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Mini Review: Spectral Relativity

By Spirit Canyon Audio
http://www.spiritcanyonaudio.com/spectralrelativity.php

Being a sucker for weird and unique sounds, I *HAD* to get my hands on this product.

Having used convolution / IR verbs for a few years now, it was always noted that someone could easily do weirder sounds simply by loading in any wave file and designating it to be the impulse to be emulated. Mic Simulations and analogue sounding delays were features that could be brought out of these sorts of reverbs, although ‘not recommended by the manufacturer’.

The fact is, anyone can do it. Just as anyone can twiddle knobs on a synth and create a single great patch. It takes true talent and patience to sit down and make a comprehensive and somewhat tonally compatible set of patches. This is what Spirit Canyon Audio did with this package. 850 individually tweaked verb impulses, categorized into 11 groupings, designed to make your reverb processor sound nothing like it was intended to sound.

Some patches are designed to color the sound and named appropriately: Brick Red will bring out the ‘furnace’ in your track. Others are more positional in nature. The Cosmic series evokes a Pink Floyd at the Planetarium sort of sounds – long washy smears that leave the sound almost unrecognizable at higher wet settings. Horror brings goths into the light and the pushes them back again into the night. The impression series features items like Ceiling Fan or Electrogrove, featuring a weird comb ringmod filter. And then we get into the heavy players – Industrial, the Periodic Table and Science & Industry. All in all, SCA even has a category called Weird, which should simply be called As Weird At The Rest, But Uncategorized.

Compatible with a dozen IR based verb systems, including Emagic’s Space Designer, you should be able to find a purpose for this somewhere. Its only $20 with shipping and the head designer, Darrell Burgan, over at SCA has been a long time Sonikmatter reader as well as a member of our KurzList having put a few dozen free patches into the community over the years. All in all he is a good guy and deserves your support so that he can keep bringing us weird but usable libraries such as this.

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