Recording - August 2016 - 48

Soundware Showcase
Heavyocity GRAVITY
by Gary Eskow

Let's take the Wayback Machine on a spin to the early 1990s. In the world of
film and advertising music, a new specialty called "sound design" is developing
at a rapid pace. If you've got $100,000 to drop on a Synclavier, you're all set.
That auto commercial needs a dramatic hit when the latest model rolls into
view? Take a sample of a prison door slamming shut, tune it down a few
octaves, throw in a similarly detuned whale call, and wham-you're a genius.
If only you had a piece of software that had lots of dramatic material and a
computer fast enough to handle your demands, all at an affordable price. Why,
you could compete with the wealthiest of your peers! You get the point-kind of.
GRAVITY, according to the manual, puts "an award-winning sound design
team at your fingertips." In reality, the potential of this truly amazing virtual
instrument is far greater.
Delivery: Web download only, 9.2 GB on disk (12 GB uncompressed
equivalent)
Format: Windows 7 or better, macOS 10.9 or better; requires
Kontakt or Kontakt Player 5.5.1.451 or later, can be used
standalone or as VST/AU/AAX plug-in
Copy Protection: Proprietary watermarking linking library content to
purchaser
License: For use with all instances of Kontakt owned by user; sounds
usable without royalties in original compositions, but cannot
be repackaged or repurposed for resale
Documentation: Downloadable PDF User Manual
Price: $449
More from: Heavyocity, www.heavyocity.com
48

RECORDING AUGUST 2016

Getting to know GRAVITY
The GRAVITY interface will be familiar to
owners of other Heavyocity products.
Weighing in at 12 GB uncompressed (9.2
GB on disk thanks to a lossless compression scheme), it requires Native Instruments
Kontakt 5 (Player or full version). The four
main Instrument folders (Hits, Pads, Risers,
Stings) contain subfolders that organize
the material further.
To learn our way around the interface,
let's take a look at the preset DistMetals
Revs - Hits n Drones (See the screenshot).
Buried several folders deep in the Stings
folder, this is a Menu preset as opposed to
an Element preset. Elements have a single
sample stretched across the keyboard.
Menus are comprised of multiple, relatedsounding samples.
Your eye is probably drawn to the large
number 5 in the center of the screen.
That's the amount of the Punish effect currently being used. Other Heavyocity products use Punish, a combination of compression and saturation, and Twist, a modulation feature that blends pre-determined EQ
settings under the hood in Kontakt.
The blue keys are assigned to individual
samples. The pink keys in the lowest octave
let you tune those samples in half step
increments. The red keys (F6-A6) allow you
to trigger the instrument's effects in real
time, and the green keys (A#6-C7) similarly
let you trigger the new Motion Play.
To fully explain Motion would require a
review of its own. Suffice it to say that the
modulation sequencer in Motion, which
lets you draw in changes to volume, pan,
and pitch over time, is a joy to play with.
If you are asked to score the sequel to Star
Wars: The Boredom Continues and need
to underscore strange goings on inside the
Millenium Enterprise, you'll be drawing in
curves with great fervor.
Getting back to the Main page, you'll
see virtual buttons that turn Reverb, Chorus,
Delay, and Distortion on and off. There's
also a standard ASDR quadrant and, at the
bottom, a list of the instrument's four pages
(MAIN, EQ/FILT, TFX, MOTION). The
Trigger Effects (TFX)-Distortion, LoFi, Filter,
Panner, and Delay-have a pair of knobs
each for tweaking. There's also an
Advanced Control page that includes a
pair of step sequencers that let you personalize things to a greater degree.
Beyond Stings
Space requirements keep us from delving into GRAVITY much more deeply, but
we need to say a few words about the
other instrument categories.

http://www.heavyocity.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2016