AudioModern Soundbox

Audiomodern’s Soundbox free engine allows you to blend up to four sample‑based instruments, including those drawn from their own collection of inexpensive sound expansion packs.

Audiomodern’s Soundbox is a virtual instrument engine that combines depth with ease of use — and it’s free!

Audiomodern may be an unfamiliar name to some SOS readers, but over recent years the company have built up a compact catalogue of products that contains some very interesting creative tools such as Riffer, Playbeat, Chordjam and Filterstep. Their latest venture is Soundbox and, while it is not their first virtual instrument (check out the Opacity II review in the March 2021 issue of SOS), it is a somewhat more ambitious step into that world. Indeed, Soundbox is actually a virtual instrument engine and the sounds for use with that engine come in the form of expansion packs. In that sense, the broad approach has parallels with Kontakt and its many libraries, although at present, the Soundbox ecosystem is very much in its early stages.

The Soundbox engine itself is a free‑to‑download product. It’s available as a standalone application, in standard plug‑in formats for macOS and Windows, and is also available for iOS. The Mechanica and Spectra expansion packs are also free downloads and provide a collection of sounds built from various synth textures. You can, therefore, explore Soundbox — with a specific feature limitation I’ll say more about below — without any up‑front cost. There is a growing range of expansion packs starting at a very modest €29$29 and, stylistically, these are most likely to appeal to media composers or those working in more abstract/ambient musical styles. If you buy any one of the paid expansions, a licence key is provided that unlocks the full feature set of the engine.

So, as a new virtual instrument platform, just what has Soundbox got to offer? Let’s find out...

What’s In The Box?

Soundbox is, essentially, a platform for sample‑based virtual instruments. That engine supports presets consisting of up to four individual layers, each of which can be built from a multisampled (including velocity layers) instrument. The expansion packs provide collections of these presets, presets for individual layers and, of course, the underlying sample base from which they are built.

As well as browsing capabilities that allow you to explore the content at each level — pack, global preset and layer preset — the UI provides compact control sets for each layer. The selection of controls has been very carefully chosen. Yes, you get the obvious per‑layer volume and pan options but, laid out in a strip within the centre of the UI, are various tabs — Controls, Effects, Modulation, Arp, Vector and Master — each of which provides further sound‑design possibilities. For example, the Controls tab provides, among other things, full ADSR envelopes for each layer, while the Effects tab provides four per‑layer effects slots, with a selection of the usual effect suspects available to choose from.

Soundbox provides lots of user‑friendly options for sound design including modulation, automated sound blending, arpeggiators, effects and – centre‑front – per‑layer mixing and ADSR envelopes.

The Modulation tab provides four LFOs, with a selection of waveshapes available including an (up to) 32‑step pattern sequencer. The latter includes a very neat randomisation function, allowing its pattern to shift after a selected number of cycles. Multiple parameters can be linked to any of the four modulators and the usual modulation depth options (positive and negative) are included. You also get options for linking engine parameters to the mod wheel or other controllers. The Arp tab provides some typical up/down combinations and independent 32‑step arpeggiators for each layer with lanes for per‑step control of volume, octave, pan and density (a stutter‑like effect). These work very well but it would be useful...