Wraith

Designed for versatile dark ambient and cinematic sound design, Wraith is a synthesiser for pads, drones and synthetic textures.

It’s comprised of 230 audio samples grouped into 3 categories: Drones, Tonal and Textures and over 80 playable presets.

It’s housed in our powerful sampler engine Mirage, which is structured around 3 audio layers that can be controlled separately, and an effects rack with distortion, chorus, reverbs and more.

Wraith is an ideal sound design tool for creating atmospheres, backgrounds and tension.

KEY FEATURES

• 83 presets that are ready to use for production
• Wraith is playable, it’s more than just samples – it can be controlled with MIDI CC, velocity and the sustain pedal.
• It includes randomising features allowing for quick trialling of new sounds
• Easy to use – it has a sensible GUI layout which can be resized
• 3 layers can be blended together and controlled with an envelope, filters, EQ, LFO, and sample loop settings including crossfade
• Effects rack with distortion, bit crush, compressor, chorus, reverb, delay and convolution reverb to further shape the sound
• Works in any Windows or Mac DAW that can host a VST or AU, no other requirements
• Sounds with movement and character, both dissonant and harmonic

230 Samples and 80 presets

Wraith contains a huge collection of sounds, each organised into one of three categories.

The Drones and Tonal sets that comprise the largest bulk of this expansion allow for quick prototyping of complex scenes and soundscapes featuring gritty low-end, rich drones full of depth, and granular harmonic content contrasted with smooth and silky Ambient tones perfect for adding a bit of sweetness and emotion to the cold and hopeless vibe of the bleak drones.

The Textures folder acts in turn as a glue between the two main categories, making it possible to either make even more complex sounds through an extra layer of sound or substitute either of the two main layers for further variety and flexibility.

Overall, this is a great collection of sounds to add to your palette if you’re on the lookout for new and fresh modern cinematic tools capable of taking your music to obscure and uncharted places, which, within the Mirage engine conforms a great playground for extremely creative sound design.

Audio crafted by sound designer and composer Carlos Butler

Carlos Butler, who is also known for his sound design project, Temporal Geometry, created the samples of Wraith. For Wraith he has drawn from years of experience as a composer of ambient and cinematic music which he releases under the name Rildrim.

His skill for tonality and for making samples that can be used in a practical, musical way shine through in this library.

Specifications

• 83 presets, saved as separate mirage-phoenix files
• Mirage sample-based synthesis engine included
• Wraith Mirage library (closed format mdata file) which features 230 instruments

What is Mirage?

Mirage is our sample-based synthesis engine. It is a VST/AU synthesiser plugin that features a powerful set of controls for processing our custom sample libraries, such as Phoenix or Wraith (currently libraries can only be made with our internal tools).

Mirage is designed for rapid, flexible sound design and for ease-of-use.

Designed for sound layering

As sound designers and foley artists know well, layering is an excellent way of designing new sounds using existing samples. Mirage allows for up to three different sounds to be controlled separately and layered together.

The layers in Mirage have the following controls unique to them: pitch, volume and pan, filter, volume envelope, LFO, EQ, sample loop settings and MIDI settings. These controls facilitate an incredible amount of manipulation over the original sound source.

A rack of built-in Effects

Another technique that sound designers use to shape the character of sounds is by applying effects. Mirage features a rack of such effects for this purpose. Built-in effects such as distortion, bit-crush, chorus and stereo widener can be used to enhance the sound with extra harmonics or extra simulated width.

The compressor can be used to control dynamics or add punch, and the filter can be used to isolate just the frequencies you need. Mirage also has reverb and delay effects for real space simulation. These are great for sound design too.

One of the reverb effects is a convolution reverb, this is typically used to add a real-sounding reverberation effect to the signal by using samples of real spaces (impulse responses). However, by substituting the sample of a real space with an abstract sample, interesting effects can be produced. Mirage features both realistic impulse responses and abstract ones for creative sound design.

Designed to be Played

For compelling and dynamic performances, you often want to control the parameters of the sound as you play. We naturally do this in real life. For example, when singing a melody, we make some parts louder and vary the tremolo intensity. Mirage helps with enabling this type of modulation too.

The volume at both the layer level and the master level can be controlled with MIDI velocity. Sustain pedal (MIDI CC 64) is also fully supported, enabling you to hold notes using a foot pedal. On top of that, any parameter in Mirage can be controlled by knobs or sliders on your physical MIDI controller. This is simply a matter of right-clicking the parameter, selecting ‘MIDI learn’ and then moving your controller. And of course, Mirage can also be automated by your DAW.

Minimum friction from your mind to your DAW

Mirage is designed to not get in your way. It is fast to load up and is CPU efficient. It has a vector-based GUI that can be resized so that it will work on any size screen. The controls are laid out in an intuitive way, and a full description of what each control does can be viewed by hovering the mouse over it for a moment. Mirage also comes with a PDF user manual with all of the nitty-gritty details covered.