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Morphestra comes with both Instruments and Multis.

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• Review

Sample Logic's Morphestra is a sound library of cinematic textures, rhythms and atmospheres.

If you think about the nature of modern movie and television soundtracks several things spring instantly to mind: the sound-designed layers of creepy textures for horror movies; the driving rhythms for chase sequences; and the deep percussive hits and exotic wind instruments which underscore scenes from far-flung destinations. These are all just as much a part of the fabric of modern scoring as the more traditionally 'musical' elements of an orchestral or synthesised soundtrack.

Morphestra is designed to provide you with just such an array of otherworldly noises to create atmosphere, which should make it an essential choice for anyone working in this field or with aspirations to do so.

Installation

First things first – the all-important install. Large sound libraries almost always arrive on multiple DVDs, giving us time to kill as we feed one DVD in after another. So imagine our surprise and delight to discover that Morphestra arrives on a compact 160GB Glyph hard drive, ready to connect up and go. This certainly sweetens that price quite a bit, given that the library uses 27GB of the drive, leaving 133GB for your own use.

The library runs through NI's Kontakt sampler or the free-to-download Kontakt Player; Simply press click on the Add Library tab in the top left hand corner of Kontakt's GUI and point the browser at the Morphestra Library on your Glyph. You're then automatically routed online to NI's Service Centre, where you can enter your serial number to authorise. Easy. If you don't want to travel everywhere with Morphestra's precious Glyph drive, you can simply copy the Library across to your hard drive of choice before activation.

All of which means that rather than the hours installing and authorising you'll be up and running in less than five minutes. A highly promising start.

In detail

Ease of install would be worth nothing unless the library was worth having and fortunately, this is where excitement ramps up another few notches: Morphestra is phenomenal.

At their best, libraries shouldn't simply provide you with what you're expecting but should offer genuine surprises too, and this one delivers in spades. Sounds are organised into two categories, namely Instruments and Multis, which are pretty self-explanatory. Instruments are single sounds, while Multis are combinations of several Instruments which are usually stacked up via the same MIDI channel, producing pre-mixed multi-timbral layers of sound, on which more later.

The Instruments are sorted into folders by 'type', with categories such as Blurred Emotions, Dark 'n' Scary, Nature and Sci-Fi, which makes narrowing your search straightforward. Within any folder, you'll then find a list of instruments that load into your version of Kontakt ready to play.