The Unfinished Colossus II

[Guy Rowland]

A mere 400 new patches from the peerless Matt Bowdler is out on Friday, no price announced yet. In the walkthrough below, Matt says its in a similar vein to the first but with some focus on "areas I felt I didn't quite cover in the first one", in particular "more percussive loops... dark textures, cinematic impacts, drum hits and stuff like that".

[Killiard]

I listened to a lot of the walkthrough earlier and it sounds brill. Demos are cracking too.
I don't pick up everything Matt does (only because I never get paid to write that kind of stuff!) but I definitely think I'll be getting this one :-)

[TheUnfinished]

Price will be £59.99 + VAT. Plus, there'll be a discount for newsletter subscribers... which, if you're nice, I'll share on this forum.

If you're nice.

[Guy Rowland]

Very belatedly catching up with this. Of course it's all stellar, but that's sort of a given isn't it? The impacts section has some tremendous additions (the frankly terrifying Copper and Homewrecker... surely deserving of the Big Boomer tag, Matt?)

Overall, it's probably fair to say that we're now extremely well covered for Harry Gregson Williams-style patches, and personally I'd love to see some different sonic territory for the next release. Me being me, I'm still on Disney-eyes for something that focuses on analogue sounds. There's a patch in the Synth Bass section, Listen Close - jeepers, 400 patches with this frame of reference and I'd be euphoric.

On the OCD front, all these patches had star ratings attached, which was a little tedious to remove over 400 patches one by one - any chance of reverting back to empty for future releases?

And one thing I learned - this is the first product I've bought that has the bulk patch import feature, and it worked perfectly and simply. What I didn't know though is that all it does is extract a bundle and put the individual patches where they always were - in the user folder. This is good news. Matt's naming and tagging is exemplary, but I can't say the same for some other developers. What this means is that it is possible to still batch rename 3rd party patches, after you've imported into Omni.

[TheUnfinished]

The stars thing was an error that crept in due to a few last minute changes... needless to say a "reset all star ratings" function would be a nice thing to have!

But thanks for the kind words Guy. I have a bunch of ideas for new Omnisphere soundsets that will cover different territory (although I suspect there'll be a Colossus III too). I'll have a listen to Listen Close, as I can't remember it right now.

[The Saxer]

Great stuff in both Colossusses (Colossi?)! Just ordered the II!

Just in case you're bored some day, Matt:
What about a Soundset using the Keyscape samples in Omnisphere? :-)

[TheUnfinished]

I don't have Keyscape, so it might be a while before such a thing happens.

[X-bassist]

I don't have Keyscape, so it might be a while before such a thing happens.

Think about it. There are some amazing sounds in there that I never expected, mellow fat ep's that get cranky when you hit them hard. Great dynamics and tweakable (I wonder how it handles the extra noise mics in Omni 2, I still haven't upgraded). Keyscape is so fun to play and usable, I'm having a hard time getting it into my template (too many sounds I like makes it overwhelming). Let us know when you jump on board- a new soundset would probably convince me to finally get the O2 upgrade.

[Guy Rowland]

(Think I'm already loudly on the record as agreeing with X-bassist - I'm totally baffled why Spectrasonics left out the really interesting half of the library. There is some terrific stuff in there - though the acoustic piano leaves me nonplussed - but I'm more interested in Spectrasonics as coming up with new interesting sounds and hybrids than in merely faithful re-creations. Keyscape's duo section hints at what could have been... one might call it, well, Unfinished....)