Review: UVI Meteor

Dramatic rises, swells, hits and falls can all be found inside UVI's latest multi-instrument, Meteor. Matt Vanacoro road tests it and likes what he finds...  

Meteor from UVI is a collection of sampled instruments, synths and found sounds engineered to work together for the creation of dramatic rises, swells, hits and falls. Every sound in Meteor is entwined in an elaborate dance with a collection of other sounds to create patches that are complex, useful, musical and cinematic. It’s not a recreation of a vintage synth, and it’s not a single sampled instrument. It is, however, an incredibly useful tool for sound designers, producers and film composers.

The Lowdown

There are 2 components that make up a sound in Meteor, the rise and the impact. The rise can have 3 separate sounds to combine, and the impact can have 4. The sounds of each individual part (the rise or the impact) can be customized, mixed, effected, modulated and even changed to create the perfect balance of drama before the ‘explosion’ and the explosion of sound itself. The main performance page allows you to quickly disable the rise or impact, adjust the overall volume of the patch, adjust the ‘thrust’ sound that ‘sucks you in’ to the impact and adjust how long the rise should last (in beats or in seconds). 

To further tweak things, you can offset the moment of impact and adjust how the rise fades into, or doesn’t fade into, the impact. It’s all quickly accessible and the user interface is simple enough to figure out without breaking out the manual. The presets are loving crafted and categorized, as per usual for UVI, and I had a lot of fun simply surfing through what is already there.

Fire Thrusters

If you want to edit the individual aspects of either the rise or the impact, you can open up the ‘settings’ menu and get to the editor. This brings up my absolute favorite thing conceptually about Meteor. Meteor is absolutely a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ type of instrument. If you never want to get down into the nitty gritty of a sound’s design, you can keep things on the front page and simply surf the presets and utilize the macro controls to make big adjustments. If you want to see every single aspect of a patch, you can mess with things down to the sample level in the edit page.

Here’s a quick sample of a cool rise I found called ‘Here it Comes’

I was pleased to hear that the audio fidelity of the sound didn’t suffer when I asked Meteor to lengthen the rise to 4 beats.

Finally, there is ample room for combining and utilizing other pitches for any of the rises. They mix well together should you want to keep things tonal.

You don’t even have to have a long rise each time. UVI has helpfully designed quite a few patches where the impact comes first, then it’s followed by a long falloff.

I was also pleased to hear that not everything was so ‘synth based’ in Meteor. There was plenty of inspiration to be found in the acoustic/orchestral patches.

Conclusion

Meteor from UVI is a really unique tool. I like that you can trigger it by hitting the note OR holding the note, the size of the library isn’t burdensome (11+gb), the interface is extremely well designed and highly functional, and the instrument itself is easy to use without a steep learning curve. If you’re in the market for drama at the touch of a MIDI note, Meteor is your answer.

Price: 149 EUR / Currently on offer for 99 EUR

Pros: Fantastic sounds, presets are well designed and organized, easy to use interface, reasonable sample library size, deep customization options, low CPU/Memory impact.

Cons: I’d love to see the names of the layers individually on the front page somehow, maybe with a mouse hover or something.

Web: www.uvi.net

Matt Vanacoro is one of New York's premier musicans. Matt has collaborated as a keyboardist in studio and on stage with artists such as Jordan Rudess (Dream Theater), Mark Wood (Trans-Siberian Orchestra), Mark Rivera (Billy Joel Band), Aaron Carter, Amy Regan, Jay Azzolina, Marcus Ratzenboeck (Tantric), KeKe Palmer, C-Note, Jordan Knig... Read More

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