Review by James Gabriel

New from Sample Logic is A.I.R. — “Ambience, Impacts, and Rhythms”. AIR is box full of delicious ear candy that will satisfy your sonic sweet tooth and inspire some creative ideas for scores, songs, and sound design. AIR is a 2-DVD set containing over 300 Ambient Instruments, 100 Impact Instruments and Kits, Combination Platters, and 300 Tempo-Adjustable Rhythms. I recommend you visit the samplelogic.com website and check out the online demos — creations made of 100% pure AIR. The library is designed for musicians, composers, and sound designers. AIR occupies approximately 6GB of disc space, and after a relatively quick and pain-free install, you’ll be up and running. And, yes, I always recommend a separate drive for your libraries.

The Sound of AIR
AIR is contemporary, musical, and instantly impressive. Overall, the sound of AIR is big. I like big. Yet, a cool aspect of these sounds is that, while big, they remain transparent and don't tend to take over the soundstage nor dominate the music. The sounds are rich, evolving textures, consistent, and well produced. AIR will be a welcome addition to the toolbox of composers and sound designers. A serious instrument, AIR is nonetheless easy to use and will enable you to obtain impressive results quickly. Because of its flexibility and vastness, I can see using this library on all kinds of productions. My work takes me from music scores and song production to sound design. I’ve just gotten underway scoring the trailer for an independent feature release, and am making use of some gorgeous AIR Ambiences and Impacts. I’ll also incorporate it into the orchestrated film score later this winter.

AIR is powered by the excellent Native Instruments Kontakt Player 2, which by the way, makes for a great matchup with AIR. Player 2 performs smoothly and transparently and is fun to work with. AIR instrument formats include AU, VST, DXi, RTAS, Standalone Mac and PC. My two daughters will love the fact they can run these sounds on their Garage Band tracks. I haven’t told them yet. The only problem is, of course, once they discover AIR, I may be locked out of the studio for weeks to come! Yikes.

A Trip To The Library
The AIR library covers quite a large sonic territory, and the manual states that included in the set are, ‘dark and twisted ambience, cinematic impacts, transitional sounds, as well as action-packed rhythms. AIR covers all the bases from sci-fi, piercing, distorted tensions, and chilling action sounds, to light, sacred, and spiritual atmospheres.’ Other words come to mind: dreamy and other-worldly; sinister and ominous; biting and piercing; meditative and brooding, and the ever-popular ‘much, much more.’ In addition to the airy, meditative palate here, the ‘Rhythms’ are surprisingly dynamic and punchy. I just call up a sound and dive in — instant funky town.

I had a lot of fun checking out the rather massive collection of sounds here. Sample Logic refers to the library as “The All-In-One Composer's Toolkit!” and goes on to say their goal is “...to provide new tools for composing music…introducing a new concept to virtual instruments that focuses on blending three essential building blocks into one colossal library.” After spending several hours auditioning and experimenting with AIR I would have to agree the library is, indeed, colossal — as in both very high quality and huge in quantity. Sample Logic spent over 2 years in the collecting of sounds and sources and in development of the library, and frankly, it shows. If you get the program, plan to spend some time becoming familiar with the sounds. There's a bunch of cool stuff here, with lots of flexible options in the interface and many creative avenues waiting to be explored. It will be time well spent.

I’m Your Handyman
The Kontakt Player 2 is both intuitive and easy to get around. Whether you use AIR in standalone mode or as a plug-in, the program will perform virtually identically. The Main Control Panel gives you access to several controls and displays that are global to the program. The MasterKontrol button enables the Main Control Panel. The panel holds several very useful, yet simple functions. These include Master Tempo control in BPM as well as Metronome with on-screen tap tempo.

There’s an easy to grab analog-style knob for metronome volume and speed…cool! You’ll also find an adjustable Master Tune. The tuner defaults to A440, but is adjustable all the way from A=392 to A=493.88. That’s one serious tuner! As mentioned in the manual, if you use libraries in which some notes are out of tune, you can set a reference pitch and tune the samples against it. Very handy. This, I can use. The onboard mixer is a grab, tweak and go powerhouse. It includes solid processing, filtering, and routing. The MIDI controller implementation is excellent and AIR sound manipulation via MIDI is quite fun — don’t stop ‘til you get enough.

Initially, I auditioned the sounds in standalone mode to quickly get a feel for the quality of the patches available and an overall impression of the program. This makes it quick and easy to move through the sounds without having to start up your DAW or other programs you might use in your studio. This is the mode, of course, for use in live performances. I later ran the program as a plug-in within Digital Performer, externally synced to DP.

There is a toggle switch at the top of the main screen which enables an on-screen keyboard complete with pitch and mod wheels that can be controlled via the mouse. Your QWERTY computer keyboard can also be configured for MIDI playback. Great for auditioning sounds or for using your favorite laptop while on the road.

The on-screen virtual keyboard uses a light-blue color shading to indicate active keys, and they animate in real-time as you play. This brings us to my only problem with AIR. In production situations, time is always at a premium and schedules can be brutal. I found that locating the edges of sample zones was significantly, and unnecessarily, time-consuming. AIR would benefit dramatically from the inclusion of simple visual indicators, such as color-coded key zones, like those found in many sample libraries. In my exploration of AIR, I was surprised to find that some extremely cool and useful sounds were mapped to a zone as small as just a single note. That single note represents a valuable resource that could have been easily missed had I not been auditioning each and every key, chromatically. Color-coding of sample/key zones should be the default setting here, and I hope to see this issue addressed in a future version, making an excellent program even better.

The AIR InterfaceAs you can see from the screenshot below, the interface is very attractive and easy on the eyes. I really love the look and feel of it. There are knobs at the bottom of each virtual rack space and, for the tweakers among us, these are quick and easy. Just grab a knob or two and hear the results instantly. As you tweak and create patches of your own, save the changes as either a User Instrument or User Multi for later use.

Name That Patch
AIR is broad and deep. The Sample Logic development team did a good job in naming sounds and sound categories. (Naming sounds is always such fun). There's a lot of sonic territory here. The names of the patches are appropriately interesting and creative, but won't necessarily describe the actual sounds you will hear. Patches are, for the most part, splits across the keyboard. Advancing through the sounds is easy. Just click on an arrow to the right of the patch name, either left or right, to select a new sound.

A screenshot of the interface. I have a ‘Combination Platter’ in the top rack space, and single ‘Instruments’ below: one each of the Ambience, Impacts, and Rhythms below. Notice the ‘A’, the ‘I’, and the ‘R’ in the circles at the left side of each module. A nice touch to an already attractive interface.

Final Thoughts
In addition to the excellent program, I was happy to see a thorough, smart and well-laid out manual. Thank you. Yes, many of us do actually read the manuals, cover to cover. Other than the previously mentioned color coding issue, this program rocks. The boys and girls at Sample Logic are to be congratulated for a wonderful product. Since AIR is the initial release from the company, it bodes very swell for the future. Kudos.