As a way of celebrating our 10th entry in our hardware-centric series of soundsets for Omnisphere 2, we decided to shift our attention to one of the most curious synthesizers ever made: the Motor Synth.
Motor Synth is the first synthesizer by a small boutique company called Gamechanger Audio. Based in Latvia, Gamechanger Audio is mostly known for their plasma distortion guitar pedals. What makes the Motor Synth unique is that the sound engine isn’t built on traditional oscillators, but rather a handful of small mechanical rotating motors, spinning in such a fast speed they go into the hearable audio range.
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The sound like something you would hear from a synthesizer coming from a parallel dimension where life decided to go mechanical instead of organic. A sawtooth sounds like a sawtooth, but at the same time not.
With The Dark Materials, we decided to build a soundset based on two principles: more imperfections and more fluff. Due to the mechanical nature of the Motor Synth, there are small random pitch fluctuations and drift in the sound that we found absolutely adorable, and used Omnisphere to push it even further. When it came to effect processing and reverbs, we didn’t hold back. The sound of The Dark Materials is best described as a combination of an imperfect sound drenched in a world of reverbs.
The main portion of the soundset is pads and textures, but there are also arpeggios, effects, synth sounds and we also added a handful of drum sounds from an analog 80s drum machine-clone.
The Dark Materials contains 237 sounds in the following categories:
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• 25 Arpeggios / Sequences
• 12 Drums and Percussion
• 9 Effect and Hit sounds
• 66 Pads / Synth strings
• 25 Synth sounds
• 60 Textures and Soundscapes
• 40 Multi sounds