Zero-G has released, Surface Tension, a sound design tool that is designed to allow the quick and easy creation of rich, organic, complex and unusual sounds based on samples derived from various forms of used and abused electric guitars.
The Kontakt instrument combines samples and impulse responses designed to give the user a flexible tool for creating a variety of beds, drones, pads and FX. It comes with over 200 presets. The user can also make their own presets from the samples provided. There are over 29,000 different combinations available.
Playing techniques used include violin bows, screwdrivers, e-bow, extreme detuning, striking, bottleneck, feedback, distortion, scraping and plucking. A range of digital processes was applied to take these sounds into a deep electronic realm whilst still retaining the complexity of raw organic recordings.
The other key part of the instrument is the bespoke impulse responses, which are used to create unique reverbs of character within Kontakt's convolution reverb engine. To maintain the depth and organic detail, these impulse responses were derived from real world sources, circuit bent FX units and vintage delay lines.
Surface Tension is made up of the following resources:
- Surface Tension Kontakt Instrument with custom GUI and over 200 presets.
- Audio loops. Available as AIFF Apple Loops or Acidized wav files.
- Impulse responses for use with any third party convolution reverb.
A user can also use the raw audio as building blocks for their own beds, drones, hits and FX whereas the impulse responses can be loaded into any number of commercially available convolution reverbs to make a large library of extreme reverbs.
Price: $55.99 until 3 January 2017. Requires Kontakt (full version 5.6.0 or later). It is not a VST plugin or standalone instrument.
More info and audio demos at: http://www.zero-g.co.uk/store/surface-tension-p559.php