Icescapes

A Snow and Ice SFX library built for Kontakt and Decent Sampler

Icescapes is a unique collection of sound-designed atmospheric leads, ambient synths, textural soundscapes and snow and ice sound effects capturing the heart of winter. The wintery pond instruments were created by skipping a variety of stones, ice chunks and pebbles across the surface of a large frozen pond in a narrow canyon, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. These skittering impacts across the ice sheet emit a strange sci-fi ray gun zinging effect caused by an acoustic phenomenon called flexural waves, a type of bending sound wave produced by the acoustic ripples that radiate out at supersonic speeds from the point of each impact, amplified upward by the pond's large resonant ice membrane into the high craggy canyon walls that surrounded us. The ice and snow instruments are built from a variety of ice block impacts and slides, and from hand and boot foley recorded in deep fresh snow.

The natural snow and ice sound effects work well when used creatively to replace traditional kicks, snares and hi-hats or as pure sound-design source material. Each sound bank is arranged to create percussive playability and organized logically to allow efficient use as SFX. Then from these organic sound sources, Soundiron have used a bit of their signature sonic alchemy to cultivate a broad selection of 83 playable sound-designed tones, pads, synth-scapes, creative effects and tuned drones for use in any kind of musical creation.

This library comes with an adaptable LFO system, with selectable LFO shape, modulation target parameter, speed, intensity, tempo-syncing and fade-in time. You can also apply your choice of 12 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. The customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. Also included is a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance. 

System Requirements

• Native Instruments Kontakt version 6.2.2+ full version. The free Kontakt "Player" and "Add Library" import process do not support this standard open-format Kontakt library.
• Decent Sampler 1.11.18 or later. Free engine supported.
• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10.12 or higher.
• Dual Core CPU
• 2 GB System Ram
• SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.