Vir2 Q Cinematic Sound Design Library review

What’s good fam!

Back at you with another Big Fish Friday, today we checking out one of the newest products from Vir2

This one is called Q and it’s all about that Cinematic, film, game, sound design type of stuff.

But we’ll see what’s up with it right now!

So what is Q?

The concept behind Q is to provide a toolkit that covers the needs of film composers, video game producers, trailer and movie producers, etc.

But of course as you know, I feel these types of sounds are useful in many different contexts.

It comes as a Kontakt powered instrument, so this means you don’t need the full version of Kontakt to use it, it works with the free Kontakt player.

They have close to 2000 patches and 16gb of content…

so the idea to the library is combining easy library navigation by breaking down the content into meaningful folders.

As well as a straight forward interface that makes the library easy to use and tweak.

Quick Specs

• content: 16gb, nearly 2000 patches
• format: kontakt and kontakt player
• price: $299.95

How does it sound?

Man this thing is so deep and diverse it’s hard to summarize it.

The very first folder, Ambient Pad Chords, is probably one of my favorite folders in this collection and could stand on its own as a product.

In addition to the quirk fx and synths, evolving beds and multi layered drones, they also have some unique “Granular” Orchestra sounds, which I really enjoy.

Of course in with all the weird and other-worldly sounds you also go many drums, hits, and impacts.

There are a ton of phrases from vocals to ethnic instruments and even some full ethnic styled loops.

The recordings sound clean and crisp as usual and many of them have a unique character do to editing and fx usage.

Speaking of fx, the interface allows you to apply every effect directly from the front panel with one click, and it only takes another single click to bring each effect into focus for deeper editing.

There’s a few traditional sounds in here like horns, flutes, and guitars, as well as the inclusion of some diverse ethnic instruments.

Some of the vocal stuff is actually pretty useful as well, nice ambient sounding vox patches, some mixed with granular horns and strings.

So what’s the bottom line?

I was very interested in hearing this one, as it just seemed there was so much there to be discovered.

That said, I definitely had my favorite parts of the library as well as some I felt missed the mark.

For me, the stand outs are the ambient chords, granular orchestra, the multi layered patches, as well as some of the effected guitars and the collection of phrases.

However I felt some of the “regular” instruments were lacking a bit, specifically many of the ethnic instruments just didn’t seem to have that realism and articulation that you can get from a dedicated library, which makes them useful for quick runs or riffs .  If you’re like me and you have these types of  ethnic libraries already, you will most likely be choosing those over the ethnic instruments here.

However some of the phrases are really cool, and I did enjoy a bunch of the flutes!

I got a similar feeling when playing some of the drums and percussion, and felt many didn’t match the depth and impact found in Vir2’s World Impact percussion library or many of the other cinematic/film based percussion libraries, though many of the metallic and other “weird” hits were awesome.

Again, that’s comparing it to a dedicated percussion library, which should be more detailed and expressive than a more “all around” sound design tool kit such as this one.

That said, these areas really only make up a small part of this HUGE library so it’s all good, overall I’m very pleased with it for the stuff it does that my other libraries don’t do.

I give this library 4 out of 5 subs, the interface is very clean and useful, the library is fast loading, and it’s just so dang deeeeeeeeeeeeeep you’re sure to find many gems.

I’m still exploring it and love the fact that many of the single stings, swooshes, and other hits are available as standalone wave files too.

I wish they would have included some multi patches that put together a bunch of the elements in this library for quick creation, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing this yourself.

For me the standouts are the more experimental, ambient, effected sounds as opposed to the traditional instruments and such, your taste may be totally different from mine!

Either way, definitely checkout the demos and listen to what can be done with this library: Vir2 Q at Big Fish Audio