The Sound Of A Glass Beach

US Soundiron release a new sample set 25/10/11

Buying Choices

Affilliate Links help support the site

Soundiron have released the Glass Beach sample set. Here's all the details in their own words...
About 150 Miles North of the San Francisco Bay Area, is Fort Bragg, an old coastal village at the foot of the redwoods. For decades, townspeople brought their household and industrial trash to the sea, dumping into towering piles rising 30 feet high above the surf, before 'The Dumps' were finally shut down in 1967. Glass Beach is all that remains of the town's former garbage dump.
After years of clean-up, all of the large junk was removed, save for the many tons of broken glass shards that were far too small and plentiful to gather up and haul away. Over the years, the crashing waves and abrasive sand have pounded and worn those millions of tiny glass fragments down into perfectly smooth translucent glass pebbles and beads. Like glittering jewels, they can be found in every color of the rainbow. They number so great that the beach seems made entirely of sea glass. Once an ecological disaster, it has become a remarkable example of nature's resilience when we clean up our mess and try to leave things alone for a little while.
From a sonic perspective, the millions of glass beads shifting and tumbling in the gentle surf create a remarkable effect. The sound is not unlike that of ice chips on the shore of a thawing lake, but on a grander scale. The distant mournful wails of fog horns and sea birds casts an eerily serene hue over the sound-scape and the cliffs suppress most the encroaching highway and city noise.
We captured several ocean surf and tide pool ambiances, as well as gentle waterfalls trickling through the narrow caves and gullies than ran down toward the beach from the cliffs above. There's also useful foley included, with footsteps that can be used as percussion or cut and re-purposed for steps in sand, gravel and even gritty snow in a pinch. We also created a wide variety of tiny "glitch"-style percussive elements, using some of the sea glass that migrated to other nearby beaches. Lastly, we used various sound-design tricks to morph and transform the sounds from our journey into a wide range of tonal and dissonant pads, swells, stingers, synth-tones, ambient dreamscapes and disturbing hellscapes.
Glass Beach specs: