Impact Soundworks has become a well known factor in sample content industry. One of their latest releases is ReForged – an ultra-expressive and deep collection of cinematic metallic sound design for impacts, textures, atmospheres, loops, beds, tonal elements, and beyond, for Native Instruments Kontakt. So let’s have a look on the usability and sound.

Download and Installation

Download and installation are pretty straight forward. Download the files you receive after having purchased, unpack them, and place them on any disk you want. Be aware that ReForged,  like many sample libraries, requiers a full Kontakt 5.x version and will not run with Kontakt Player.

Key Features

Usability & Sound

ReForged – GUI – Designed Sounds

ReForged has a slick and intuitive User Interface, and is divided into three main sections. At the top you’ll find the settings for Volume, Tuning, Sample Offset, a Volume Envelope, and finally, a 32 step sequencer to create common gater effects. The sequencer is for the gate effect only, not for tonal sequencing.

The middle section covers all kind of effects like Filter (Lopass, Hipass, Bandpass), Saturation, 3-Band EQ, Compressor, 2 different kind of distortion, Amplifier, Lo-Fi, Delay and a Convolution Reverb with custom IRs provided by Impact Soundworks. Clicking the effect name activates it. The effect settings become available at the bottom section of the User Interface by clicking edit. All settings can be saved as presets. There is also a number of pre-made presets by Impact Soundworks that you can load into the User Interface to get some inspiration.

It would have been nice to have the effects and gate sequencer mapped on separate keyboard keys, in order to trigger them in real time (like other developers have done). This would increase the sonic possibilities even further, especially if you’d like to apply an effect only at a certain point in the sample. Maybe in an upcoming update?

ReForged- The Content

ReForged comes with a huge amount of well designed patches and great sounds. The sample quality is absolutely high end, presented in 24bit/44.1k. There is no extraneous noise, hum, or any other disturbing artefact in the samples. The amount of samples per patch differs, but as far as I have seen, you get somewhere between 10 and 50 mapped samples in each patch. A great additional option is that the samples are available in open WAV format too! So if you prefer to use the samples directly in your DAW, rather than through Kontakt, nothing stands in your way.

The patch categories are Impacts, Noise, Rhythms, Synths, Textures, Tonal, and Transitions. There are also some extra unprocessed natural patches that sound lovely, but the main focus here is on the designed sounds. Besides the naming, you can visually distinguish between natural and designed patches by their respective orange and blue interfaces. I didn’t spot any difference between the tweaking possiblities of the two interface types.

ReForged – GUI – Natural Sounds

The only thing with the patches I don’t like is that the volume output differs from patch to patch. For some patches, the volume is much too loud, and for others, it is near silent. I wish the patches would have been a little more balanced out of the box for a more homogeneous volume output.

Conclusion

ReForged is a must-have if you are in need of a hybrid scroring tool for modern trailers. For the price, you get a well designed and easy to use library, well worth every penny, and a no-brainer. The drawbacks I mentioned (like no effects on keys, volume balance between patches) aren’t enough to detract from the great merits this library provides.