Review: AEON Collection Virtual Instrument by Heavyocity — by Carmen Borgia

August 27th, 2013 by Carmen Borgia

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A few years ago, after a long stretch of recording almost entirely acoustic projects, I had the opportunity to do some orchestral film scoring. I was excited to make some great music but the tight budget meant that I would need to invest in an orchestral sample library.

I went out and bought a big one by a single manufacturer figuring it would simplify things. While I’ve never been shy about working with MIDI as needed, I hadn’t kept up in the sample library domain. I liked this library because in isolation, the instruments felt true and natural, and I had more articulations to play with than I’d ever seen in one place.

But in the course of a few projects I came to see the limitations of a single collection. When making cues that sounded “naturalistic” things seemed to function well.  With all those articulations I was getting a lot of expression out of the samples. But for an action-style project, things were just not exciting enough. The big bass drum wasn’t all that huge. The trombones were just not “trombone” enough. A lot of it seemed to do with the low-frequency content, but there were deficiencies across the board. The client was lukewarm. I’ll admit I got a bit defensive.

A composer I was working with took a listen and pulled up his own, smaller, library to help out. Suddenly cues that just hadn’t felt “cinematic” enough became larger and more dramatic simply by swapping out some of my naturalistic samples with the big, processed ones.

At first it felt a bit like cheating, but I’ve come to see that finding the right virtual instrument for the right project is part of the gig, even if one is using the sample tracks to prepare for a real orchestral session.

I’ve spent the past several weeks exploring and working with the new AEON collection from Heavyocity, the maker of the popular Damage library, which is a favorite among film composers. AEON occupies some of the same sonic territory without duplicating the company’s other products. Here are my impressions of this great-sounding sample library.

WHAT IT IS

AEON is comprised of two libraries: Melodic and Rhythmic. They are launched from within the Kontakt 5 player or the free version of Kontakt that is available.

The Melodic library is the larger of the two at 12GB (25GB uncompressed). Over 9,800 samples are grouped into 315 presets. Traditional instruments, analog synths, unique ensembles and hybrids are included. AEON Hits are the thing you grab when you need a single note to leave a blast radius.

On the main page are tabs for Mix, Twist and Punish.  Mix sets the basic blend of up to three sample channels along with pan and tune controls. Twist provides a large knob for adding spatial modulation, while Punish is an equally large knob for adding aggressive distortion. Delay, modulation, reverb and distortion are included in master effects. Volume envelopes are included for the three mix channels.

AEON Melodic with Punish Knob

A custom arpeggiator with an extremely versatile parameter set allows for quick creation of complex rhythm patterns and melodies. Trigger FX (T-FX) allows key switching for instant and momentary triggering of distortion, lo-fi, filter, panning and pitch mod processing. EQ and filtering for up to three channels of samples are available as well.

The performance arpeggiator is very groovy. Eight patterns of 16 steps each can be chained together for a total of 128 steps.Velocity, note length and pitch can be controlled separately for each step. A handy 16 step amplitude sequencer (!) follows for a tremolo-like effect. It’s an alluring set of controls, and they are arranged so as to be intuitive, but maybe not too intuitive. Many of the samples in this collection have less-than predictable progressions once the arpeggiator is in play — much fun is to be had with AEON in its element of surprise.

The Rhythmic library weighs in at around 1.7GB. There are hits and drum-like sounds here, but that’s not what you use this for. While Melodic has plenty of western tuning presets for playing from a piano keyboard, Rhythmic provides a battery of sounds ideal for arpeggiating and tweaking.

AEON Rhythmic Main Page

The main page matches that of Melodic except that the mixer in the center is replaced with a loop editor. Load in a single loop and you can adjust tuning, pan and level for each slice of the loop. You can also rotate the start point for even more variation.

INSTALLATION

I’m spending a lot of time up river in slow Internet country, so the installation was a bit of a process since AEON is available as download only. I downloaded the 13GB package overnight and the next day copied it to my workstation. Authorizations are via the Website (no dongle) and the step-by-step instructions worked the first time in copying the authorization codes from the laptop near the wireless to my DAW with no internet.

(Laugh if you will, but no Internet means less time compulsively checking email and more time to rock! I appreciate that Heavyocity includes as an option an authorization scheme for selective luddites such as myself.)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The samples are gorgeous. In terms of sequencing implementation, they hold up beautifully even at extremely slow tempos, a testament to the thought and care that went into the creation of this library.

From a musical-emotional standpoint I’d say this library falls into dramatic, portentous, important, deep and significant categories – also known as huge, dynamic, massive, epic and sick. I’d be very interested to know of composers who use this outside of these categories for things that are happy, light or carefree. You just never know.

When I made my first pass at auditioning the sounds I thought, “Sounds like a movie”, though definitely a certain kind of movie. This might be a bad thing if there weren’t so much variation possible with the FX and arpeggiator. The sounds available here are iconic without being limited.

AEON arpeggiator

IN USE

This is not a comprehensive library of every kind of sound, it’s geared more to being a particular type of instrument. I would reach for AEON if I were composing a soundtrack for a thriller, horror film or anything suspenseful or otherwise dramatic. Sound design for spots or trailers would be a good fit or anything that needs big, fat accents or warm and sumptuous grooves.

Part of the fun of an instrument like this is figuring out what it does, so I tried making AEON Dance Demo with AEON and got butt-shaking niftiness in just a couple of hours; with a few real instrument tracks I’ll be done. On the other hand, this AEON Film Cue Demo took less than an hour and it feels ready to go.

AEON is a unique musical instrument. At $399 MSRP it wouldn’t qualify as an impulse buy for me, but if I were doing a project with any of the aforementioned styles, I’d consider it well worth the investment. This collection is a great companion to my other libraries; it fills a completely different sonic space. I look forward to mixing things up as I add more libraries to the drive.

Stepping out of my professional shoes, this is just a super fun thing to play with. I could see clocking out for a few days and making some contemplative meditational grooves to get myself centered for the next challenge.

One of the great things about this collection is how the sounds are imaged through the Kontakt player. I sometimes like, when mixing 5.1, to keep music out of the mono space of the center channel which keeps the score off of the dialogue. Out of the box, the sounds are wide and distinctive. I would be inclined in some cases to narrow the panning somewhat to keep the music from becoming distracting, but that’s easily accomplished at mix time. I know we need — and like — to punish our sounds, but the simple twist knob adds beauty and extremely functional dimension to a film mix.

WISH LIST and LIMITATIONS

I wouldn’t say I have any complaints about AEON, but there is always something. I found myself looking for a means to grab multiple faders in the arpeggiator window to adjust things in non-contiguous groups as there are a lot of parameters.

I ALSO found myself wondering if I could import my own samples into this interface, but I’m not sure I would have the time for that given the great variation available here.

CONCLUSION

AEON is a great, purpose-built library for musical creations on the dark and gigantic end of the spectrum. It’s got great sounds, and the interface is versatile and engaging. It’s got a lot of personality — mostly the kind of person I wouldn’t loan my car to — but sometimes you need a little outlaw in the mix.

Carmen Borgia is a freelance sound designer, mixer and composer.  Find him at http://www.carmenborgia.com for all your animated robot audio needs.