In This Issue
Rastsound Cincescapes Pro – the Synth and Software Review
Is it a “smart music assistant?”
Devices that take away some of the hard work of composing music are not exactly a new idea. Sampled loops, drum machines, and arpeggiators have been with us for 40 years. Today, sophisticated software tools take the trend quite a lot further.
We can leave the philosophical implications of this for another day. Personally, I prefer to compose my own music note by note, but will I use a loop from Spectrasonics Stylus RMX to fill in a hand percussion texture? Sure. I do it all the time.
For better or worse, Cinescapes Pro from RastSound may be an indication of where the trend is headed. If your goal is to put together dreamy floating ambient music, this VST plugin will get you in the ballpark quickly and efficiently. It has some shortcomings, but it does what it sets out to do, and the minimal number of user-controllable features will help novices avoid getting lost in the weeds.
Overview. Cinescapes Pro (which we’ll just call Cinescapes from here on out) generates four layers of sound: a pad, a bass drone, background noise, and atmosphere. What they’re calling atmosphere is really just another layer of noise. The sounds are sampled, but they’re not just basic loops; subtle animations are built into the samples.
Each of the layers has its own menu of about 40 long looped tones. Individual layers can be switched on or off, and their volumes can be adjusted. Unless you export its self-generated MIDI tracks and turn off its Play button, Cinescape’s will play whenever your DAW’s transport is running. Bouncing the output to a new audio track is a good strategy.
Each layer has a lowpass filter cutoff knob, a delay send knob, and a couple of knobs labeled MF1 and MF2. Apparently the MF stands for Moving Filter. The global Speed and Depth knobs interact with the MF1 and MF2 knobs for each layer, creating LFO-driven filter pulsations of variable speed and depth. To be honest, I couldn’t hear any difference in the sound when comparing the full-on value of the delay knob to no delay at all, but with a pad sound this is maybe not surprising.
You can choose a root key for your creation and select a scale (major, minor, blues, and so on) or a mood (joy, calm, tense, sweet, etc.). For some reason you can’t select both a mood and a scale; selecting one switches the other off.
Knobs for Variation, Complexity, and Duration affect the chord types that will be auto-generated and how often the chord will change. In loop mode, you’ll get a repeating chord progression, and in evolving mode Cinescapes will keep coming up with variations. The Mix Type knob has four modes (neutral, silk, dark, and edgy), and there are also global mixer knobs for Drive, Bright, and Smooth.
A Shimmer knob adds a very quiet fifth layer that sounds like wind chimes coming from the house next door. Annoyingly, this happens even when the music is not playing. At first I thought it was a really bizarre malfunction, but no, it’s just the Shimmer knob.
What you won’t find in Cinescapes are the features one naturally expects in a synthesizer. Filter resonance and filter modes? Nope. Control over the delay time? Nope. Attack and release envelope knobs? Nope. Transposition of individual layers? Sorry.
Extensibility. The good news is, if you toss some of your own .wav sound files into the library folders, Cinescapes will happily load and play them. This feature is not mentioned in the bare-bones PDF manual, but I was curious enough to try it, and it works. Sounds in the Bass and Pad folders are multisamples, but this is not a problem. Just use the naming conventions you’ll see in the factory sample folders, and you can freely add any content that you happen to have.
In Windows, at least (I don’t know what happens in a Mac), Cinescapes insists on installing its 4GB library in ProgramData on the C: drive. You get no option to install it elsewhere. After it’s installed, you can move it to an external drive, but the manual does not say how to do this. When I tried moving the whole Cinescapes folder, the plug-in wouldn’t load. The folks at RastSound explained to me that you can move the samples, but you mustn’t move the folder with the reverb’s impulse responses. Oh, okay.
There’s a command for exporting the MIDI files that Cinescapes is using internally. After exporting, you can drag them into a MIDI track in your DAW. The files will contain really long notes, so they’re not very interesting, but you can drag notes up or down in the MIDI editor to produce chords Cinescapes doesn’t know about.
The Final Cut. Does Cinescapes Pro do anything you couldn’t do yourself by layering sustained tones from two or three decent synthesizers? No, and if you do it yourself you’ll have a lot more control over the sound and the shape of the composition. What it does do, and quite effectively, is give you quick access to broad washes of sound in a variety of colors and moods. Add your own flute solo, maybe some sparse plucked arpeggios, and possibly some hand percussion with a cathedral reverb, and you’ll have a dreamy track ready to go in an hour or two, in plenty of time for tomorrow’s yoga meditation retreat.
After listening to a few of the self-playing presets for minutes on end, however, I find the chord progressions Cinescapes generates rather numbingly dull. The prospect of adding a melody over a boring chord pattern doesn’t entice me. Also, the noise and atmosphere layers are sonic clutter. They’re like insects chewing through the wallpaper. If you know how to write a I-VI-III-IV progression with open chord voicings, you won’t find a teaspoonful of real musical creativity anywhere in Cinescapes, and it’s not at all clear how one would use its minimal parameters in a way that would inject creativity.
Still, there’s a lot of audio content. If you know nothing about music theory and nothing about sound design, Cinescapes may be exactly what you’re looking for.
Price: €99 (current – list price is ostensibly €149)