Soundiron The Ruler

Soundiron is known for our willingness to take sampling ever farther, to go to any lengths, and explore every inch of the sonic world. Our never-ending quest is sampling literally every measurable sound in the universe that has musical potential. Perhaps we're compensating for a long-hidden fear that we won't measure up, or maybe it's just that we're willing to go miles beyond the rest to set a new metric for excellence. Time and time again, we've set new benchmarks in sampling and elevated the art to a whole new scale. We're willing to break all the rules in our quest. Our goal is always to reach imperial quality, no matter how tall the order. When we find that our catalog has fallen short, rather than inch along, we put our foot down and fill in those gaps, because we'll never sell you short.

Long story short, we've all played with rulers and tape measures and noticed all of the satisfying sproings and wobbles they can produce. When you brace a ruler over the edge of a flat surface so that it can oscillate freely, it can produce a musical tone at a frequency in proportion to the distance it’s able to vibrate up and down. The longer the section of tine that can freely vibrate, the lower the note and the longer it can sustain. As you slide the ruler farther onto the surface and reduce the length of the freely-vibrating overhanging segment, the pitch increases, and the duration of the note shortens. Tiny adjustments can result in large jumps, so you need to go millimeter-by-millimeter to produce a wide musical scale.

Because we're strange, we headed into the garage and grabbed our two best-sounding rulers and a couple of self-winding tape measures and then set out to capture one library to rule them all! We took no shortcuts! As the meters danced, we sampled every inch with millimeter precision, using finely calibrated microphones and pristine preamps to capture even the most minute details. We recorded 30 notes with our 6-inch ruler (15.24cm) and 38 notes on our 12-inch ruler (30.48cm), plus percussive taps, rattles, and drops. We also recorded a wide variety of sound effects and percussive articulations with our 25-foot (3m) and 10-foot (7.62m) tape measures for a more modern take on the concept. We also tried to record a laser range-finder, but it turns out microphones aren't quite sensitive enough just yet. I guess the exception proves the rule: if it moves matter, it can make music.

Because we always bring you miles of value, we've included a collection of uniquely sound-designed ambient pads and tonal atmospheres created by manipulating the source recordings, along with plenty of custom FX presets to let you take the sounds even further. By any measure, The Ruler goes the distance! And now I think we’ve stretched these puns far enough!

The Ruler includes over 24 playable articulations, 20 custom FX presets, 20 sound-designed ambiences, 4825 stereo samples, and a full gigabyte of content.

Contents

The Kontakt interface includes a suite of automation-ready sound-shaping controls to give you total creative flexibility. You have control over the swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more. We've also included 20 unique sound-designed custom FX presets to give you lots of creative options.

This library comes with an adaptable LFO system, with selectable LFO shape, modulation target parameter, speed, intensity, tempo-syncing, and fade-in time. You can also apply your choice of 12 low-pass, high-pass, and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, mod wheel, expression, after-touch, key position, and step-sequencer table control. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization, and duration. We’ve included a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance.

The interface is rounded out by our modular FX rack panel, with 18 different DSP effect modules that you can assign in any of 10 available slots, in any order that you wish. You’ll find classic phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ, rotator and so much more. The Reverb effect includes our favorite convolution reverb impulse responses, including 99 different rooms, halls, chambers, and outdoor environments, plus another 40 custom FX impulses to radically transform the sound and open up whole new worlds of musical possibility. We've added a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started!

Kontakt Format

This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or later. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform. You can view screenshots of this library's custom graphical user interface in the image gallery above. This library is packed with features to provide you a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler, and synth formats. The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.

Product Specs

• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• Pings, plucks, slaps, drops, rattles, taps, and FX sampled from rulers & tape measures
• 20 Ambience patches created from the source content
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 4,825 Stereo WAV files
• 1.1 GB installed
• Flexible and intuitive multi-layer user interface controls, with LFO, filter, glide, and arpeggiator
• Full FX rack with convolution reverb with custom rooms, halls, chambers & FX environments

System Requirements

• Native Instruments Kontakt Full 5.5 or above, NOT Kontakt Player
• Windows 7 or higher
• Mac OSX 10.9 or higher
• Dual Core CPU or better
• 2GB RAM or more
• SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library
• This digital product is delivered as a download via the Amazon S3 cloud network
• A broadband internet connection is required

User Manual