Void and Vista are a relative newcomer to the sample library space. They have 3 libraries to their name, and the name is steadily growing in reputation as a result of the quality of the libraries (you can check out our Folds review for reference).
Frames is their latest release, and is available as a Kontakt library (7.7 or later only! But you can get the v.8 of Kontakt Player for free)
V&V, as I shall now call them, are all about cinematic atmosphere. The four co-founders are focused on sounds that are evocative, and unclear in source – for unique yet highly playable and useful sounds for music makers. To quote one of them in an earlier article they said of the purpose behind their instruments:
“The things we’ve made that please us all are what end up in the instrument. I think the starting point of trying to make things from sound sources you haven’t heard before is sort of the point of Void & Vista. Trying to do something different – not weird for the sake of it – but something you might not have expected.”
Sound Sources – Not Your Average Blend
This purpose is continued in Frames, utilizing sound sources from both classically defined instruments such as pianos, marimbas, and vibraphones, and also household objects such as kitchen utensils, bike spokes, and chairs.
These sound sources are blended in pairs (you can pick 2 different source sounds) with the built-in fx from Kontakt to easily achieve the intended incredible atmospheric sounds that would be in place in scoring for media and electronic music of various kinds.
Interface, Presets, Macro Controls And Morphing
The GUI is dark upon opening. Hundreds of presets are gathered into sub banks of pads, drones, textures and so on. Once you load your preset, you’re presented with 7 macro controls that affect the overall sound from the more typical filter and reverb to more interesting ‘character’ and ‘lofi.
A small arrow leads to a drop down menu for each macro that gives you more granular control over most aspects of each macro. The control is separate for each of the two source sounds that are in the preset.
I particularly liked the lofi macro. The drop down enabled you to choose what type of lofi you’re wanting – tape, radio, EFI. The noise, warble and saturation all come out of that character, and you can blend subtly, or take over the preset into extreme noisy distortion.
At the bottom of the GUI is the instrument selection. If you want to start from scratch, or tweak a preset, it’s a simple click on the Left or right hand side sound source, which opens up beautifully clear boxes with different sound sources to choose from. Chair scrape or macaroni shuffle, they all sound gorgeous.
There’s a ‘morph’ slider that fades between the two sources, and the way the samples are played can also be manipulated – you can raise/lower the pitch either incrementally in hz or by octaves and fifths, to keep it diatonically consistent. You can also change the direction the sample plays in.
Automation
You can map a lot of elements to MIDI control, and many of the macros and morph slider are pre mapped to the Modwheel (slightly differing per preset) the midi mapping is really easy to access, with a midi button in the top right hand corner of the GUI allowing you to map loads of different parameters to MIDI.
My only thought about improving options on the Frames instrument would be to add more auto modulation options on parameters within the instrument. This is easily resolved in Ableton for example by configuring the instrument, and then adding an LFO to tweak that parameter. But it would be nice to have that built-in for other DAWs.
Conclusion
Void and Vista Frames is a lovely addition to the Kontakt library stable, with its heavy emphasis on textural, noisy atmospheric drones and pads. It’s perfect for media composers, and will fit usefully in most genres.
It’s set up to be simple to set up and get playing as an instrument, yet you can get fairly deep into adjusting the tone and timbre of the sound without much menu diving. It’s fairly standard CPU usage, and was using around 15% an instance on my mac mini m4.
Frames operates as a library on the NI Kontakt platform, and can be used with their free player if you don’t already have it. It costs £129.
For more info visit https://www.voidandvista.com/products/frames.
