Straylight

Even during the Silent Era, movie projections were accompanied by music. Today, it’s difficult to imagine films without music; surely, there are a few bold directors who make such experiments, but they are certainly not considered the norm. The same can be said about TV series and video games. If your goal is to create music for any such audiovisual medium, then you have a lot of learning to do, but you also need to find the right tools for creating cinematic ambient music.

Today we’re going to take a look at Straylight, a soft synth that can help you produce some truly eerie soundtracks.

Native Instruments is a respected brand that excels at almost everything it does; from top DJ software and controllers to quality synths, plugins and studio equipment, anything that wears the NI logo is sure to help you delve deeper into your passion for music production. Now among these products, you may find some very specific instruments that aren’t really targeted for electronic dance music producers and DJs. Straylight is one such instrument.

The synth was designed with the specific idea of creating eerie ambient music that would be fit for thrillers, horrors, post-apocalyptic sci-fi films, weird arthouse dramas, well, you get the picture. It achieves this by using granular synthesis, a method that is based on the same principle as sampling, but functions by splitting audio signals into “grains” (minuscule pieces of sound that aren’t longer than 50 milliseconds) and rearranging them into all kinds of soundscapes.

Straylight’s UI certainly has one of the most elegant soft synth designs I’ve ever encountered. Everything is dominated by a soothing yet threatening orange pallet, reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic sunset. Meanwhile, the sounds that you produce range from creepy to downright disturbing; although the modulation options may appear limited at first, most parameters have a noticeable effect on the sounds.

In the beginning, you’ll have a lot of presets to explore, and you can also use randomize buttons for your grains and samples in order to test the instrument’s capabilities. If you’re a fan of atmospheric soundtracks, then you should definitely give Straylight a try.