Zero-G’s Elements Silentium is less a sample library than a dark folk world: raw strings, hefty drums, ritual and ethereal voices and Stefano Maccarelli’s ear for pairing sounds. After a blind, five-and-a-half-hour first play, here’s what it’s actually like to compose with, and who it’s really for.
Wavelet Audio’s Runa and Runa 2 are both built on the kobyz, a two-stringed Kazakh bowed instrument, but they ask very different things of it. Runa covers the core articulations and a deep rhythmic toolkit, while Runa 2 explores extended techniques, gated textures, loops and phrases. Here’s how each one plays, and why they complement each other instead of overlapping.
“That was not one that I wanted to look back on and say, where did the last 10 years go?” Composer Seth Tsui on turning down the orchestra, the Zimmer studio ladder, and a manager’s salary at Riot Games.
Sound Magic’s Neo Piano Chapters: F308 fits a full concert grand into 550 megabytes and surrounds it with a deep set of shaping controls — including two ideas I haven’t really seen done this way before. It’s a focused, purist instrument that rewards patience rather than preset browsing, with a couple of rough edges worth knowing about. Here’s how it actually feels to play, and who it’s really for.
Greg Schlaepfer of Orange Tree Samples has spent seventeen years making keyboards sound like guitars. A conversation about hidden mechanisms, the ethics of who gets paid, and why the most impressive work never announces itself.
Percussion is the one corner of music where asking for variation isn’t exactly the first thing we think of — and Envoy, the first instrument built on Emergence Audio’s new Cadence Engine, is built on the opposite assumption. Six hundred analog sources, three independent clocks, and a randomiser that reshapes your sequence without destroying it. A close look at what it does well, where it asks something of you, and the second instrument hiding inside it.
The Circles drum samples have long been a quiet favourite secret weapon among producers, used across countless big tracks. Now Circles Audio has gathered the whole library into a single instrument — smooth, clean, polished, and easy to navigate. The samples were never the question; whether the instrument could do them justice was, and it does.
Orange Tree Samples’ Latitude arrives subtitled Latin Rock Percussion, but what’s inside reaches far beyond that — 376 deeply sampled instruments, musical grooves, surprising drum kits, and a sound quality that breathes. Here’s why this might be one of the most versatile percussion libraries right now.
Heavyocity’s Oblivion Drums delivers aggressive, industrial-grade percussion that stays musical and mixable. It hits hard without becoming fatiguing or harsh — a balance that sounds simple but very few libraries in this category actually pull off.
Built in collaboration with drummer Darren King, Teletone Audio’s HYPE is refined texture, rare drums, and unending groove — the kind of instrument that genuinely makes you want to write. Powered by sounds from Blackbird Studio’s vault, an extraordinary beat maker, and Teletone’s own effects DSP, it’s as much a source of musical inspiration as it is a source of soulful, rich drum sounds.
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