Cinematic sample library developer Wavelet Audio just released a new product called Trailer Box: a trailer sound design toolkit designed for modern cinematic audio and video projects. The sounds presented in this toolkit are based around twisted organic sounds and noises as well as powerful guitar and bass recordings.
I had the chance of checking out Trailer Box recently and will share my thoughts on this interesting new sample library in the upcoming review.
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OVERVIEW
Trailer Box is a roughly 2.5 GB sample library for the full version of Native Instruments’ Kontakt sampler (version 6.0.2 and above). The library contains 240 individual samples spread across 14 sound categories. These include:
| 56 Bass Pulses 30 Guitar Stems 17 Clocking Pulses 17 Pulses Marches 30 Hits 18 Low Thuds 9 Braams | 12 Pings 18 Bass One-Shot 10 Sub Drops 8 War Horns 20 Whooshes 16 Risers 10 Risers Rhythms |
In addition to the Kontakt format, the samples are also provided as lossless 24bit/48kHz audio files that are easily compatible with any major editing platform including Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut X, DaVinci Resolve, and more.
INTERFACE
When loaded into the Kontakt sampler software, Trailer Box presents itself with a custom-designed user interface. The interface is easy to read and features only the most essential controls used to manipulate a given sound.
Smack in the middle of the GUI, you will find a waveform display that shows the waveform of the sample you triggered last. A position marker in the display allows you to set the start point of a sample to a later position. This is useful if, for example, you want to skip the initial ‘whoosh in’ of a trailer hit and start right with the transient. The waveform display also has a cool ‘Reverse’ feature, through which you can reverse any sample and have it playback backward.
To the left and right of the waveform display, you will find the controls for a rhythmic gate that can be superimposed on the samples. When activated, the gate adds a stuttering effect to your sound whose speed and depth can be set quickly with the respective controls.
Another cool feature that the interface provides is a tempo-synced ‘start-time menu’. Here you can set the start point of a sample to playback at a certain point in time or have the peak of a sample take place on a certain beat. Start times can be set from 1/32 of a bar to hit to 4 bars to hit.
Learning how to use this clever feature might need a little more explanation: Let’s say you have a non-tempo-synced riser that is 10 seconds long and has its loudness peak at 8 seconds. When you set the start-time menu to ‘1 bar to hit’, the loudest part of the riser will arrive at the beginning of the next bar. Wavelet Audio’s engine intelligently analyzes the riser sample and sync’s its peak in time with your DAW.
Apart from those rather complex features, Trailer Box offers a couple more basic controls like volume, panning, stereo width, reverb amount, filtering and basic ADSR envelope parameters. The engine also allows you to pitch your sample up or down by 6 semitones. This can be done using the pre-programmed keyswitches from F#-1 to F#0.
THE SOUND OF TRAILER BOX
The various samples and loops found in Trailer Box sound powerful & clean across the bank, which makes it easy to implement them into both dense trailer music tracks and complex video projects. The library features a good balance of bread-and-butter sounds and more experimental ones. Depending on the demands of your project, the basic sounds in Trailer Box will easily help you along 80% of the way and the more unusual ones are perfect to set individual acoustic highlights.
A welcome addition to the essential trailer sounds are Trailer Box’s cool, tempo-synced guitar and bass pulses, which can be used to quickly set a project in motion. Both pulse categories sound pretty heavily processed and are more synthetic in nature. The fuzzy guitar pulses sound as if they were programmed instead of played live, which gives them a nice robotic or Cyberpunk-esque vibe.
Some sounds I’d like to particularly point out are the impressive ‘Marches Pulses’ and ‘War Horns’. The rhythmic pulses provide a pushing, urgent feel to any composition, particularly great for situations where you want to quickly take a track’s pressure up a notch. The awesomely creepy war horns sound like the desperate cries of giant monsters – think Godzilla vs. Kong.
CONCLUSION
Trailer Box by Wavelet Audio is a cool trailer sound design toolkit that provides you with all the essentials you need to get started. The library also throws in a couple of more offbeat sounds like the guitar and bass pulses or the imposing war horns.
The basic user interface is easy on the eye and provides users to further adjust the base samples provided. The start-time menu is a clever way of tempo-syncing one-shot sounds to your musical arrangement.
Since you can use the sounds in Trailer Box either as a Kontakt instrument or as audio files, both media composers and video editors will be able to integrate them into their workflow easily.
Given the library’s reasonable price of $89 ($69 during intro sale!), aspiring composers and editors just starting out with producing trailer content really can’t do anything wrong here.
Trailer Box is available as a digital download through Wavelet Audio’s online shop.
Pros
- Powerful trailer sound design
- Simple user interface
- Smart tempo-syncing options
- Reasonable price
Cons
- Engine offers only limited manipulation options
- Sounds are quite specialized/restricted in use
RECOMMENDED 7/10
TRAILER BOX – VIDEO WALKTHROUGH
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