EPICA Redux KONTAKT

Zero-G – EPICA Redux | 8.19 GB (2 GB Part)

Striking patches and extensive sound-sculpting capabilities
Epica Redux has been produced by Sam Spacey who also produced the highly-acclaimed Phaedra and Epica Bass virtual synths.

Epica Redux comes with a stunning interface that gives the user amazing sound-shaping capability.

Over 17,000 24bit samples have been hand-edited, looped and multi-layered to produce an unsurpassed richness and authenticity of sound that will have your audience gasping in appreciation.

We’ve made some great presets to get you started, 600 single instruments and over 100 multis in total. You will love how they instantly sound part of your song with no EQ or Compression needed, they sound for want of a better phrase “Warm, real just like a record”. Epica sounds like…well…Epica, it is unique in its tone and versatility offering sounds that you just cannot get with other synths.

Epica Redux’s samples have all been recorded through an equipment chain of 100% boutique hardware with no plug-ins used in the creation of the source sounds. Creatively offering a fresh palette of sounds that are rich in timbre and have their own character, you’re really able to set your music apart from the masses.

All samples were hand looped and with Kontakt key mapping never stretching a sample more than 1 note from its root they sound as real as the instruments they came from. In fact, all of the non looped samples are mapped to every key for 6 octaves with a large amount of them 3 to 4 x Round Robins on every key

The sound of Epica Redux is rich, full and ‘Real’, they just fit into your projects ready to go. I have always found that virtual synths need a lot of work to make them fit into mixes, to my ears they always had this plastic two-dimensional sound to them. EPICA instantly sounds like it has come off a record from the beginning as the sound sources are from real hardware instruments and 100% hardware processors. You will find yourself not reaching for the compressor, eq or other plugins as they just sound so good on their own.

Technical Info

Product Page

“The samples were processed through various top of the range equipment including Eventide H8000FW, UBK FATSO, Neve 1073 preamp, Lexicon PCM 96 and various analog guitar pedals. My particular favourite was the Eventide H8000FW which just adds a beautiful sheen to anything it touches, but a big shout has to go to the amazing UBK Fatso hardware giving all the recordings that lovely hardware thick feel to all that pass through it.
Samples were themselves sourced from various analog synths from my home buit Modular system, Arp Odyssey Mk3, Sequential Pro-1, Yamaha CS-30, Oberheim’s and Future Retro to digital synths like the Virus Ti, DX9 and Roland D-50. Real life recordings were also used.
600 presets using 17,247 recordings were made, all at 24bit 44.1khz totalling 13GB of raw sample recordings. No dead space and all obsessively hand looped by a human (me) rather than an auto looping program (no dodgy loop points here).
The samples are very long and have been obsessively sampled and looped by hand. A lot of the sounds use the actual analog filter sweeps of the synthesizers that they were sampled from and implemented using sample start points assigned to either velocity or random so as to enable the true sound of the sampled synth. That being said, Kontakt 5’s newly modelled filters are astoundingly good and give a huge palette of sonic possibilities to anything you create.
Some Multi presets have Reverb type effects from hardware units such as the Eventide H8000FW and Lexicon PCM96. Instead of recording the presets with the reverb on them I sampled the reverb separately. This enables you to dial in how much reverb and also to synthesize it as you wish, you will be amazed at how real this sounds and how much it can increase sound design.
A lot of libraries are recorded extremely hot, what do I mean by hot? There is no need with a 24 bit high end A/D converter to record right up to 0db, in fact nearly all sound cards sound better in the -12 to -6db range. The problem with recording so hot is that you can very easily overload plugins but within the context of the Kontakt 5 engine you can also overload the modules inside it, for example the Filters. Giving the recordings the correct headroom makes for a much more natural and honest to the source sound. The key to a great sound when using digital devices is to not overload any plugins with a signal that is too hot.”