This is maintained in the Plucked Strings folder, where three different types of Lyre and a Lute give you all of that Nordic tavern vibe you didn’t think you wanted but, after hearing it, will become an essential inclusion on your next deep-house tune.įinally, in the Instruments section, the Winds folder offers some of the best flutes, horns and pipes ever to grace a piece of software and, although I don’t recall too many Vikings playing didgeridoo in my history lessons, they probably would have done, had they sounded this good.īack to the three main folders and we enter Sound Design, and this is where Eduardo lets his hair down. These are where the collection really starts hotting up. In the Strings section, the Bowed Strings are a definite plus, especially where the aforementioned brown, blue and now orange keys offer variations and phrases. Others, such as Tympanum Romano Tuned, have brown keys with variations or different lengths of the same tuned note – meticulous stuff and typical of Tarilonte’s attention to detail.
Some sounds might be a little short and to-the-point for you, but the better ones, such as the Skin Snares and Square Frame Drums, have phrases on green keys to get you inspired. All are beautifully recorded and there are extra controls on screen to adjust Envelope, Reverb, Pitch and other parameters. The presets can be as simple as half-a-dozen samples across notes, or different variations spread over different key ranges. Starting with Percussion, you get everything from Anvil to Viking Mouth Harp – three words I never thought I’d type together. Instruments is broken down into Percussion, Strings and Wind. You get three main sections in Dark Era’s library: Instruments, Sound Design and Voices. The Best Service Engine works standalone or within your DAW like a plug-in instrument and I tested both without any issues. Yes, it is a bit of a faff, but not as bad as some installations.
From this, you get a response code which you paste in to activate Dark Era and you’re sorted. You then need to load Dark Era into the Best Service engine (easy), load an instrument to trigger the E-Licence software which generates a product code for you to input at your Best Service login area. rar files will probably involve downloading a special unpacker (for Mac, I used the freeware Keka tool) which unloads the data to a single Dark Era folder, a shade over 15GB in size (then you delete the original.
rar files (mostly 2GB each), plus the latest version of the Best Service player (free), which is like Kontakt, a shell in which you load the data files to make up the Dark Era instruments. It’s not surprising, then, that Tarilonte is most excited about this collection, as it crosses both of his real and imaginary worlds. Clever stuff, eh?ĭark Era takes us back to, not surprisingly, the dark ages, where the worlds of history and fantasy overlap – we’re talking Norse mythology, Vikings, pagan music and “forgotten cultures and tribes celebrating and singing their myths”. I noted that it was perfect to “transport you and your music to everywhere from the plains of Mordor to the lower, third-class decks of the Titanic”. The last Tarilonte collection I reviewed was Celtic Era, a large library focused on ancient instruments including keyed, percussion, soundscapes, strings and winds.
At most, he’s producing the ingredients for sonic worlds no one else can touch and tools to inspire your music-making into areas you probably won’t even have dreamed of. At the very least, he’s producing a digital catalogue of every real and fantasy instrument ever created (or not created, as it were). Indeed, they can completely transform whatever you are working on… You need something different to lift a tune? Tarilonte has recorded it for posterity. Like me, you may have thought these historical and fantastical libraries have no place in your music, but Tarilonte’s genius is that, while they are aimed at very specific moments in time (or fiction), each beautiful instrument recording or incredibly rich atmosphere can find a home in whatever genre of music you’re working in.