FRICTION (DIVA presets) by Sound Dust Review

Sound Dust produce 170 presets that are used with U-He’s astonishing analog software synth DIVA. FRICTION is a fancy, cool vide driven and sometimes strange sounding preset collection. As you may know Sound Dust this presets collection is very different, as always.

Sound Dust is the brainchild of Pendle Poucher, a Brighton UK based composer, sound designer and lover of funny noises.

Pendle has written, produced and performed soundtracks for every major UK TV station and much more all over the world. Pendle worked for 10 years as sound designer and composer for award-winning theatre company DreamThinkSpeak devising amongst others a 32 channel soundtrack for their radical reworking of Hamlet “The Rest is Silence” in 2012.

Installation

You buy the presets and install it; there are instructions included where you put the DIVA presets and the NKS version. Follow the instructions in the included PDF to use the DIVA presets.

Sound

Sound Dust talks about the origin of FRICTION: “The starting point for FRICTION was early homemade ‘industrial’ synth pioneers such as Suicide, Vice Versa, Cabaret Voltaire, Fad Gadget – not forgetting the awesome and groundbreaking Throbbing Gristle. “

You get 170 presets in 15 categories:

• ARP – melodic arpeggiated patches
• CHAOS – boisterous and complex
• DMX – arp driven drum machinery
• DUST – classic Sound Dust organic
• FX – textural earworms
• KEYS – keyboards…obvs
• LEAD – legato style solo instruments
• LOW – bottom feeding basses
• NOISE – bpm synced atonal beat shadows
• ORG – organic organish
• PAD – thick, wide and often filthy
• PERC – hits, thuds, and snaps
• SLOW – take your time with these
• THROB – low rhythmic boomers
• WEST –  moving the East coast over to the West coast

User interface & Usability

It uses the DIVA UI, the sorting of the patches is beneficial.

Rating:  Four out of five stars

Sound Dust’s FRICTION is a collection of isolated and usable patches, listen to the playlist and get the demo to see if it fits your needs. You can get a demo here of these excellent patches here. Buy it if you are a Diva performer.