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8Dio – Eternal Darkness (Review)

8dio eternal darkness hybrid tools series

With Eternal Darkness, the cinematic sampling experts at 8Dio recently released a new virtual instrument and addition to their Hybrid Tools line of products. Eternal Darkness is all about gritty horror sound design and dark, creepy textures. Housed within the brand’s own engine inside KONTAKT, 8Dio’s new sample library features a large collection of eerie and unnerving sound effects, including processed vocals, haunting risers, aggressive patterns, and pulses, as well as dark and distorted impacts and sub booms.

We had the chance to check out Eternal Darkness for you and found out what the sample library can help you with scoring your next horror or thriller blockbuster.

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8DIO’s Troels Folmann on scoring a horror track in one minute

OVERVIEW

Eternal Darkness is a sample library designed for the full version of Native Instruments’ KONTAKT 5.8 and above. The library features roughly 1.3 GB of original sample content and is structured into 13 sound design categories including Hits, Risers, Drones, Tempo-Synced Rhythms, etc. Have a look at the list below to find all of the categories included.

What makes Eternal Darkness special is that 8Dio went the extra mile and also included 15 pre-composed songs that are sourced from the product’s sample collection. These songs feature various stems of loops and sound effects that are perfectly synced together and laid out on the keyboard. This way, you can build your own cue from the song elements literally in minutes.

Here’s a full list of the sound categories included:

  • Impacts
  • Hits
  • Sub Hits
  • Sub Drones
  • Risers Short
  • Risers Medium
  • Risers Long
  • Risers Extra Long
  • Low Drones
  • High Drones
  • Rhythms
  • Tick Tocks
  • Phrases

INTERFACE

As most of the other recent 8Dio libraries, Eternal Darkness is powered by the company’s own custom user interface. The photorealistic GUI allows to quickly switch between different sound categories or songs respectively, all in one instance. It also features plenty of customization options, effects and a sequencer that can turn every one-shot sound into a complex rhythm.

If you select a sound category, you can audition its samples as they are laid out across the keyboard. Once you decided for an individual sound you like, you can spread it across the keyboard chromatically using the “Stretch” button. It’s also possible to stack various sounds into one complex layer with the “Stack” function.

By working with the six rotary controls you can drastically influence the shape of your sound. Dial up the attack control for a smoother fade in or cut down the release for more accentuated sounds. Lastly, by playing around with the “Random” and “Chaos” functions, you’re able to generate complex and unique combinations of sounds and effects.

15 HORRIFIYNG SCORES

As mentioned before, Eternal Darkness comes with a neat collection of 15 handcrafted songs. These songs feature various categories of sounds per patch that you can mix, match and combine to your liking. All of the sound effects, loops, and rhythms of a particular song are composed in a way that they make a coherent musical statement. Some songs revolve around a distinct signature type of sound, others feature an interesting rhythm or phrase everything else weaves around. All in all, these 15 pre-composed songs are a great way to spark inspiration and to get the creative juices flowing for your own work.

THE SOUND OF DARKNESS

8Dio founder and producer Troels Folmann states in one of his videos: “this is the darkest library we’ve ever made”. He stresses that during production, they strived to achieve a sound as analog as possible. To accomplish this fat and dark attitude, the sounds for Eternal Darkness were created by heavily using hardware synthesizers, analog signal processing chains. Acoustic sources were mangled with hardware effects such as guitar pedals.

By going through the samples and checking out the different categories, you can clearly say that 8Dio succeeded in creating a dark, gritty and oftentimes disturbing sound. The sounds rumble, sizzle, break up and sometimes pulverize between your ears.

With Eternal Darkness, you get haunting, processed children’s voices, groaning, zombie-like risers and sub booms that sound like they are coming straight out of the depths of hell. Everything sounds so evil, hostile to life and alien. This is clearly not the polished and clean sound you may know from other more standard cinematic SFX libraries. Instead, you get a rich collection of intense textures and effects that are perfectly suited for those psychological or supernatural horror moments of a movie.

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Eternal Darkness Audio Demos

CONCLUSION

Eternal Darkness is a great library for composers who are on the search for eerie, dark and downright evil cinematic sound design. While it may not be your one-stop-shop for cinematic sound effects in general, it specializes very well in delivering a distinct, unnerving sound that is highly sought after in today’s horror trailers and movies. You can hear the analog edge and grittiness the library is advertised with in almost every sound and the product’s sleek custom interface allows for manifold processing options. The pre-composed songs provided with Eternal Darkness make for a great starting point to overcome writer’s block. However, these songs are also diverse enough to create complete tracks out of them if you put in a bit of effort.

Eternal Darkness is available for $198 as a digital download via 8Dio’s online store.

ETERNAL DARKNESS VIDEO WALKTHROUGH

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