Aberrant Drones by SKYES Audio Review
Drones are key to a musical score and are often used when underscoring to picture. Many soft synthesizer offer patches that are short (time) drones, Aberrant Drones is the opposite of short soundscapes. Let’s discover more than six hours of distinctively flavored, frightful and ever-evolving drones. Aberrant Drones did send a review copy with no strings attached.
Installation
You download a large file which includes the core 79 audio files, overall 13isch GB. To use it add the drones to your Soundminder database or use tools like AudioFinder to navigate through the content.
Sound
The included 79 drones overall are 400 Minutes of drone sound goodness. The covered drones are between less than a minute or around 14 Minute long.
With the more than six hours of content, you get sounds (drones) to support the emotion you want to trigger in the audience when they watch certain scenes. The vibe of the drones can be unnerving, harsh, or unfriendly and increases the intensity as the track progresses in time. This makes this toolkit of drone sounds a really quick win for a composer who needs to underscore Sci-Fi, action, or horror movie.
As pointed out below you can easily make them your own sounds with the use of third-party tools and could use them as they resulting tracking to drive home the beat of a scene with some emotional soundscapes. Sometimes you find yourself just adding some effects and you are done, just don’t tell your customer how easy it was.
If you want you can start to use tools like Serato sample to automatically find chunks in the included wav files. This allows you to play with parts of the drone on your keyboard, helpful when you want to quickly find pieces to repeat throughout the score without having to go through the content of a track.
Speaking of third-party tools you should always take the sound you buy and further mangle it with effects tools or send it to one of your hardware samplers. To do this extra step really expands you sonic arsenal and allows you to create unheard sounds even if you buy a drone in the first place.
User interface & Usability
This is a collection of wav audio files, there is no UI. SKYES Audio did make sure that the usability is improved by using metadata to allow you to find the needed drone sound quicker. I would recommend using tools like AudioFinder or Soundminder
The wording of the metadata describes the feeling and mood. You can take a look here to learn more.
Rating: Four out of five stars
Aberrant Drones works great with sci-fi, emotional scenes, and your productions for dark genres. The included sounds are usable as they are or can be changed easily with some third party tools to create some unique vibes.
