Morphology

MORPHOLOGY is a new Native Instruments-powered virtual instrument featuring over 3 Gb of evolving soundscapes, dream synth patches and samples for film composers and sound designers, created from scratch by IAN BODDY, one of the UK´s most celebrated synthesists, and a veteran of the European electronic music scene since the late 1970s.

Boddy has over 20 solo albums to his credit, runs the ambient label DiN, has composed 6 library music CDs for DeWolfe Music and has previously created numerous popular sample libraries for Zero-G including Ambient 1 & 2, Malice In Wonderland and Dream Zone. His exclusive sound archives and arsenal of vintage and modern synths have been extensively plundered to create the unique and inspiring new library that you will find within this powerful virtual instrument.

IMPORTANT: the Native Instruments software powering this product is not a ´PLAYER´ but an INSTRUMENT. The software included is a complete Virtual Instrument called KOMPAKT INSTRUMENT, which is a special streamlined version of the NI KONTAKT sampler and also uses the KONTAKT audio engine. KOMPAKT INSTRUMENT should not be confused with the much more basic "KONTAKT PLAYER" interface as included with some other companies´ products, which is simply a ´player´ of libraries in Kontakt format and has very little editing functionality. That is obviously very different from the KOMPAKT INSTRUMENT, which includes the most used controls from KONTAKT and allows massive editing of the included sound library. The KOMPAKT INSTRUMENT which powers Zero-G Virtual Sound Modules is a much more powerful creative tool than the "KONTAKT PLAYER".

Emerging from the post Tangerine Dream generation, Ian Boddy has carved out a position as a distinctive independent composer and performer, and is one of the few of his generation to have successfully integrated electronic music styles as diverse as seventies-style sequencer structures, melodic neo-classicism and the post-rave Modern Ambient style. Here he again provides the listener with a rich atmosphere of original timbres and floating soundscapes. A prolific performer, Ian is credited with over 70 live appearances in the UK, Holland, Germany, and the USA.

The whole library is presented within a stunning new state-of-the-art plug-in interface by NATIVE INSTRUMENTS which combines intuitive handling and a capable architecture with excellent sound quality. It is a powerful version of NI´s KOMPAKT sampler interface, and it makes no compromises playing and performing sample-based instruments. Powerful multi-mode filters, envelopes, and LFOs give a wealth of creative possibilities. Integrated high-quality reverb, chorus, and delay effects give each sample life and depth. The clean and intuitive interface doesn´t let technology get in the way of creativity. All important instrument parameters can be immediately adjusted without the need to page, scroll, or fumble through a manual. Features:
- Over 3 Gigabytes of new evolving and morphing soundscapes, dream synths & samples by IAN BODDY, one of Europe´s leading synthesists,
- Virtual Synth section includes lovingly multi-sampled / multi waveform analogue synth. In conjunction with the flexibilty of the Kompakt interface this provides the user with a huge potential to customise their own sounds,
- All original samples, recorded at 24 Bit sample resolution for hi-fidelity,
- Easy and intuitive user interface (a version of Native Instruments´ superb KOMPAKT sampler),
- Engine is based on KONTAKT audio engine, the world´s finest software sampling engine,
- Professional sound quality with advanced 32-bit processing,
- Powerful filter offers six types, including low-pass, high-pass, and band-pass,
- Three AHDSR envelopes and four LFOs,
- Integrated effects: chorus, reverb, and delay,
- Total Recall (complete MIDI automation and control),
- Sound Library can also be loaded into Native Instruments KONTAKT
Supported Interfaces & Standards: VST 2.0, DXi, ASIO, Soundmanager, OMS, Audio Units**, Core Audio**, RTAS**.
 

More infos

More Infos
User Interface

Systemrequirements

NI Kompakt Player included in this product!

Minimum:
Windows XP, Pentium III / Athlon 500 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 11 GB free HD space
MAC OS 10.2.6, G3 500 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 11 GB free HD space

Recommended:
Windows XP, Pentium IV 1,8 GHz / Athlon XP 1800+, 1 GB RAM
Mac OS 10.3.8 Mac G5, 2 GB Ram

You can use this library with the free Kontakt Player 3.5 (or higher) which is compatible to all actual operating systems and interfaces on Mac & PC

Download free Kontakt Player Windows (71MB)
Download free Kontakt Player Mac (144MB)

Product activation:
An internet connection on any computer is required to authorize / activate the product (Challenge/Response).

Reviews

US Keyboards 7/04
Sound on Sound UK 7/03

US Keyboards 7/04

"Outstandingly moody and emotional sounds, effects and ambiences....A potential lifesaver in music-for-picture applications, and killer for music composition too....The size of the sound library is impressive...There's a lot of quality material here. Harmonic Loops holds some of the most beautiful sounds in the entire collection. They'd be great for communicating longing, sorrow, tears of joy. Strong but quiet emotions. They're the kind of thing that'll likely turn up in a lot of TV movies... Big kudos to Boddy's collaborator Markus Reuters for his contributions here. ...it could be argued that Boddy's done all your work for you.....but some composers will likely thank their lucky stars for the completeness of some of these patches. They're a potential boon to the music-for-picture crowd. But in the final analysis, this work is so well done, so imbued with mood and emotion, that it's a pleasure to recommend it."

Pros: Outstandingly moody and emotional sounds, effects and ambiences.

Cons: Kompakt's syncable funtions under-utilized. Sounds might be too overdone for some tastes.

Bottom line: A potential lifesaver in music-for-picture applications, and killer for music composition too.

A lot of hardware keyboards have wowed us over the years with entrancing one-note symphonies that appear just a few patches in from the top of their preset banks. The sequential Circuits Prophet-VS brought evolving textures within reach of many. The Roland D-50 gave us "Digital Native Dance," an atmospheric splash followed by a whoosh and a startling, spiky marimba loop. The Kawai K4 offered a few choirs on wheels, and of course the Korg Wavestation was positively drenched in one-note wonders, layered with evolving textures and in-time, syncable percussion elements.

Morphology's strong suit is bringing this idea forward into the sounds of today, providing the kind of animated pads, effects, and atmospheres that can make a whole cue in a movie or TV soundtrack, add palpable mood to a pop song, or just overwhelm everything if used ham-fistedly. Programmer Ian Boddy has been mining this vein for years; the Zero-G back catalog is full of his outstanding atmospheric collections. Near as I can tell, Morphology is made from all-new material and though a number of vintage synths were used in its production, the sounds themselves are quite timeless and shouldn't date nearly as quickly as some sample libraries do.

The size of the sound library is impressive. And it isn't pumped up with filler, either. There's a lot of quality material here. Opening the Atmospheres bank, we're
presented with a number of sub-banks. The first of these, Arpeggiations, houses everything from murky, moist textures like "Burbling" to gossamer, airy constructions like "Frosty Morning." Six more categories within Arpeggiations hold around a dozen patches each. Some standouts? "Spacious Events," whose name holds a clue as to what it'd be absolutely perfect for - a sound installation in a science museum or theme-park attraction. "Lost World," found under Eerie, would have been perfect for the scenes where George Lucas established Tatooine as "a desolate place" in the first Star Wars. In fact, it would also nail the vibe of another Lucas film, THX1138, with its minimalist, musique concrete electronic score. "Scary Reverse," in the Scary category (still in Atmospheres) made me think of being sucked into the dream world in Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Drones folder contains exactly what you'd think - drones - but these are far from static. They evolve with more subtlety perhaps than some of the other sounds, but nothing in Morphology sits still. "Low Guitar in D" offers a reverb-smeared melody that can be used to great effect if you play chords. Harmonic Loops holds some of the most beautiful sounds in the entire collection. They'd be great for communicating longing, sorrow, tears of joy. Strong but quiet emotions. They're the kind of thing that'll likely turn up in a lot of TV movies. Placed under better acting than that, though, they could be devastatingly effective. Big kudos to Boddy's collaborator Markus Reuters for his contributions here.

As achingly beautiful as the Harmonic Loops material is, the Industrial area is dangerous, menacing, and downright annoying: drills, machinery, bangs and crashes, catastrophic equipment failure. People are enslaved and maimed in these soundscapes. "Shimmering," within the Click & Glitch category, is a slight departure and a nice tribute to the Six Million Dollar Man's signature bionic sound effect.

Pads & Synths offers sounds of a more everyday nature, although even these are twisted in some strange and wonderful ways. These are the sounds to reach for if you're doing dance music and want something just a little off-kilter. Some of them don't lend themselves to playing your own chords on, though. They lock you into whatever major or minor tonality is baked in. A small selection of nifty lead sounds briefly breaks from convention here. These sound impossibly fat without that rankling analog outta-tune sound that often accompanies fat texture.

All in all, there's very little to say against Morphology. I was slightly disappointed that most of the motion can't be MIDI-synced; it's built into the samples rather than built up in Kompakt's engine. So that's a slight bummer. Also, it could be argued that Boddy's done all your work for you. It's a valid opinion, but some composers will likely thank their lucky stars for the completeness of some of these patches. They're a potential boon to the music-for-picture crowd. But in the final analysis, this work is so well done, so imbued with mood and emotion, that it's a pleasure to recommend it.

Kompakt Synthesis In addition to the main event - the animated pads, ambiences, and effects - Morphology also includes a selection of plain analog waveforms designed to take advantage of Kompakt's synthesis features and let you sculpt your own synth sounds. Triangle, triangular sawtooth, sawtooth, square, wide rectangular, and narrow rectangular (pulse) waves are included, apparently sourced from real analog VCOs, though the source isn't named. The proof is in the sound, though, and these sound woolly and wild just like real VCOs do. Bravo to Zero-G for this extra little bit of value-added content. Be aware that this collection is shipped without Mac OS X support, but the update is free to registered users and painless to install. Visit www.native-instruments.com Review: Morphology  Keyboard  7/2004"Outstandingly moody and emotional sounds, effects and ambiences....A potential lifesaver in music-for-picture applications, and killer for music composition too....The size of the sound library is impressive...There's a lot of quality material here. Harmonic Loops holds some of the most beautiful sounds in the entire collection. They'd be great for communicating longing, sorrow, tears of joy. Strong but quiet emotions. They're the kind of thing that'll likely turn up in a lot of TV movies... Big kudos to Boddy's collaborator Markus Reuters for his contributions here. ...it could be argued that Boddy's done all your work for you.....but some composers will likely thank their lucky stars for the completeness of some of these patches. They're a potential boon to the music-for-picture crowd. But in the final analysis, this work is so well done, so imbued with mood and emotion, that it's a pleasure to recommend it."

Pros: Outstandingly moody and emotional sounds, effects and ambiences.

Cons: Kompakt's syncable funtions under-utilized. Sounds might be too overdone for some tastes.

Bottom line: A potential lifesaver in music-for-picture applications, and killer for music composition too.

A lot of hardware keyboards have wowed us over the years with entrancing one-note symphonies that appear just a few patches in from the top of their preset banks. The sequential Circuits Prophet-VS brought evolving textures within reach of many. The Roland D-50 gave us "Digital Native Dance," an atmospheric splash followed by a whoosh and a startling, spiky marimba loop. The Kawai K4 offered a few choirs on wheels, and of course the Korg Wavestation was positively drenched in one-note wonders, layered with evolving textures and in-time, syncable percussion elements.

Morphology's strong suit is bringing this idea forward into the sounds of today, providing the kind of animated pads, effects, and atmospheres that can make a whole cue in a movie or TV soundtrack, add palpable mood to a pop song, or just overwhelm everything if used ham-fistedly. Programmer Ian Boddy has been mining this vein for years; the Zero-G back catalog is full of his outstanding atmospheric collections. Near as I can tell, Morphology is made from all-new material and though a number of vintage synths were used in its production, the sounds themselves are quite timeless and shouldn't date nearly as quickly as some sample libraries do.

The size of the sound library is impressive. And it isn't pumped up with filler, either. There's a lot of quality material here. Opening the Atmospheres bank, we're
presented with a number of sub-banks. The first of these, Arpeggiations, houses everything from murky, moist textures like "Burbling" to gossamer, airy constructions like "Frosty Morning." Six more categories within Arpeggiations hold around a dozen patches each. Some standouts? "Spacious Events," whose name holds a clue as to what it'd be absolutely perfect for - a sound installation in a science museum or theme-park attraction. "Lost World," found under Eerie, would have been perfect for the scenes where George Lucas established Tatooine as "a desolate place" in the first Star Wars. In fact, it would also nail the vibe of another Lucas film, THX1138, with its minimalist, musique concrete electronic score. "Scary Reverse," in the Scary category (still in Atmospheres) made me think of being sucked into the dream world in Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Drones folder contains exactly what you'd think - drones - but these are far from static. They evolve with more subtlety perhaps than some of the other sounds, but nothing in Morphology sits still. "Low Guitar in D" offers a reverb-smeared melody that can be used to great effect if you play chords. Harmonic Loops holds some of the most beautiful sounds in the entire collection. They'd be great for communicating longing, sorrow, tears of joy. Strong but quiet emotions. They're the kind of thing that'll likely turn up in a lot of TV movies. Placed under better acting than that, though, they could be devastatingly effective. Big kudos to Boddy's collaborator Markus Reuters for his contributions here.

As achingly beautiful as the Harmonic Loops material is, the Industrial area is dangerous, menacing, and downright annoying: drills, machinery, bangs and crashes, catastrophic equipment failure. People are enslaved and maimed in these soundscapes. "Shimmering," within the Click & Glitch category, is a slight departure and a nice tribute to the Six Million Dollar Man's signature bionic sound effect.

Pads & Synths offers sounds of a more everyday nature, although even these are twisted in some strange and wonderful ways. These are the sounds to reach for if you're doing dance music and want something just a little off-kilter. Some of them don't lend themselves to playing your own chords on, though. They lock you into whatever major or minor tonality is baked in. A small selection of nifty lead sounds briefly breaks from convention here. These sound impossibly fat without that rankling analog outta-tune sound that often accompanies fat texture.

All in all, there's very little to say against Morphology. I was slightly disappointed that most of the motion can't be MIDI-synced; it's built into the samples rather than built up in Kompakt's engine. So that's a slight bummer. Also, it could be argued that Boddy's done all your work for you. It's a valid opinion, but some composers will likely thank their lucky stars for the completeness of some of these patches. They're a potential boon to the music-for-picture crowd. But in the final analysis, this work is so well done, so imbued with mood and emotion, that it's a pleasure to recommend it.

Kompakt Synthesis In addition to the main event - the animated pads, ambiences, and effects - Morphology also includes a selection of plain analog waveforms designed to take advantage of Kompakt's synthesis features and let you sculpt your own synth sounds. Triangle, triangular sawtooth, sawtooth, square, wide rectangular, and narrow rectangular (pulse) waves are included, apparently sourced from real analog VCOs, though the source isn't named. The proof is in the sound, though, and these sound woolly and wild just like real VCOs do. Bravo to Zero-G for this extra little bit of value-added content. Be aware that this collection is shipped without Mac OS X support, but the update is free to registered users and painless to install. Visit www.native-instruments.com

Sound on Sound UK 7/03

These days, if your sample library's going to be a success, it seems you've got to release it with a virtual-instrument front-end. Analogue-synth fanatic and long-standing sample-library producer Ian Boddy does not disappoint with his latest creation... Zero G's Morphology is one of the new breed of software instruments that combines a large sample library with a software-instrument front-end, and as with many of these new-style libraries, the playback engine in this instance is Native Instruments' Kompakt. The man behind Morphology is none other than Ian Boddy, long-standing UK electronic musician, analogue-synth fanatic, and sample-library creator (Ian was previously responsible for Zero G's Ambient 1 & 2, Malice In Wonderland and Dream Zone). As its name suggests, Morphology provides evolving and morphing soundscapes and dreamy-sounding synths, but its library of original 24-bit 44.1kHz sampled sounds, which is over three Gigabytes in size, goes rather further than that, spanning both beautiful-sounding and gritty industrial sounds. It also includes some of the most generously sampled analogue synth oscillators around - reasonably long notes are provided so that the notes in a chord beat and breathe just like they do on a real analogue instrument. If comparisons had to be made, I'd say those who like the Spectrasonics Atmosphere and Distorted Reality products would also like Morphology, but they are still very different in approach.

The Kompakt instrument is worth a closer look, as it's not simply a sample- playback front-end for the library. It allows up to eight 'instruments' to be used at once within a Multi, and as you'd expect from this synth-like architecture, each Instrument can then be assigned to any MIDI channel, panned independently, and can have a key-rangeassigned to it. Morphology also supports separate outputs for each instrument within a Multi on those host software packages that support multiple output routing.

This architecture makes it possible to set up layers and key-splits, and the sounds can be further processed using both instrument-specific and global processing (at 32-bit resolution). There are also more advanced tricks you can do, such as loading two different-sounding instruments on the same MIDI channel and then arranging the mod wheel to crossfade between them, by setting the Mod Wheel to control one instrument with positive volume and the other with negative volume.

The structure of the Kompakt instrument is much like that of a traditional analogue synth, with level envelopes (there are three envelopes and four LFOs), multi-mode resonant filters, portamento and modulation, but there are also global effects (reverb, chorus and delay) and a global EQ/filter. Because some of the samples are rather large, the Kompakt instrument also offers direct-from-disk (DFD) streaming to ease the load on your computer's RAM (albeit at the expense of increased hard driveactivity). Apparently all the programming was carried out with the samples loaded into RAM. Mac G5 dual-processor users need to download the latest DFD extension from the Zero G web site (see www.zero-g.co.uk/index.cfm?articleid=797), as the one supplied with the package wasn't dual-processor compatible, and the result was that I got a lot of clicks and pops in the audio when streaming from disk. However, updating to the new DFD extension cured this immediately.

Currently, Morphology is compatible with various Windows plug-in formats (VST 2.0, DXi 2, ASIO, MME, Direct Sound and RTAS), and the major Mac OS 9 formats (VST 2.0, ASIO, Sound Manager, OMS and RTAS). OS X users are not left out, with support provided for Audio Units, Core Audio and RTAS formats. The Mac OS X formats weren't available on the install disk at the time of review, but updates were available for download via Native Instruments' web site, and it was the AU version that I used for this review. However, Morphology can also be used as a stand-alone software instrument, which is very useful if you wish to use it in live performance. Authorisation is via a challenge-and-response system hosted by the Native Instruments web site.

As we've now come to expect from plug-in instruments, Morphology offers complete MIDI automation and control of parameters, and new instrument settings or Multis can be stored in the usual way. The memory size in Megabytes required by each instrument is shown in the Patch List, and nearly all the instruments load with a default polyphony of 32 notes, apart from those sounds in the Synths sub-folder marked as Monophonic. All instruments (except the basic waveform templates) have a key parameter assigned to the Modulation Wheel, though you can of course change this if you like prior to resaving the instrument.

Some of the 'Noise FX' instruments use templates comprising two noise groups each, so these use two notes of polyphony for each note played. As with any software instrument, the CPU load increases along with polyphony, and also with the amount of processing being used. For example, using the included reverb will eat up more CPU power than not using it.

According to the documentation, the majority of the samples are referenced to C3 as the root key, though there are some backgrounds and textures that are melodies in themselves. There are also weird detuned or pitch-processed sounds where the concept of tuning is somewhat vague, and not wholly appropriate! Some of the more melodic loops were contributed by Markus Reuter and are often not in the key of C, so you may need to refer to the extra on-line documentation if your musical instincts aren't enough. To help out, some of these melodic textures include note and scale names in their titles to act as clues.

The Virtual Synth A significant element of Morphology is its virtual synth section, which is based on sampling individual notes (every minor third) from a real analogue instrument for a longer than usual period of time to capture the subtle pitch drifts and other nuances. These are presented as raw VCO samples which are then shaped using the envelope modulation and filter arsenal of the Kompakt front end. There are six waveform types (Triangle, Triangular Sawtooth, Sawtooth, Square, Wide Rectangular and Narrow Rectangular) with a loop length of about 10 seconds per sample. This equates to almost 50MB of sample data spread over 35 different note samples per waveform type. However, knowing that some users will have machines that find this heavy going, 'Lite' versions are also provided with fewer samples, and these take only around a third of the memory.

The Sounds Morphology's instruments are arranged by category, and most of the categories are divided into further sub-categories. The main categories (the content of which is fairly self-explanatory) are 'Atmospheres', 'Drones', 'FX', 'Harmonic Loops', 'Industrial', 'Pads & Synths', 'Virtual Synths' and 'Voices'. Each of the sub-categories typically contains between six and a dozen instruments, though where there are no sub-categories, there tend to be many more instruments - there are over 30 synth pads, for instance. With the exception of the 'Industrial' and 'FX' categories, most of the sounds on offer are either analogue-sounding and solid or atmospheric and gentle, but Ian Boddy wouldn't be who he is if there wasn't the occasional 'visit to the dentist' example of sonic terrorism in there somewhere! My favourites were the 'Harmonic Loops' and 'Atmospheres' sections, though the 'Virtual Synth' samples sound great played as chords. The 'Harmonic Loops' section contains some wonderful processed new-age style beds that could almost be used as minimalist tracks on their own (especially in the 'Calm' and 'Beauty' sub-categories), but at the same time, they also integrate well with other sounds and instruments. If you like Wavestations and similar synths, you should find a lot to like here.

While it may not take too long to trawl through the sounds and identify your favourites, the real joy of Morphology is the simple way in which you can tweak the synth-like controls for each instrument to bend it to your will, or layer different sounds to create something new. In short, it was easy enough to use, although I found the text used on some of the Kompakt menus to be on the small side, and the menus had a habit of slipping out of my grasp as I was trying to navigate through them. However, in its favour, there is only one screen to deal with, so I guess there have to be some compromises.

Conclusions Kompakt provides a fairly straightforward but nevertheless very versatile front end for the playback of sample libraries of this kind, and while the 3GB Morphology core sample library is impressive, it is even more impressive to be able to edit the sounds so easily. Morphology should please anyone who's into
realistic-sounding analogue synths or evolving textures, and even if you already have Spectrasonics' Atmosphere, it offers a different take on the genre. All in all, this is a pretty impressive workshop of weirdness that manages to be both different and musically useful. Review: Morphology  SOUND ON SOUND UK 7/2004These days, if your sample library's going to be a success, it seems you've got to release it with a virtual-instrument front-end. Analogue-synth fanatic and long-standing sample-library producer Ian Boddy does not disappoint with his latest creation... Zero G's Morphology is one of the new breed of software instruments that combines a large sample library with a software-instrument front-end, and as with many of these new-style libraries, the playback engine in this instance is Native Instruments' Kompakt. The man behind Morphology is none other than Ian Boddy, long-standing UK electronic musician, analogue-synth fanatic, and sample-library creator (Ian was previously responsible for Zero G's Ambient 1 & 2, Malice In Wonderland and Dream Zone). As its name suggests, Morphology provides evolving and morphing soundscapes and dreamy-sounding synths, but its library of original 24-bit 44.1kHz sampled sounds, which is over three Gigabytes in size, goes rather further than that, spanning both beautiful-sounding and gritty industrial sounds. It also includes some of the most generously sampled analogue synth oscillators around - reasonably long notes are provided so that the notes in a chord beat and breathe just like they do on a real analogue instrument. If comparisons had to be made, I'd say those who like the Spectrasonics Atmosphere and Distorted Reality products would also like Morphology, but they are still very different in approach.

The Kompakt instrument is worth a closer look, as it's not simply a sample- playback front-end for the library. It allows up to eight 'instruments' to be used at once within a Multi, and as you'd expect from this synth-like architecture, each Instrument can then be assigned to any MIDI channel, panned independently, and can have a key-rangeassigned to it. Morphology also supports separate outputs for each instrument within a Multi on those host software packages that support multiple output routing.

This architecture makes it possible to set up layers and key-splits, and the sounds can be further processed using both instrument-specific and global processing (at 32-bit resolution). There are also more advanced tricks you can do, such as loading two different-sounding instruments on the same MIDI channel and then arranging the mod wheel to crossfade between them, by setting the Mod Wheel to control one instrument with positive volume and the other with negative volume.

The structure of the Kompakt instrument is much like that of a traditional analogue synth, with level envelopes (there are three envelopes and four LFOs), multi-mode resonant filters, portamento and modulation, but there are also global effects (reverb, chorus and delay) and a global EQ/filter. Because some of the samples are rather large, the Kompakt instrument also offers direct-from-disk (DFD) streaming to ease the load on your computer's RAM (albeit at the expense of increased hard driveactivity). Apparently all the programming was carried out with the samples loaded into RAM. Mac G5 dual-processor users need to download the latest DFD extension from the Zero G web site (see www.zero-g.co.uk/index.cfm?articleid=797), as the one supplied with the package wasn't dual-processor compatible, and the result was that I got a lot of clicks and pops in the audio when streaming from disk. However, updating to the new DFD extension cured this immediately.

Currently, Morphology is compatible with various Windows plug-in formats (VST 2.0, DXi 2, ASIO, MME, Direct Sound and RTAS), and the major Mac OS 9 formats (VST 2.0, ASIO, Sound Manager, OMS and RTAS). OS X users are not left out, with support provided for Audio Units, Core Audio and RTAS formats. The Mac OS X formats weren't available on the install disk at the time of review, but updates were available for download via Native Instruments' web site, and it was the AU version that I used for this review. However, Morphology can also be used as a stand-alone software instrument, which is very useful if you wish to use it in live performance. Authorisation is via a challenge-and-response system hosted by the Native Instruments web site.

As we've now come to expect from plug-in instruments, Morphology offers complete MIDI automation and control of parameters, and new instrument settings or Multis can be stored in the usual way. The memory size in Megabytes required by each instrument is shown in the Patch List, and nearly all the instruments load with a default polyphony of 32 notes, apart from those sounds in the Synths sub-folder marked as Monophonic. All instruments (except the basic waveform templates) have a key parameter assigned to the Modulation Wheel, though you can of course change this if you like prior to resaving the instrument.

Some of the 'Noise FX' instruments use templates comprising two noise groups each, so these use two notes of polyphony for each note played. As with any software instrument, the CPU load increases along with polyphony, and also with the amount of processing being used. For example, using the included reverb will eat up more CPU power than not using it.

According to the documentation, the majority of the samples are referenced to C3 as the root key, though there are some backgrounds and textures that are melodies in themselves. There are also weird detuned or pitch-processed sounds where the concept of tuning is somewhat vague, and not wholly appropriate! Some of the more melodic loops were contributed by Markus Reuter and are often not in the key of C, so you may need to refer to the extra on-line documentation if your musical instincts aren't enough. To help out, some of these melodic textures include note and scale names in their titles to act as clues.

The Virtual Synth A significant element of Morphology is its virtual synth section, which is based on sampling individual notes (every minor third) from a real analogue instrument for a longer than usual period of time to capture the subtle pitch drifts and other nuances. These are presented as raw VCO samples which are then shaped using the envelope modulation and filter arsenal of the Kompakt front end. There are six waveform types (Triangle, Triangular Sawtooth, Sawtooth, Square, Wide Rectangular and Narrow Rectangular) with a loop length of about 10 seconds per sample. This equates to almost 50MB of sample data spread over 35 different note samples per waveform type. However, knowing that some users will have machines that find this heavy going, 'Lite' versions are also provided with fewer samples, and these take only around a third of the memory.

The Sounds Morphology's instruments are arranged by category, and most of the categories are divided into further sub-categories. The main categories (the content of which is fairly self-explanatory) are 'Atmospheres', 'Drones', 'FX', 'Harmonic Loops', 'Industrial', 'Pads & Synths', 'Virtual Synths' and 'Voices'. Each of the sub-categories typically contains between six and a dozen instruments, though where there are no sub-categories, there tend to be many more instruments - there are over 30 synth pads, for instance. With the exception of the 'Industrial' and 'FX' categories, most of the sounds on offer are either analogue-sounding and solid or atmospheric and gentle, but Ian Boddy wouldn't be who he is if there wasn't the occasional 'visit to the dentist' example of sonic terrorism in there somewhere! My favourites were the 'Harmonic Loops' and 'Atmospheres' sections, though the 'Virtual Synth' samples sound great played as chords. The 'Harmonic Loops' section contains some wonderful processed new-age style beds that could almost be used as minimalist tracks on their own (especially in the 'Calm' and 'Beauty' sub-categories), but at the same time, they also integrate well with other sounds and instruments. If you like Wavestations and similar synths, you should find a lot to like here.

While it may not take too long to trawl through the sounds and identify your favourites, the real joy of Morphology is the simple way in which you can tweak the synth-like controls for each instrument to bend it to your will, or layer different sounds to create something new. In short, it was easy enough to use, although I found the text used on some of the Kompakt menus to be on the small side, and the menus had a habit of slipping out of my grasp as I was trying to navigate through them. However, in its favour, there is only one screen to deal with, so I guess there have to be some compromises.

Conclusions Kompakt provides a fairly straightforward but nevertheless very versatile front end for the playback of sample libraries of this kind, and while the 3GB Morphology core sample library is impressive, it is even more impressive to be able to edit the sounds so easily. Morphology should please anyone who's into
realistic-sounding analogue synths or evolving textures, and even if you already have Spectrasonics' Atmosphere, it offers a different take on the genre. All in all, this is a pretty impressive workshop of weirdness that manages to be both different and musically useful.