By Robin Shore

Krotos has got to be one of the most.innovative developers of sound design tools in the industry right now. That is a strong statement, but I stand by it. This Scottish company has become well known over the past few years for its Dehumaniser line of products, which bring a fresh approach to the creation of creature vocals and monster sounds. Recently, they released a new DAW plugin, Reformer Pro, which aims to give sound editors creative new ways of accessing and manipulating their sound effects.

Reformer Pro brings a procedural approach to working with sound effects libraries. According to their manual, “Reformer Pro uses an input to control and select segments of prerecorded audio automatically, and recompiles them in realtime, based on the characteristics of the incoming signal.” In layman’s terms this means you can “perform” sound effects from a library in realtime, using only a microphone and your voice.

It’s dead simple to use. A menu inside the plugin lets you choose from a list of libraries that have been pre-analyzed for use with Reformer Pro. Once you’ve loaded up the library you want, all that’s left to do is provide some sort of sonic input and let the magic happen. Whatever sound you put in will be instantly “reformed” into a new sound effect of your choosing. A number of libraries come bundled in when you buy Reformer Pro and additional libraries can be purchased from the Krotos website. The choice to include the Black Leopard library as a default when you first open the plugin was a very good one. There is just something so gratifying about breathing and grunting into a microphone and hearing a deep menacing growl come out the speakers instead of your own voice. It made me an immediate fan.

There are a few knobs and switches that let you tweak the response characteristics of Reformer Pro’s output, but for the most part you’ll be using sound to control things, and the amount of control you can get over the dynamics and rhythm of Reformer Pro’s output is impressive. While my immediate instinct was to drive Reformer Pro by vocalizing through a mic, any sound source can work well as an input. I also got great results by rubbing and tapping my fingers directly against the grill of a microphone and by dragging the mic across the surface of my desk.

Things get even more interesting if you start feeding pre-recorded audio into Reformer Pro. Using a Foley footstep track as the input for library of cloth and leather sounds creates a realistic and perfectly synced rustle track. A howling wind used as the input for a library of creaks and rattles can add a nice layer of texture to a scenes ambience tracks. Pumping music through Reformer Pro can generate some really wacky sounds and is great way to find inspiration and test out abstract sound design ideas.

If the only libraries you could use with Reformer Pro’s were the 100 or so available on the Krotos website it would still be a fun and innovative tool, but its utility would be pretty limited. What makes Reformer Pro truly powerful is its analysis tool. This lets you create custom libraries out of sounds from your own collection. The possibilities here are literally endless. As long as sound exists it can turned into a unique new plugin. To be sure some sounds are better for this than others, but it doesn’t take long at all figure out what kind of sounds will work best and I was pleasantly surprised with how well most of the custom libraries I created turned out. This is a great way to breath new life into an old sound effects collection.

Summing Up
Reformer Pro adds a sense liveliness, creativity and most importantly fun to the often tedious task of syncing sound effects to picture. It’s also a great way to breath new life into an old sound effects collection. Anyone who spends their days working with sound effects would be doing themselves a disservice by not taking Reformer Pro for a test drive, I imagine most will be both impressed and excited by it’s novel approach to sound effects editing and design.

Robin Shore is an audio engineer at NYC’s Silver Sound Studios.