Introduction
A love letter to 150 years of Impressionist art, Spitfire Audio’s Impressionism offers a brightly hued palette of instrumental sounds to inspire your next masterpiece. Designed to be your track-one go to, Impressionism enlivens the blank canvas under impasto daubs of brass; pastel washes of strings and woodwinds, shimmering touches of harps and vibraphones; and fine-tipped trills, clouds, and atonal clusters — all layered in with the turn of a mod wheel.
Comprising uniquely expressive performances from some of the UK’s leading instrumentalists, Impressionism’s sounds overflow with vibrant shades of emotion. Unorthodox combinations of instruments swirl together, with each note evolving across three distinct phases to create fluid, delicate brushstrokes of sound.
Impressionism is less a means for applying fine detail and finishing touches to your music than a powerful toolkit for quickly and directly capturing the emotions that inspire it. It is a totally unique toolkit for creating beautiful musical shapes, textures and gestures.
Impression is available from Spitfire Audio for PC and Mac as a plugin in AU, AAX, VST2 and VST3 formats (64 bit versions) typically priced at £199. Note that download and installation is via the Spitfire Audio app.
Overview
Impressionism was recorded at Air Studio One and comprises of a diverse range of rich, closely recorded instrumental sounds with different articulations. Each sound is divided into three separate parts – an attack portion, swell portion and sustain portion. Each of these are individually controllable and you can also change the time separation between them so you can have them all at the same time, turn some off or evolve over time. The mod wheel also gives a diverge control which introduces things like trill, shimmer or subtle dissonance. The velocity also controls the interval that is played which will always be in key.
The presets have been carefully crafted with a range of combination of sounds and articulations to give a huge palette of sounds. It’s a superb library of sounds with lots of scope to adjust sounds as well as providing instant inspiration and playability.
In Use
Impressionism’s interface is clean and thoughtfully laid out.
The top menu has a handy indicator to show whether the instrument has loaded properly, along with cpu, disk, and memory usage indicators. You can also see how many voices you are using. You can also set the midi channel, adjust tuning (increments of 0.01 of a semi-tone), pan and volume. There are also a number of settings including velocity, velocity curve, short releases as well as plugin settings such as size, default scale and default tuning,
The middle part of the display has the main controls. The first slider is dynamics, the second is diverge which dials in an additional sound, widening and intensifying the sonic palette. The knob is configurable to control separation, reverb or release.
To the right you have scale mode where you can choose between played and set modes. Played mode detects what scale you are playing and sets the scale accordingly. There are various settings for note memory, threshold and memory time allowing you to fine tune how often scales / chord change for example. There are also different play modes.
Set on the other hand allows you to define a key and scale, whether you want to trigger notes outside the selected scale and play mode.
At the bottom of the screen there are three selectable options that change the display accordingly. Technique selector allows you to choose between different techniques, You can lock the technique or switch it using a specified note, cc range, velocity range, midi channel or speed of playing. There are also 2 switching modes, normal and latch which changes the articulation until the keyswitch is released when it returns to the original articulation.You can also set the number of round robins and reset these using transport or a keyswitch. The transpose control here transposes the incoming midi notes and there’s also a techniques editor where you can remove and reorder techniques for each preset.
The signal mixer and fx allows you to turn signals on/off, solo/mute and adjust levels. You can adjust the separation, release and reverb settings as well as change the Impulse Response and switch between slow or fast swell. A cool feature here is that you can save and load your own mixer presets.
The granulator has a number of controls including delay, duration, frequency, tuning, tuning quantise, low/high filter and mix. There are also spread controls which apply randomisation to their respective parameters.
Conclusions
Impressionism is an excellent library, it is fairly unsual in that it is hugely customisable yet instantly playable too. The instruments and articulations are brilliantly crafted and the layering and evolution can create intricate, rich evolving orchestral sounds that are very difficult to produce otherwise. I really like the how it has been created to be responsive to your playing, it’s a very dynamic instrument.
The album embedded at the top of this post was created using multiple instances of Impressionism, I revisited the previous Naviarhaiku489 weekly challenge for inspiration.
‘mountain’s red leaves’ is a new track created with Scaler 3. I’ve used 5 instances of Impressionism processed with Pro-R 2, Timeless, TVerb, SP2016 Reverb, Silo, UADx 1176 Fet Compressor. The track was finalised with Saturn 2, Pro-Q 4, Pro-L 2.
‘the setting sun returns’ uses midi from the original ‘The Setting Sun (Naviarhaiku489)’ with a new arrangement and instrumentation. I’ve used 8 instances of Impressionism processed with Airspace, SP2016 Reverb, TVerb, Silo, Instant Delay, Sandman Pro, Ultrachannel. Finalised with Stage, Saturn 2, Pro-Q 4 and Pro-L 2.
