Soundiron is known for their willingness to take sampling ever farther, to go to any lengths and explore every inch of the sonic world. Their never-ending quest is sampling literally every measurable sound in the universe that has musical potential. Perhaps they’re compensating for a long-hidden fear that they won’t measure up, or maybe it’s just that they’re willing to go miles beyond the rest to set a new metric for excellence. Time and time again, they’ve set new benchmarks in sampling and elevated the art to a whole new scale. They’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 they find that their catalog has fallen short, rather than inch along, they put their foot down and fill in those gaps, because they’ll never sell you short.
Long story short, they’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 they’re strange, they headed into the garage and grabbed their two best-sounding rulers and a couple of self-winding tape measures and then set out to capture one library to rule them all ! They took no shortcuts ! As the meters danced, they sampled every inch with millimeter precision, using finely calibrated microphones and pristine preamps to capture even the most minute details. They recorded 30 notes with their 6-inch ruler (15.24cm) and 38 notes on their 12-inch ruler (30.48cm), plus percussive taps, rattles and drops. They also recorded a wide variety of sound effects and percussive articulations with their 25-foot (3m) and 10-foot (7.62m) tape-measures for a more modern take on the concept. They also tried to record a laser range-finder, but it turns out microphones aren’t quite sensitive enough just yet.
Because they always bring you miles of value, they’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 !
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 swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more. They’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 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. Their customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. They’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 their 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 their 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 !
The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 5.5 (or later) is required to use .nki instrument presets included in this library. The free Kontakt “Player” and “Add Library” import process do not support this standard open-format Kontakt library. Windows 7 or higher. Mac OSX 10.9 or higher. Dual Core CPU, 2 GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library. This software is delivered as a digital download, so a broadband connection is required.
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
