Ty Unwin is one of the UK’s most in demand media composers, having written music for the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, National Geographic Channel and Discovery as well as international advertising campaigns for Hewlett Packard, Google and Unilever. You can find out more about Ty’s work and his studio set-up in a previous interview with did with him on the Time+Space website here.
Following the release of DRONAR: Hybrid Module earlier this week, we asked Ty if he would put it through its paces and tell us about his experience of it for the T+S blog. In short, DRONAR: Hybrid Module by Gothic Instruments, is an atmospheric sounds creator which is incredibly easy to use and is capable of producing deep, complex atmospheres in seconds. What’s more, the simplicity means it’s extremely expressive, and, as such, very addictive!
We’ve loved playing around with DRONAR in the T+S studio over the last few weeks, but we were interested to know how useful it would actually be for a working composer. I knew we were going to enjoy the review when I opened Ty’s email this morning and read the words “Hi Melanie, I GENUINELY love the library and mean every single word of this [review]!“.
Over to Ty…
“Dronar is an incredible library. If you work in TV, Film or games then this is a MUST HAVE… and genuinely IS a bargain. For me the main difference between this and other similar libraries is the fact that whilst the raw sound design samples are of incredible quality the way that you can combine and shape this source material can take them to places that you’d never expect.
With folders titled “Dark”, “Strange”, “Tension” and such like, you would think that you know what you’re going to get, and whilst you CAN obtain the kind of long atmosphere patches that litter any great Hollywood Blockbuster with ease, some of the Pads and Arpeggio patches that I’ve got out of this library are amazingly beautiful.
The interface is incredibly simple to use (although there IS an advanced page). There’s an octave of key-switching “patches”, each made up of 4 independent layers…each of those with it’s own type and frequency range and it’s own independent synth and arpeggio parameters. Combined with FX and realtime parameter control and you can see why it’s so versatile.
The intensity and movement controls can make the sounds move and shift in a way that up until now would have taken hours to create.
And for me THAT is the wonderful thing about Dronar… To create these kinds of granular, shifting, layered sounds would take an enormous amount of time, effort and sophisticated programming… and even THEN I doubt you could get this kind of quality simply because the source material is THAT good and some of it unique.
For me time really IS money simply because most of my work is deadline based and so any library that can save me time but deliver quality like this is a real find. To put it simply when I need any kind of atmos or creative pad this library has become my first port of call. A great product.”
A big thank you to Ty for taking the time to share his thoughts.
Click here for full DRONAR details, audio demos and videos
