If there’s one thing you need as a cinematic composer in the New Year (or let’s face it – any day of the year) it’s more dark, gritty pulsing loops.
Motion Cinematic Grooves will give you just that – it’s a new hybrid rhythm & pulse library by Olajide Paris (Paris Sampling), which boasts over 1000 organic rhythms created with bass, contrabass, and violin. Perfect for adding excitement and momentum to your hybrid compositions.
As composers we have to be careful with popular loops and sounds – I guess the trick is to find the brand new loops and use them before everybody else does, and that’s why it can be good to top up the palette once in a while with something fresh.
They are a useful, and sometimes necessary tool for working in certain styles, and with a bit of time spent adjusting them you can get great, unique results each time.
They are also the secret weapon of any composer under a deadline. You have two hours to write a dramatic tension cue, what do you do?
Motion comes with two types of loop – Raw and Processed.
The Raw loops are just that, organic sounding samples that can be processed in your own way and chopped together to create unique sounds and patterns. And with the processed rhythms you get some broody and biting pulses in a nice sound design bed.
https://youtu.be/ZbMT-jN85Og
Built for Kontakt, Motion uses the Photosynthesis engine which will be familiar to anybody that has used Audio Imperia libraries before.
The engine and interface make it easy to add grit, saturation, delay, reverb and lots more. This is where you can spend time adjusting the sound so you get something interesting.
The patches have keyswitches which means you can immediately get the loop into the key you need (and change it as you go).
This makes the library quite a versatile tool. Some of the patches are chord based and offer major and minor versions, which is handy.
So, how does it compare to the many other pulsing libraries out there? Well for me, I find the sounds quite refreshing – there’s chopped up slap bass sounds, dark contrabass loops, weird twitchy violin sounds, it’s quite cool and different than some of the more synth or percussion based loops out there.
That said, many of the loops do sound quite similar and things can get quite same-y fast. But that’s expected. With some clever editing and creativity I think there’s a decent amount of mileage here.
Conclusion
Motion Cinematic Grooves will be great for lots of uses but especially dramatic tension cues and hybrid tracks, for both film composers and electronic music producers. And for the introductory price of $49 (soon to be $69), it’s well worth a shot, especially for those looking for a slightly more organic approach to their loops and pulses.
Written by Chris Hurn
Chris Hurn is a composer from New Zealand. He writes for several trailer and production music libraries, and is currently working on a couple of video game scores. His website is http://www.chrishurn.com.
