Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 4/5 Stars
As with the original Trails, Trails 2 is the result of a collaboration between Fracture Sounds and Alexander Parsons, a busy media composer based in London. In Trails, Alexander combined his love of modular synthesis and processing with the acoustic sounds of his violin and other acoustic instruments. Like its predecessor, Trails 2 is aimed at media composers seeking evolving organic textures rather than conventional solo instruments.
Trails 2 also runs inside NI’s Kontakt, but includes a different sound library. Installed via NI’s Native Access, the library takes up just over 25GB of drive space and when open shows as eight different instruments. The first six are Solo Trumpet Textures, Solo Bass Clarinet Textures, Synth Textures, Solo Saxophone Textures, Canna Sonora (a tuned rods instrument) and Metallic Percussion (cymbals, waterphone, thunder sheet and gong). The seventh offers Layer Blends where up to three samples can be stacked or crossfaded, while the eighth is Granular Engine. A large number of presets are included, presented in alphabetical order and based on the various different modes of the instrument, and while many of these are abstract types of sound, most retain an organic quality.
The first five instruments follow a similar basic layout with rotary controls for Dynamics, Lo‑Fi, Delay and Reverb. Square icons below select the articulation with either four or eight articulations available depending on the instrument, though Canna Sonora has no choice of articulations. Articulations may be used conventionally, one at a time, or combined by Shift‑clicking on the articulations to select more than one. Layer Mix controls the balance between layers with faders for Raw plus three instrument‑specific elements, or you can click Mic Mix (which relates to the Raw sound) to access faders for Close, Room and Res, and for the first six instruments along with Pedal. A rotary Atmosphere Intensity control adjusts the overall level of the atmospheric sounds added to the Raw sound. If Trills is selected as an articulation, then buttons appear at the bottom of the screen to set either Smart mode or to select the interval for the trills. Clicking the cog icon allows the user to adjust patch‑specific parameters such as Tightness, Sample Start time, Velocity Range, Dynamic Range and so on. On the whole these instruments don’t depart too far from their natural sound, and keyswitching is available to hop between articulations during performance.
Layer Blends
Instrument seven, Layer Blends, has a quite different interface, with the option to select different samples (again based on the solo instruments and synths) for the three layers and a large control that allows the sounds to be layered or crossfaded. The octave can be selected for each sound source and there are familiar controls for LFO modulation, AR envelope and HP/LP filter, plus effects controls for Lo‑Fi, Delay and Reverb. It is very easy to create custom patches for this instrument, and automating the large control in crossfade mode can produce some lovely shifting textures, as can using the LFO to control the crossfading.
Finally we come to the Granular Engine, which is where a lot of the more abstract fun resides. The waveform display at the top of the page shows the grains moving when a note is played and also allows the user to select which portion of the waveform is the focus for granular processing. The waves themselves are arranged as Winds, Metals, Synths and Aleatoric, the latter being a fancy way of saying that something is subject to chance.
Below the display are the controls that affect the granular processing by adjusting the density of the grains, their position and range along with grain Shape, Speed, Mutate and Intensity. Effects can be dialled in via delay and reverb knobs and there’s also a full ADSR envelope for the patch. The large intertwined arrow logo allows patch parameters to be randomised when in the granular section, and there’s a smaller randomiser icon that works on the sound sample list. A little random dabbling is often rewarded with something useful.
It has just enough in the way of controls to give the user plenty of flexibility but without getting bogged down in complexity.
Overall, Trails 2 is capable of producing a wide range of sonic textures that incorporate movement but, in many cases, still hinting strongly towards their organic roots. There are some lovely evolving pads to be had. The Granular section manages to transform sounds without making them sound too glitchy (unless you want them to be) and it has just enough in the way of controls to give the user plenty of flexibility but without getting bogged down in complexity.