We all know and praise Heavyocity for their earth-shattering, widely acclaimed and highly qualitative sample libraries. They created Evolve, Damage, AEON, and more – they have simply proven themselves among the top in the hybrid scoring stage of sample developers. And now, Heavyocity present us with a new beast in their hybrid scoring range – Gravity.
Is is a collection of awe-inspiring sounds never-before-heard. It’s a diverse library for Kontakt, with sounds ranging all the way from eerie and other-worldly, to groundbreaking and deeply unsettling, all wrapped together in their fantastic UI inside of Kontakt allowing control beyond imagination.
Quick Overview
- $449 (currently on sale for $369)
- 12 GB uncompressed (9,2GB compressed)
- 1200+ NKIs (2200+ sound sources)
- 780+ Pads
- 390+ Stings
- 19 Riser Menus
- 9 Hit Menus
- Design your own hits and risers
- Twist, Punish, Sequencer, FX, multi-channel modulation, and much more functionality
- A huge cinematic sound
- VST, AU, DXi, RTAS, AAX
- … and much more
What… the hell? This is awesome!
So let me tell you about when I first loaded up a patch from Gravity: I chose a Pads patch called “Star Stung”. I increased the “Vol Mod Rate”, the modulation of the separate channels, cranked up the Twist and Punish knobs, and just transcended out of space-time. The sound was so unreal, so deep and modulating and I found myself wanting to do a track from this newly-found source of inspiration, and that was only from one small Pads patch.
Again, it’s hard to put into words how friggin cool this thing is! It’s the whole diversity of the library (apart from its magnificent sound quality) that sells it for me. By finding your way through the folder structure, loading up a patch and playing around with the controls, you can go from a very smooth and atmospheric soundscape into madness beyond belief.
Now that we’ve got it out of the way that Gravity is insane let’s dive into what actually is in it.
The content
Here is the folder structure inside of Kontakt:
- Hits
- Breakouts (for designing your own hits), Full Menu, Impacts, Subs, Tails, Whooshes
- Pads
- Complex, Element Menus, Elements Ambient, Elements Short
- Risers
- 15 sec, 30 sec, Organic Risers
- Stings
- Elements and Menus, with Atonal, Tonal, Reverse, Sweeps, and much more
Even if this library is “only” 9,2GB of .wav content, it’s simply huge. You have hits menus, hits and riser elements that you can design yourself inside of the patches, stings with all kinds of hybrid styles, and pads with endless sonic possibilities.
This may sound like a lot of praise, but trust me – it is all warranted once you try it out yourself!
Functionality
Once inside of the patches of Gravity, we find some familiar controls such as the Punish knob which adds a compressed power and saturation and Twist. I have no idea what Twist actually does under the hood, but it basically sounds like a flanger with a phaser gone mad – meaning it’s really wicked. Crank up the Twist and Punish knob on a riser and you got yourself the sound of impending doom.
You also have Mix, where you can modulate between three channels of sounds at different rates, pan the channels differently, and more. This is one of my absolute favorite features. The sound spins around the stereo field, in both volume and texture
Other elements on the main page are the reverb, chorus, delay and distortion, ADSR, velocity, glide and unison controls.
On the other tabs of the Gravity engine, there is EQ/Filter which has a bunch of filters and EQ controls for each of the three channels of the patch. There is also a TFX (Trigger FX) tab that you can set what distortion, panner, delay, filter, lo-fi to be triggered with your MIDI keys.
Finally, there is a Motion tab for any sort of movement in the patch, or step sequencing for any rhythmic gating or similar arpeggiated effects.
The really useful parts
Most of this library is useful for my hybrid scoring; either for trailer music, film score or any soundscape design. But to accentuate some of the most useful parts for me, I’d like to highlight the length control of the hits and risers and the entire Designer part.
Being able to change the length of any given hit or riser is really useful to match whatever part of a track.
The breakouts patches are very useful because it allows you to pick and choose between any whoosh, impact, sub-hit and tail included in the library. For me, this is particularly useful for trailer music.
You can also add on interesting rhythmic aspects with the modulation of the Twist, rates of the modulation on each channel, and also the entire Motion tab of the patches where you can arpeggiate or gate however you wish.
A few drawbacks
One letdown of the library is that there is no real expression or mod wheel action in the library. There are some MW patches, but I want the mod wheel (CC01) or the expression (CC11) to control the volume of the pads especially and the other content.
I have to manually MIDI learn something inside the patch to control volume, which is a bit of a pain. Would like to go from very soft/quiet to the maximum of the patches. Just having expression to control the volume of the patches would be a huge benefit, but alas – it’s not programmed in the library.
One other thing is that even if the Twist knob is at 0%, it still has a big effect on the sound. I’d like the 0% to be completely unprocessed from the Twist algorithms, and then as I crank it up I want to mix it in to taste.
Conclusion
This is a great sounding library for any hybrid scoring composer – regardless of what you are composing for. If it needs a hybrid twist to it, you will find a bunch of inspiring sounds here to your liking. Gravity is modern, imaginative, and extremely functional in many ways.
There are over 1200 patches in Gravity, all ready to be accessed and tweaked as you like. I would use most of what is in here for my own hybrid scoring – especially for my trailer music. The hits are very clean and modern, the pads and stings are imaginative and new, and the stings are unique.
Even if there are a few drawbacks such as the lack of mod wheel and expression action, this library shines in many ways. I recommend it to anyone who’s looking for new, exciting and inspiring sounds for their hybrid scoring.
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