As part of their Sonic Drop initiative Avid have released the latest of their Sonic Drops of new content for Pro Tools - Analog Snarl - Sub Growl.

Pro Tools Sonic Drop was announced as part of the Pro Tools 2023.3 release. At that time there were six ‘Drops’ of content. Pro Tools Sonic Drops are available to Pro Tools subscribers or perpetual licence holders with active update plans. This initiative was always presented as a rolling programme with monthly updates so the value grows over time.

What Is Analog Snarl - Sub Growl?

Analog Snarl is a new series based around the theme of sampling classic analog synths and then twisting them within the PlayCell engine to have the ability to aggressively snarl as if you took its beautiful bloody steak away. The first of the series, Sub Growl, is sampled from a highly renowned monophonic synth widely recognised for its iconic bass sound. While all the raw waveforms are present, as are detuned oscillators, there are some highly processed sounds in Sub Growl that would never be possible in the synth’s original form, not to mention polyphony! Which brings us to another development…

PlayCell Updated With Legato Mode

Avid also just updated PlayCell to include monophonic and legato voicing modes, glide, as well as a big update to the internal scales. Monophonic and Legato voicings are hugely useful and important, especially when working with any sort of bass of lead sound. On bass, monophonic will negate any form of note overlap which is often necessary for a clean low end, and the variation of Legato allows for smooth transitions. With glide enabled in Monophonic all notes will glide between each other at the user set rate. Legato makes it a little more interesting where glide will only occur between notes when the note input overlaps. This allows you to be quite expressive as you can control when you want notes to glide and when you want them to start perfectly on pitch.

The other benefit of Legato is that the notes aren’t retriggered if they overlap, so if your bass sample is nice and long, you’ll hear a resampled pitch shift, and the evolution of the sample continues allowing for complex textures. In Monophonic mode, notes and envelopes are retriggered with any new note input which allows for a much more uniform output. Avid have also updated the existing Palette Series to include the new voicing modes.

PlayCell Scales Updated

The Scales have been updated as well to include all traditional modes (Dorian, Lydian, etc…) as well as scales such as Melodic Minor, Harmonic Minor, Diminished, and Wholetone.

Keep your eyes peeled for more additions to the Analog Snarl series in the future. Remember to update PlayCell and the Palette Series via Avid Link or your Avid Account and then get your Sub Growl instrument from the Sonic Drop tab in Avid Link.

The Sonic Drops available so far are:

• Analog Snarl - Sub Growl

• Loopcloud Selects Vol 1

• SynthCell Industries

• Tea Time Breaks

• Brutal Vegetables

• PurrCell

• Cinematic Selects

• Pummeled Piano

• Noise Engineering Modular Motifs

• Mike Avanaim Burnin’ Breaks

• Elektron Syntakt Beats

• Eventide H90 Drums

• Kitchen Kit

• Pumpkins

• Rob’s Basement Beats

• Ultra 808s

• Isorhythm

To find out more about how to get SynthCell Industries check out the video above and to hear more about Sonic Drop listen to our podcast with Matt and Greg from Avid below. Sonic Drop is available to all Pro Tools users with active subscriptions or Update plans, Access Sonic Drop through Avid Link.