Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 4/5 Stars
Transfigured Orchestra Vol 2 is an expansion pack designed to run on AudioModern’s Soundbox platform (downloadable free of charge for macOS, Windows and iPad). Vol 1 of Transfigured Orchestra featured 30 patches, focusing on the softer side of the orchestral sound palette and including pianissimo and sordino strings, soft French horns and clarinets, organic‑sounding woodwind and granular transformations. Sonora Cinematic Transfigured Orchestra Vol 2 delivers what are termed Hybrid Gestures, which I’d describe as cinematic‑style orchestral sounds, some of which have been treated using further processing or created from hybrids of other sounds. The pack includes 20 presets, the ones described as Waves offering unprocessed orchestral crescendos. Traditional orchestral instruments used to create the presets include violins, violas, cello, basses, flutes and even a flugelhorn.
The whole library only runs to 750MB, but don’t let the small size and low price fool you, as the sounds on offer are impressively cinematic in scope and ready to slot directly into sound‑for‑picture, games or ambient music. Many of the sounds embody a sense of movement and there’s a choice of orchestral crescendos, hybrid ambient washes, or combination sounds that have clearly been crafted with great care. Cinematic Rumbling or Crusher, for example, serve up the familiar slow‑attack, ominous wall of basses that preclude some form of doom while the flugelhorn would fit right in with a historical epic where something involving swords and bad attitudes is about to kick off. By contrast the Granular Flutes and This Is Cinema patches are a touch mysterious. The various string sounds also offer the kind of textural movement that many straightforward samples miss out.
The pack offers an expressive sense of movement and mood setting. Compact, but genuinely impressive.
Over and above the included 20 presets, it is trivially easy to populate any unused sample slots with samples from any of the packs you already have installed to create new layered patches, and there are some free packs out there that work well in conjunction with these orchestral offerings. I found some lovely combinations by combining samples from this pack with some taken from Aethervox. This isn’t one of those orchestral packs where you pick an instrument and then get a choice of articulations as that’s not what the Soundbox platform is designed for, but what you do get are deeply expressive sounds that can fit directly into a film or music score with little or no further adjustment or processing. The pack is not about strict orchestral realism and doesn’t cover the entire orchestral instrument range, but instead offers an expressive sense of movement and mood setting. Compact, but genuinely impressive.