Atmosphere

I had high expections for Atmosphere and I have not been let down. As a fan of Distorted Reality and Bizzare Guiter, I had reservations that this may just be a rehash of these sounds, which is cleary not the case. Atmosphere can sit along side existing Spectrasonics sample CDs nicely.

The sheer number of sounds on offer is awesome and of very high quality and attention to detail. The initial press press release of Atmosphere gave the impression of an ambiant and pad system. While it does this well, the sounds available have more on offer and should be useable in any number of musical genres, though clearly it is the ambient and movie soundtrack field that I feel this will be used a lot. Expect Atmosphere to be coming to a cinema to you soon. Really this is no wild boast, considering the number of movie score producers on the manual and demo credits, and Eric Persings association with the "LA Movie Producer Elite".

However there are a few gripes though not really reflective of the score I am giving, and are really minor if nothing at all:

a) I would have prefered a little bit more vocal patches and different "Choir" sounds. But I am not not too bothered considering it excels in other areas.

b) The GUI is functionally well laid out, but why those two stupid bars and the top taking up screen space. A minimum mode should have been incorporated.

c) The Layering system is an important and usefull feature. But why stop there, it would be nice to specify keyzones and velocity ranges, as well as even more layers.

However Atmosphere surpasses everything. It offers the sounds I like for Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Eno, Sylvian, Glass etc type sounds and "atmospheres". The Interface is so clear to use functionaly to the sounds that it was not really necessary to read the manual.

I used it on both Logic 5.5 and Cubase SX windows. On Logic it crashed on Cubase SX it did not. I do not know why, nor did I care since I am crossing to SX anyway.

Bluey.Read Review