Slate + Ash Ruins is a new Kontakt Player instrument with a custom engine that takes guitars into colorful, experimental soundscapes.
The guitar is a string instrument whose sound is directly associated with pop, rock, metal, or jazz music. Indeed, less so with electronic music production. This may be due to the sounds that immediately spring to mind when we think of a guitar.
Slate + Ash show us a different sonic side of the guitar with their new Kontakt instrument, Ruins.
Slate + Ash Ruins
Ruins is a new virtual instrument for the Native Instruments Kontakt sampler and Kontakt Player.
It is built from newly recorded performances of six experimental guitarists – Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, David Torn, Bill Horist, Ben Greenberg, and Arjan Miranda. They were recorded and curated by producer Randall Dunn at Circular Ruin Studios.
Slate + Ash has developed a custom engine for Ruins that is inspired by the tape-slicing technique of musique concrète. According to the developers, it treats the source material as a collection of excavated fragments.
There are two distinct versions of the engine. The single-sample engine lets you craft soundscapes from detailed sounds like string scratches or amp hum, while the multi-sample engine layers guitar phrases into rich shifting harmonics. The latter gives you multiple mappable loop points and also has an additional asynchronous looping option.
The engine allows you to create up to five loops on a layer that act as distinct sonic elements that can be rearranged into sequences.
Each fragment offers its own set of parameters, including pitch, envelopes, filtering, and playback, allowing the engine to function as a unique time-based sequencer for creating unstable, evolving patterns.
Sound Content
Not only the Kontakt engine but also the content of the library follows a special approach.
Each of RUINS’ six experimental guitarists was chosen for their ability to push the guitar outside traditional musical roles, more precisely to treat the guitar less as an instrument and more as an interface for texture, gesture, and sonic ritual.
For the sessions, they weren’t given a specific script about what to play or how to manipulate the guitars. They had free rein with the sound design and could submit fragments like loops, textures, resonances, and mechanical failures.
When selecting the collected samples from the sessions, the Slate + Ash developers focused on texture, feedback, and raw materiality. 258 phrase articulations, 96 multisample articulations, and 4636 raw wav files made into the final Ruins virtual instruments.
For immediate playing, it ships with 281 presets, including animations, evolving atmospheres, subterranean soundfields, and digital smears, to collaged rattles and tangled harmonics.
First Impression
Over the past few years, Slate + Ash has become one of the best Kontakt library developers when it comes to sounds outside of the orchestral/symphonic genre.
With Ruins, they released another beautiful and inspiring virtual instrument with a set of impressive guitarscapes. It’s worth taking a look at the linked videos. Here you’ll hear everything from shimmering, elegant sounds, multi-layer harmonic goodness to powerful, brutal drones.
Slate + Ash Ruins is available now for an introductory price of 199€ instead of 279€. It runs in Kontakt 7.10.7 + and Kontakt 7 Player.
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