As part of their Sonic Drop initiative Avid have released the latest of their Sonic Drops of new content for Pro Tools - Yesterday's Relic

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 Yesterday's Relic

This month’s Sonic Drop is Yesterday’s Relic—a collection of 15 warbly and somewhat lofi instruments for the Pro Tools | PlayCell virtual instrument. Created by sampling numerous synths through various outboard FX and guitar pedals that specialize in a dirtier and slightly unstable sound, Yesterday’s Relic brings a new flavor to your production arsenal. The sounds within are almost naturally nostalgic, often haunting, sometimes melancholy, and is Matt’s favorite collection of PlayCell expansion instruments up to this point.

Matt has never been shy of preaching his adoration for Boards of Canada, not to mention how influential he’s found them (ed. note- look for the PlayCell preset “Fjords Of Canada” in the Palette Series). With a cult-like following that spurred countless copy cats, BoC had a sound that nobody else could truly replicate… and many certainly tried and failed. There’s a fair amount of mythology, not to mention misinformation, about how they made their signature sonic footprint, however there a few things we can be pretty certain of. Synths like the Roland SH101 are prevalent across BoC’s catalog, and the rare Yamaha CS-70M was rumored to be their secret weapon; however, Matt believes the processing they applied to these synths is often more interesting than the synths themselves. It gets murkier here as this is the area of studio black magic where only they truly know how these sounds were created, but once again there are a few consistencies:

1) Tape. There are some beautiful characteristics of analog tape that they’ve consistently used and that includes both the saturation as well as the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) pitch warble.

2) Digital Resampling. While BoC certainly resampled countless elements to tape they would also have been using samplers such as the Akai S1000 to manipulate not only their drum samples but also synths. As for how it was actually done, it’s best to leave that to our imaginations.

Give Yesterday’s Relic a try and hear for yourself.

The Sonic Drops available so far are:

• Yesterday's Relic

• Spectral Particles

• 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 Yesterday’s Relic 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.