Tools 9 & 10) plug-in formats allowing it to work seamlessly within any major sequencer, in addition to standalone use.
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