Metallic Percussion Library

US Soundiron announces Tuned Artillery 15/02/12

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Tuned Artillery by Soundiron Soundiron tell us that Tuned Artillery is a unique tuned and untuned metallic percussion library based on dry and hall recordings of authentic spent brass field artillery shell casings from the WWI and WWII eras, plus a few odd extra elements in the same vein – an Eastern Bloc infantry combat helmet and a couple of decommissioned modern hand grenades. They say that these well-aged yet high-quality perfectly-machined brass and steel pieces all produce a stunningly rich, warm and complex musical tonality that just has to be heard. Here's the details in Soundiron's own words:
Under the cover of night we infiltrated our favorite recording hall to experiment with forgotten relics of past wars, using state-of-the-art gear to capture each piece of Army equipment with military precision. Not content with just including 3 mic positions (close, wide and far), we also recorded each shell and helmet totally dry to let you sculpt the sound you want, including a diverse pallette of dry articulations using mallet, brush, hands and hammers. Expanding further, we added deactivated hand-grenades, recorded close and dry to capture a huge variety of pin-pulls, rattles, clinks, bounces, rolls, clicks, jungles and bassy thuds to provide unique and maleable percussion elements.
Artillery shells and combat helmets actually have a long history in modern classical music in the hands of pioneers like Harry Partch throughout the mid and late 20th century. They're not at all uncommon to find in avant-garde classical and experimental music today, used both as untuned anvil-like striking instruments and pitched over a tuned key range. We took this library beyond any of that, with over 3GB of content, including 3026 samples and 112 Kontakt presets, each with a powerful and artfully designed custom user interface. We've also included a deep bonus collection of hand-crafted ambiences and tonal pads, each created by warping the original source material in strange ways to provide a perfect "organic" accompaniment to the more traditional tuned and untuned percussive material. We've also included a poweful set of automatable LFO, EQ, filter, custom convolution, reverb and arpeggiation systems to further expand on the raw creative possibilities this library offers.
Pricing and Availability:
The Tuned Artillery library is available for download right now, for $49.00 through February 20th, 2012. Once the sale ends, the price returns to $59. More information: