The SINE Player sound system based on actual recordings in the famous Teldex Studios in Berlin, Germany, is constantly growing with new collections. The latest one is called TIME Macro and TIME Micro. Both collections are associated with “chronographic” or “chronometric” scenes. The Macro set uses a symphonic orchestra setup, while the Micro set uses a chamber orchestra. Orchestral Tools calls them “structures” and while that is a close description of these collections it might make people think they’re not suitable for music not related to scenic events like in a documentary or a movie. That would be a mistake.
I downloaded the full set of each, which took the better part of an afternoon, and discovered they can be used for anything from background music to film scenes to drones and pads in a music piece. It’s true, though, these aren’t orchestral snippets as in some other sets SINE Player is famous for. You won’t find the simple building blocks like a violin vibrato sustain. Instead you’ll find components like for example sustains tremolo bursts, pendulum echo swells, and irregular arpeggios, to name a few.
The reason for this is that the collections revolve around the concept of time and timing. So, instead of having to build that concept into your music score using hundreds of tiny components from, for instance, Orchestral Tools’s Berlin Symphonic Series, you get a whole collection of symphonic and chamber orchestra “structures”.
I was sceptic at first, because I find it very difficult to make auditive associations with the concept of time. The best one I’ve ever heard was the music score of the movie Interstellar. The film was a masterpiece and the score was a masterpiece as well, composed by Hans Zimmer and making use of… a pipe organ.
However, I must admit that TIME Macro and Micro both work well to generate visions, feelings, and emotions of temporality upon hearing even as little as the components themselves.
Now I have a confession to make. Far from being a composer I do love to dabble around in Logic Pro X, using its built-in synthesisers, some free ones I have found on the web and some I have reviewed in the past. I am not good enough at it to even think that I will one day make some money out of it, but I did upload my first attempt to Soundcloud last month and much to my surprise found that some people actually like what I created.
Encouraged by those few reactions that I’m not completely tone deaf, I tested these TIME collections in a new piece I’m working on, which initially was to use plug-in synths exclusively, but I was tempted to try at least some of these as well, so when I combined several of the articulations of these sets together, I could actually recall the same emotions that I had when I saw Interstellar for the first time (and the second…).
That is no small feat given the fact that I am as far from Hans Zimmer as the sun is from the planet Pluto. So, as much as I liked the two last Orchestral Tools collections I reviewed here, I really love these two.
You can buy them as a bundle for only 399 EUR until May 23, ’22. After that date, the bundle will be 100 Euros more expensive. Buying the two separately, though, will set you back two Euros short of 700 EUR, but, as with almost every collection, you can buy individual articulations as well.
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