thanks to Saul @YamahaMusician.com I had the chance to have a deeper look at Steinbergs new library Materials Wood & Water. Please read here my thoughts and impressions.
What is Material – Wood & Water and what do you get?
Wood & Water is an instrument and library for HALion. It works with a HALion 6.4, HALion Sonic 3.4, HALion Sonic SE 3.4. If you don’t have an HALion license you can use the library with the freely available HALion Sonic SE.
You can find all necessary information on Steinbergs homepage: https://www.steinberg.net/vst-instruments/materials-wood-water/
The library comes with 6GB of sound content. The samples vary from samples of classical orchestral instrument to pianos, guitars and synthesizer sounds. Near this it also offers a quit interesting bunch of natural noises. They noise sample part is buildup of sounds made by wood and water: flowing river, saw, cracking wood stocks or wood stocks rubbing against each other.
You can combine up to four of these basic elements to a sound and synthesize it with all the well-known possibilities (envelopes, filter, effects). At the end comes the magic: there is something called motion. You can modulate or animate the sounds by using an LFOs, a step sequencer or an arpeggio. It reminds me somehow to the Motions Sequencer concept in Yamahas Montage & MoDX product line.
Beside all the basis samples and possibilities to create own sounds, the library comes also with roughly 170 ready to play presets with a wide range of categories from basses to strings, from pianos to synthetic sounds.
It’s clear from the first moment that these sounds are intended to be used in cinematic music. As a film composer you will find here a broad range of beautiful textures and sounds to underline the emotions from a scene. And you also get a quite nice set of effects to enrich your music and scenery by adding animated noises.
I was absolutely stoned by some felt piano sounds, that soaked in reverb and animated with some water noise effect, kept me playing and playing. Same happened for some drone and string or pad style sounds too.
I already started to use some of the sounds on my compositions – I never were thinking so much about adding noises to make it more interesting. But it works quite well.
Overall, I’m quite impressed by the library, and I think I will use this library quit a bit! The work with the library inspired me and brough me to a new way of thinking with arpeggiated sounds and noises.
Thumbs up Steinberg.
best regards
Werner