Hauschka Composer Toolkit Review – By Spitfire Audio
Hauschka Composer Toolkit is a library for electronic music and works great when you compose to picture. Keep in mind this is a library with an organic feel that wants to disruptive your usual creative process. It wants to inspire you. Hauschka Composer Toolkit is not for everyone, it is for anyone who loves to think outside of the box. If you ready for a change, you will be surprised and thrilled. The Hauschka Composer Toolkit was developed in cooperation with the composer and sound artist Volker Bertelmann aka Hauschka.
Hauschka
Spitfire and the world-renowned German composer Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann) produced this new library in collaboration. Hauschka is best known for film scores such as the Oscar-nominated Lion (2016) and Adrift (2018). As a multifaceted musical toolkit to add dazzling depth, tension, and texture to anyone’s scoring spadework by bottling a sought-after signature sound palette, performed by Hauschka himself on a Steinway Model D grand piano with 40-plus preparations. Presented in Spitfire Audio’s advanced Evo Grid layout and masterful Mercury synth engine with mix-and-match multiple signal options as an industry-standard Kontakt-powered instrument benefiting from the sound-specialising British music technology company’s seasoned sampling expertise, encompassing unique soundscapes from epic industrial rhythms and thundering bass lines to offbeat, atonal plucks and beautiful, shimmering pads that genuinely capture the sound world and creative spirit of a true innovator.
Although Hauschka has a number of prepared piano compositions to his notable name — not least, appropriately, an album titled The Prepared Piano (released in 2005), his HAUSCHKA COMPOSER TOOLKIT namesake collaboration with Spitfire Audio is not actually a prepared piano sample library in the way that someone hearing those two words out of context could conceive it to be, but rather a creative exchange and an opportunity for its users to effectively collaborate with a one-of-a-kind composer. Clearly uncompromising and unorthodox, who better to formally introduce that sought-after signature sound palette than Hauschka himself. Spitfire Audio did send a review copy with no strings attached.
Installation
It is as with all Spitfire Audio products an quick and easy installation process. You use the Spitfire Audio Installer Application and if available update the library later when an update is available. Hauschka Composer Toolkit requires the free version of Kontakt. Following downloading the library, you must register the serial number in Native Access.
Sound
Hauschka Composer Toolkit is unmistakably different from the other libraries offered by Spitfire Audio, you could even go that far different to anything in the market. To work and appreciate the Hauschka library you have to be prepared to work outside the sonic world that Spitfire Audio works in. And that is a good thing, as we get finally from Spitfire Audio libraries that do not repeat and launch another Skandi or orchestral library. I love the orchestral and Skandi libraries, and I was thirsty for something different from Spitfire. The sounds of the toolkit come from a piano. The samples were recorded at the Berlin Vexton Studios.
The Hauschka library is divided into six sections. Four Evo Grids: Plug Hits, Plug Rhythms, Pad Sounds, Pad Hits, Swells, and Drum Kits. Each is unique in sound. From rhythmic hits to thunderous basses, sustained notes to atonal stabs. The team made sure to design the sounds to allow them to be layered mutually. The Plug Rhythms are made by playing rhythms while objects such as tea lights and ping pong balls bounce or fly off the strings, creating dynamic, multi-layered textures. Other objects used range from saxophone reeds to toy drums, tambourines to gaffer tape and light filters to wooden pegs, creating a huge range of new instruments. Both the Evo Grid layout and multiple signal options give you endless possibilities for each sound, with different results for every user. I personally love the rhythmic sequences that are included.
The Hauschka Grids include
- PLUG HITS – Objects like wood mutes beating the piano to produce percussive sounds
- PLUG RHYTHMS – In this grid, each of the plug hits preparations has its own rhythm
- PAD SOUNDS – Ping pong balls and tea lights resonating on the piano strings to create pad-like sounds. Excellent use of the Pedal FX mic and the Modular FX
- PAD HITS – Long decays, sampled in combination with FX chains
- SWELLS – Mallet, Octave, and Single Key creating amazing, vibrant textures
- DRUM KITS – Atonal, percussive patches, in which Hauschka turns the whole range of the grand piano into a drum kit, virtually unrecognizable as a Piano
If you still wonder if you should obtain Hauschka Composer Toolkit you can download the Hauschka Composer Toolkit Free Demo Patches.
These free patches can be used in Kontakt Player for 15 minutes, or in Kontakt Full indefinitely. Watch Spitfire Audio How It Works video if you need help on how to install your demo patches.
The sounds and vibes of the Hauschka Toolkit are between pure and alien nature. It incites your creativity with something new and different. The included sounds, especially the pads have a tremendous climatic warmth and work excellently without many much more work really in a film score. Outstanding tool for atmospheres.
Rating: Four Out of Five Stars
Hauschka Composer Toolkit is excellent when scoring for a modern film, TV, Ads, Games, and media. For the producer of electronic music, this library helps to make your track unique while it still fits the genre.
The Kontakt library Hauschka Composer Toolkit is different and comes with a very unique sound and is not the traditional library you are used to. You need to spend time with this library, go through mangled sound, or take the raw sounds into your own effect tool. As a result, you get a huge amount of variation. The corporation between Hauschka and the Spitfire Team produces ambiances, soundscapes, percussive beats, thundering bass sequences, atonal plucks, and beautiful pads.
