Studio One: Cinematic Lights

The main screen of Cinematic Lights hosts a number of macro controls and a three‑way vector pad for blending between the layers.

We explore the new Cinematic Lights virtual instrument.

In January's v7.1 Studio One update, PreSonus gifted us a new virtual instrument called Cinematic Lights. It’s designed to blend heavily processed strings and brass with synth, modular and environmental elements to offer complex textures, smooth transformations and multiple layers of movie magic.

Cinematic Lights is based on the core Presence XT engine and so is essentially a multisampled instrument library. It uses an overhauled front end to give you more intuitive and creative control over how the sounds are layered and modulated. We find similar ideas in Deep Flight One and Lead Architect, which came with the initial release of version 7.0. This new hybrid instrument comes with 120 sampled sounds, 120 layer presets, 96 instruments and 50 Musicloops. So let’s dig in.

Layer Cake

The front end of Cinematic Lights mirrors the instrument’s intention: it’s moody, interestingly lit and asking for interaction. When you lay your hands on the keys, the default preset is exactly what you’d think; I half expected the background to spring into life with illuminated flying objects, moodily moving figures and the stings of a few drops of rain. Instead, we have some controls to play with.

The detailed layer editor gives you direct access to each layer’s amp, filter and modulation options.

A preset is made up of three layers represented in yellow, green and red. The layers can be seen at the bottom of the GUI and have their own controls for panning, reverb and delay. Clicking the little down arrow opens the instrument browser, where you can select your sound from seven categories. However, it’s the strange arrangement of triangles in the middle of the panel that really catches your eye. The Triangle Vector Pad is like a three‑axis X/Y pad, or a three‑edged vector synthesis system. As you drag the little white triangle in the space, the three coloured lines on each side expand and contract to reflect the position. The lines correspond to the volume of the associated layer and so as you move you get a different blend of sound. If you click on the even smaller triangles at the points of the middle triangle, the mix goes 100 percent to that layer, essentially acting as a layer solo. It’s much less complicated than it sounds. All you have to do is hold a chord and move the white triangle and it becomes obvious very quickly.

To the right is an Attack and Release envelope for each of the layers, split into their colours. There’s a full ADSR envelope behind the scenes that we’ll come to in a minute, but for now, PreSonus feel that the journey into the sound and back out again are the most important aspects of the multi‑layered sound.

Over on the left is a master filter cutoff. It’s tied to the filter cutoff in each of the layers and gives you an easy way to control the timbre of the whole instrument.

Next to that is the slightly mysterious Sample Shift. The idea behind Sample Shift is that it changes the speed of the underlying sample without altering the pitch. This results in some quite interesting tonal shifts. According to the Presence manual, Sample Shift should be able to go from ‑36 to +36 semitones, and in the Presence XT instrument, it certainly does. In Cinematic Lights, however, the up/down buttons shift it ±1 octave, with no other values on offer. The only way to access the full range appears to be to map a MIDI control to it. It seems an odd oversight for a control...