Tuned Artillery

A Tuned Brass Shell Percussion Library for Kontakt

Tuned Artillery is a unique tuned & untuned metallic percussion library based on dry and hall recordings of 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.

Artillery shells and military 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. In both cases, the high-quality precision cast and machined brass shell casings produce deeply resonant and harmonically rich qualities when struck on the sides, edges and base with mallets, hammers, sticks, brushes or bare hands.

Under the cover of night, Soundiron infiltrated their favourite recording hall to experiment with some army party favours: a collection of spent artillery shells and headwear. Soundiron used their state-of-the-art gear to capture multiple velocity layers in multiple articulations for each piece of Army equipment. Unsatisfied with just 3 mic positions (close, wide, and far), they then went back and recorded each shell and helmet dry in a booth to really give you the ability to sculpt the sound you want.

For Tuned Artillery 2.0, Soundiron remastered the samples and added them into their efficient four-layer modular template, then created brand new ambient pads and soundscapes from the raw source content. They also designed 20 new custom FX presets to give you instant inspiration for your next film/video game score, soundtrack or music composition.

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. Soundiron has 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. The customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. Soundiron have included a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance.

Features

• Three master NKI instrument banks in open Kontakt format
• Helmet and Grenade pings, dings, brushes, scrapes, bounces, clunks, shakes, SFX in 4 mic positions
• 64 Ambience patches created from the source content
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 3,060 stereo samples
• 3.37 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

• 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.

Important Notes: 

• The full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or above is required to run this software.
• This software will not function in full within the FREE Kontakt Player engine and will only be available in DEMO mode.