In recent years, Spatial Audio and Spatial Music have become some of the most talked-about concepts in music production and digital audio.
As spatialization, immersive sound and 3D aural experiences continue to break into the mainstream and dominate the conversation, both producers and music fans are growing to realize the value in making music an experience that includes space in its storytelling.
However, as with any newly established field, it can be difficult to figure out how to get started without dropping thousands of pounds on software packages that could take months to get to grips with.
Sound Particles are making it easier than ever before to dive into Spatial Audio by offering a suite of affordable, easy-to-use plugins that are custom-built for music production in Spatial formats. Supporting a broad range of formats - from Dolby Atmos, to Binaural, to 3rd order Ambisonics - they’re an essential tool for everyone from seasoned professionals to Spatial Audio newbies.
If you’re new to Spatial Audio and wondering where to start, a great place would be Sound Particles’ free eBook, All You Need To Know About 3D Audio. This covers all the need-to-know basics and explains fundamental concepts that’ll give you a solid foundation on which to develop and build your skills.
Immersive, 360-degree panning is one of the most powerful effects that Spatial Audio can create. With Sound Particles’ panning plugins, you can bring an entirely new dimension to your sound.
Energy Panner automatically moves sounds around in space in response to their volume level and intensity. Instead of dull, tired auto-pan effects that we’ve grown accustomed to, Energy Panner injects life into your mixes and creates an organic, shifting soundscape that moves rhythmically in line with the intensity of your composition. Imagine: drums that move around you in tandem with the accent of the beat, or synth sounds that rotate and breathe in time with their attack.
Brightness Panner produces a similarly awe-inspiring effect, but it’ll pan a sound in response to the pitch, brightness and MIDI input. This enables you to easily transform any sound into a living, breathing piece of music. Imagine cascading arpeggios flying around your head, or rippling chord sequences doing dizzying spirals in your ears.
Both Energy Panner and Brightness Panner are easy to understand and simple to use. They’re designed to take your sounds to another level, expanding your mix beyond the 2D dimension with a few clicks of the mouse and creating immersive, ever-changing productions that evolve and transform like nothing you’ve heard before.
When most producers think of panning, they think of a simple two-way knob, with controls for left and right. This is because when you’re working in two dimensions, you only need two-dimensional controls. However - when you’re working with 3D sound, surround sound and Spatial Audio, you’ll need a whole new approach to achieve the results you’re looking for.
That’s where Sound Particles’ Space Controller comes in. This phenomenal plugin allows you to use your mobile device to control the panning within your DAW. Simply point it around the room like a laser pointer, and discover a fun, intuitive and precise method for panning that makes 2D knobs feel like something out of the 18th century. This helps those that are new to Spatial Audio mix in a way that’s easy to master and simple to understand.
Finally, Density makes it easier than ever before to transform individual sounds into highly complex, organically evolving compositions. Through the wonders of granular synthesis, particle systems and 3D panning, Density multiplies a signal into several layers and manipulates these through detuning, repitching and panning to generate epic, immersive structures of sound that have to be heard to be believed.