Turbine by BOOMLibrary Review

BOOM Library has just released its first sound design plugin. Professional sound designers know BOOM Library for the effects libraries that have been used in Movies, Shorts, Trailers, Games, and TV-Shows.

With Turbine BOOM Library stepped away from the comfort zone and developed a unique plugin that can be used to make engine, car, robotic and Sci-Fi sounds.


You purchase, download the product and activate the License in iLok. Everything is straightforward. TURBINE requires one of the most generally used DAW(for example Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic Pro, Nuendo,  Pro Tools, Reaper and Studio One) that supports VST 2.4, AU or AAX plug-ins.

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Turbine is all about recreating the sound of specific engines by using real values of the actual real-world object. In its first release, it does focus on airplanes, motors, and rockets. Those sounds can be further changed to some extent to create the sound of a robot or a futurist car or sound or sound element you need for your movie.

When you launch Turbine you start with a preset; every preset is representing a completely different engine/turbine. I did reach out to Axel Rohrbach to get further clarification on what is behind the presets and how to best use them as a starting point.

The presets are not simply some parameters that have been altered, the presets are really different engines. Every engine has something like 100.000 parameters to create what you hear in the end. These engines are a basis to alter them within the GUI you can see. We tried to offer them in a way that a) lets you get nice results quickly but b) also be creative in altering the sound. said Axel Rohrbach, Founder of BOOM Library.Probably the most import way to drastically change the sound in the ENGINE tab is to change the max RPMs of the up to three turbine stages. If you go to extremes, they do not sound like a turbine anymore at all. For the SIMULATION it can be a lot of fun to load the simulations of another preset in the preset browser to give a certain preset another character during the movements.”

While I talked with Axel, I also needed to ask about BOOM Library plans to expand Turbine or offer additional features in the next release of the Turbine.

“We just released the plug-in a few days back. We are eager to discover what people do with it and how plus of course if any issues pop up which we didn’t discover yet. So the question is a bit early, but of course, we do have plans. Some concerning the Turbine, some concerning new products in this direction.”, Axel added with a smile: “But let’s keep this a secret.”

With Turbine, you can quickly create believable engine sounds. For example, when you want to add audio to a plane flying by you start with a fitting preset (remember each is a different engine) and then change and record the parameter in your DAW. Through the automation settings in your DAW, you can adjust the settings in the plugin. In my testing I used both automation and the mouse, with the automation in your DAW, you do produce better effects. Use the mouse to just fiddle around with the engine when you first get the plugin.

You receive more than 50 presets based on different modeled engines. With those presets, you can generate sounds used for planes, cars, home appliances, quadcopter, a lot of sci-fi devices and transportations. When sounds designing you should also layer different engines together.

Don’t stop in the plug, take the sounds out process them through an external plugin, bend the generated wave files and put them through an external sampler, the plugin is just the start of many innovative sounds.

User interface & Usability

Turbine is very powerful; BOOM Library has done an excellent job to simplify the use through the developed UI where possible. 

Rating:  Five out of five stars

Turbine is the next generation of tools to create sounds that you would have to record under extreme conditions or usually would be impossible for you to capture  (flight sound of any flying plane are impossible to obtain in the field). For every sound designer, Turbine costs are low, and it is a significant investment that should pay off in the next assignment. 

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