Heavyocity Symphonic Destruction

Heavyocity take a creative wrecking ball to the orchestra.

If I were a violinist I’d be wary of taking my instrument to a Heavyocity sampling session — these are the guys that dropped a school bus from a crane just to see what it sounded like, after which cutting a priceless Stradivarius in half with a chainsaw might just seem like a bit of harmless fun. Nevertheless, despite their reputation for wanton damage the company were able to assemble close to 100 musicians for their grand Symphonic Destruction project, which fuses traditional orchestral timbres with Heavyocity’s trademark face‑melting sound design.

Featuring a 52‑piece string section, 26 brass players and 16 woodwinds, the library was recorded in Skywalker Sound (recording location for Heavyocity’s Damage 2 percussion library), Warner Bros Studios, Sear Sound and Heavyocity Studios. The project spanned roughly two years from the start of recording to the ensuing processing, sound‑design and mastering phases. Containing over 11,000 samples, 235 snapshots and 11 NKIs, the library (16.2GB installed) requires Kontakt or the free Kontakt Player, version 6.6.1 or later.

Library Structure

Symphonic Destruction (SD for short) contains three main instrument types, the simplest of which is the ‘Performer’. There are eight Performer instruments, labelled Traditional, Hybrid, Damaged, Soundscapes, Traditional Pedals, Hybrid Pedals, Damaged Pedals and Damaged Guitars, each housing between 16 and 30 full‑range sources (aka articulations). Any of these articulations can be loaded into one of eight keyswitchable slots on the interface, so you can switch between eight different sounds on the fly.

To get you started, each Performer instrument provides eight or so snapshots which group together articulations of a certain type — for example, shorts, sustains, swells & crescendos, etc. Once you’ve found sounds you like, you can create your own setups by using the drop‑down menu beside the slots on the interface. Unusually, the artics’ keyswitches are duplicated in low and high positions, the former starting on C‑1 (MIDI note 12) and the latter on F6 (MIDI note 101), with the playable keyboard zone positioned in between — this gives flexibility of performance, but unfortunately the keyswitch positions are fixed and can’t be edited.

Every instrument and articulation was sampled with three microphone positions (Main, Hall and Reverb FX), and a simple three‑channel mic mixer with built‑in reverb and delay effects provides volume, pan, solo, mute and output routing controls. There’s also a ‘purge’ button which unloads the selected channel from memory — useful if you’re working with limited computer resources.

Heavyocity refer to their other main instruments as ‘Designers’. The SD Designer offers the deepest sound‑design facilities, while the Loop/Braam Designers share their own identical design and focus respectively on rhythm loops and big, blasting sforzando outbursts. We’ll take a detailed look at all of these instruments and the powerful timbres they contain.

Masterful Performance

The instruments includes three‑band parametric EQ controls with adjustable bandwidth.Though the main thrust of SD is creative sonic mangling, there are useful unprocessed orchestral textures in the Performer ‘Traditional’ folder. These include sustains played by a stately, serious‑sounding full string section and a lyrical mix of strings and woodwinds, and some great incisive staccatos performed by various layerings of arco, col legno and Bartok pizzicato strings. The full orchestra’s short notes are given extra low end weight by a thunderous grand piano, while the players’ big, dramatic and sonorous crescendos stand in contrast with a set of beautifully composed, ultra‑spooky quiet atonal cluster chords.

SD’s Soundscapes section continues the eerie theme with more lovely soft clusters, then ups the ante with some nerve‑jarring loud, braying clusters which evoke feelings of alienation and madness (common states of mind for your SOS reviewer). A standout soundscape is ‘Psyborg 2084’: its six pitch zones contain respectively a monumental evolving bass drone, pumped‑up low string sustains, a frightening metallic industrial racket, 1950s descending sci‑fi effects, a wailing phantom choir and a profoundly atonal shifting sustain texture performed by alien woodwinds — all in a single preset. Pretty good value, I’d say.

While you can find broadly similar material to the abovementioned artics in other libraries, the ‘Hybrid’ artics see Heavyocity moving into more original territory. While string tremolos, loud, accented tutti short notes and crescendos are standard orchestral sonorities, the processed versions you hear in ‘Space Chopper’, the stonking ‘Alien Attack’ and ‘Flutteroid’ (one of the weirdest crescendo textures I’ve come across) have an intriguing synthetic quality — it’s an orchestra Jim, but not as we know it. I also enjoyed the glacial deep‑space reverb of the delicate ‘Frozen Tales’ harp/piano artic.

Damaged Beyond Repair

If you seek attacking aggressive textures, the real payoff is the ‘Damaged’ Performer instrument, which embodies the sound and fury Heavyocity are known for. The distorted heavy‑metal brass of ‘Orchestra Grit’ and ‘Scorched’ pack a tremendous low‑end punch, while the laconically‑named ‘Dirty’ provides processed orchestral crescendos of awesome power. ‘Punktualika’ and the ferocious ‘Scorchy Portato’ are also great playable keyboard presets, though you may want to reduce the duration of the latter’s note die‑aways (easily done by adjusting the release time in the interface’s envelope settings). If you fancy a bit of creative tweaking, try experimenting with the ‘offset’ control in the envelope tab — this adjusts the start time of the sample, allowing you to temporarily trim off the attack transients of the orchestral sources and create less identifiable synth‑like timbres.

The Source Browser allows you to browse, preview and load sample sets to create your own layers and splits with the mapping keys.

A highlight of this section is a simple but highly effective ostinato engine which animates the Performer short‑note artics with a series of automatic repeats. You can set the repeat rate to eighth, 16th or 32nd notes and their triplet variants, specify the number of repeats (which can be infinite) and add accents to the first, last, third or fourth notes. When applied to explosive artics such as ‘Frittharmonika’ and ‘Underground’, this generates amazingly forceful and propulsive rhythm patterns. The Damaged artics also offer ‘Shorts FX’ and ‘Swells & Cresc FX’ variants which introduce a dramatic reversed reverb effect after the initial note — I found this particular approach worked best with the short notes.

Pedal Power

In this library the term ‘pedal’ is used to denote notes with a built‑in repeating rhythmic pattern. These samples work particularly well in a bass pedal note capacity, but since they’re mapped chromatically over four or five octaves you can also use them for chords and high parts. The ‘Arctic Drafts’ artic is a dramatic example — when you hold down a note, the initial Bartok ‘snap’ pizzicato evolves into a sparse, four‑bar accented eighth‑note rhythm with dynamic accents generating great extra momentum. ‘Only Forward’ does a similar job — if you sustain chords over a held bass note, you’ll be rewarded with manic slashing string stabs straight from the Bernard Herrmann/Igor Stravinsky stable (only louder).

A simple but highly effective ostinato engine generates repeated notes with built‑in programmable accents — instant rhythmic momentum at the touch of a finger!Hybrid pedal artics introduce less familiar sound sources. ‘Fading Colours’ features big piano‑cum‑pizzicato strings downbeats with what sounds like an Indian tambura filling in the gaps; ‘Trail Blazing’ starts out with a faint, weedy synth pulse which is rudely interrupted by gated fortissimo horn blasts; while the distorted brassy accents of ‘Groovenbach’ are interspersed with wild reverb and repeat effects. The Damaged pedals include some wild bass timbres — ‘Sinistorch’ and ‘Biggunz’ deliver formidable low‑end pitched impacts which would scare the bejasus out of a cinema audience, and the bottom octave of ‘Doom Hammers’ sounds completely mad. I don’t normally expect to hear explosions incorporated in a rhythm loop, but I have to admit these ones work rather well.

If you’re partial to a bit of high‑gain, roof‑raising, distorted, low‑pitched guitar of the Meshuggah variety, you’ll enjoy Damaged Guitars. These Performer instruments feature classic staccato power‑chord slashes and palm‑muted chugs woven together in thunderous, motoring and rhythmically hip patterns which will cut the mustard in both rock tracks and cinematic productions. Frankly, I’ve not heard a better sampled Djent guitar (see the ‘Favourites’ box for more details).

Loop Designer

The beat goes on. Modelled on the loop designer in Heavyocity’s Damage 2 library, which I reviewed in December 2020 (my ears have healed up now, thanks for asking), the SD Loop Designer incorporates three banks of loops with their own three‑channel mixer. You can trigger three loops simultaneously by pressing one of the mauve ‘Designer Keys’ on the interface, or play a single loop by pressing one of its 12 colour‑coded keys, each of which selects a different performance. The loops are divided equally between straight and triplet‑based time, and you can specify their pitch over a two‑octave range by pressing one of the 24 ‘tuning keys’ keyswitches.

The SD Loop Designer instrument displays Heavyocity’s trademark Punish and Twist master effects, the macro knob and a mixer for three loop banks. Thirty‑six loops are mapped across three colour‑coded keyboard zones — you can play them individually by pressing the blue, yellow and green keys, or trigger three loops simultaneously with the mauve keys. Pink keyswitches determine the loops’ pitch.

Presented in 28 fully user‑configurable snapshots, the loop material ranges from single‑note rhythm sequences incorporating the abovementioned pedal samples to fully composed ‘motifs’ (four‑bar, minor‑key mini‑compositions which sound like short film cues). The overall mood is dark, dramatic and driving — some timpani and pitched low drum patterns crop up, but since many of the instruments sound extremely percussive, I never found myself wishing for taikos or bass drums!

I liked ‘Crypto Flutters’ with its unsettling reversed crescendo pulses, and the ethereal pianistic stabs of ‘Arctic Drafts’, while the psychedelic swirling high register of ‘Night Raid’ evokes ’60s backwards‑tape experimentalism. While many users will be happy to play these loops as they stand, experienced composers may find some of the material to be too dense and complete‑sounding. Either way, the beauty of these three‑way combos is that you can thin them out by muting or swapping out one or more of the elements, thereby creating space for your own inventions.

Needless to say, the pedal sequences and loops described above are tempo‑sync’ed to your DAW. I encountered no unwanted artefacts, and found they all sounded great at any tempo you might reasonably use in a song or instrumental arrangement.

Braam Designer

The Loop/Braam Designer allows you to choose which loops are triggered by the Designer keys, and to set the start point of each loop.Not to be confused with the composer Johannes Brahms or the author of Dracula, the SD Braam Designer contains a generous selection of the kind of pulverising low brass eruptions made popular by the 2010 Inception movie. The three sound banks consist of a sub, mid and tail element: the first features heavily distorted, growling, low orchestra hits; the second contains the classic ‘Braam’ pitch‑bent brass blowouts; while the tails introduce unearthly reverberant noises which evoke images of the Alien spinning off into space after having its arse kicked by Sigourney Weaver.

As you can tell, the overriding emphasis here is on epic big‑screen aggression of the Mad Max/War Of The Worlds/Battle: Los Angeles/Pacific Rim ilk. Much as I appreciate the sheer cataclysmic power of these devastating braams, I also enjoyed the occasional flashes of subtlety evident in the quietly portentous plucked bass sound of ‘Studly Thudly Sub’ and the heavenly major‑chord euphoria of the ‘Golden Grate’ tail. Maybe I’m getting old.

The SD Designer

The Gate modulates the output volume of an instrument over time to create rhythmic effects.

SD’s Dynamics modulator controls the dynamics level of an instrument.Once you’ve become familiar with the Performers and Loop/Braam Designer samples, you can delve into the SD Designer and investigate further possibilities. An immediate attraction is a fresh batch of tasty three‑channel sample sets with their own Source Browser. A preview button lets you select a category, audition the samples and read an eloquent (and often amusing) description before loading. Clicking on the Options tab opens up the Key Mapping controls which allow you to edit the three channels’ playable ranges. The Source Browser and editable key mapping are only available in this particular Designer.

This section of the library is presented in All‑Stars, Damaged, FX & Textures, Hybrid and Loop Combos categories, each containing between 25 and 36 sample sets. There’s some excellent material here — space precludes a detailed examination, but suffice it to say you’ll find plenty more variants on the previously outlined themes, ranging from savagely distorted seismic impacts and rumbles to serene tinkling bells and harps and including more rhythmic loop material. One personal highlight is the complex, majestic and gently unsettling pulsing pad ‘The Devil Above’, which makes full use of the SD Designer’s unique modulation features.

Modulation

Did I mention modulation features? Here’s a brief rundown: the Designer’s powerful macro system can simultaneously rhythmically modulate an instrument’s envelope, EQ, filter, drive, gate, delay and reverb settings, creating unique animated timbral variations. The Cycle feature combines a rhythmic sequencer with an arpeggiator to build custom pulses, rhythmic beds and stutters, while Gate and Dynamics respectively modulate instruments’ volume and dynamics. While such tools offer many creative possibilities, there’s no need to immediately figure out their controls — these samples sound great straight out of the box!

The powerful Cycle feature combines a rhythmic sequencer with an arpeggiator to build custom pulses, rhythmic beds and stutters.

If you’re in the market for devastatingly powerful hybrid orchestral instruments, timbres, loops and textures with a side order of heavily processed, scary and menacing effects and clusters, this library dishes them up with a vengeance.

Conclusion

I recall a 1980s press ad for a trendy and unaffordable London recording studio which boasted that after spending eight hours working in their tastefully appointed control room, “you’ll emerge feeling lightly cool”. By contrast, after spending a week auditioning the textures in Symphonic Destruction I emerged feeling as if I’d been repeatedly bashed on the head with a large rubber mallet. No problem, though — I expected no less from Heavyocity, and we SOS reviewers are a hardy bunch.

Joking apart, though the naked aggression may not appeal to those of a sensitive disposition (and you’d certainly think twice before employing these combative sounds in a delicate ballad), these are great, inspirational instruments for creating attacking, grandiose cinematic arrangements. My verdict: if you’re in the market for devastatingly powerful hybrid orchestral instruments, timbres, loops and textures with a side order of heavily processed, scary and menacing effects and clusters, this library dishes them up with a vengeance.