Cathedral of Junk

Austin, Texas is an odd place. So odd in fact, that “Keep Austin Weird” is virtually the officially recognized slogan of the city itself. The place is packed full of artists and art, musicians and the instruments behind them. In fact, there’s a shop on 6th St, at the heart of downtown Austin, where you can buy a guitar-shaped toilet seat, complete with sunburst finish. Among the strange are many really interesting and creative people, each exploring and giving back in their own way. Sometimes a guy just wants to build a towering castle of steel, plastic, glass and all manner of other glorious scraps that modern progress and consumption has wrought in his own backyard for over 20 years. And sometimes a guy has to fight for the right to keep what he’s built when the powers that be come along and tell him to tear it all down. Meet Vince Hannemann, the “Junk King”, and welcome to his amazing Cathedral of Junk.

Located in the South Congress area of Austin, Vince’s Cathedral of Junk rises at least 30 feet into the sky amongst the towering trees in his backyard and probably weighs in at well over 50 tons up to three stories tall. The entire structure is built from a mind-blowing collection of old TVs, car parts, machinery, building materials, appliances and an endless host of scrap, parts, objects, toys and stuff, from commonplace and identifiable to inexplicable and perplexing. In an epic tail of defiance and grit, the local government tried repeatedly to close him down and force him to tear down and haul away the Cathedral, but he refused to back down. After a few years, a few lawyers and some seriously fierce tenacity, Vince prevailed and acquired a proper building permit and with it, the bona fide right to keep on building ever onward and upward.

We met up with a few local friends for a little field trip and picked, pulled and prodded the structure to find a few dozen unique objects and surfaces to bash some cool sounds out of with drumsticks. This library includes playable multisample instruments of the coolest and most musical oddities we found, edited and programmed with precision for maximum playability and musicality. It covers everything from old cymbals and refrigerators to saw blades and artificial legs. The final result is a grand old scrap-heap orchestra!

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. We'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. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. We’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 our 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 our favourite 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!

Features

• The Junk King Percussion Ensemble
• Bent Cymbal
• Bike Spokes
• Billboard
• Butter Box
• Ceramic Jar
• Chandelier
• Chemical Barrel
• Fiberglass Tube
• Galvanized Bar
• Glass Lamp
• Junk Bell
• Old Cog
• Piano Strings
• Plastic Orb
• Rusty Box
• Saw Blade
• Steel Flowers
• Tibetan Chime Tree
• Tin Can
• Warning Sign
• Water Cooler
• Wind Chimes

Kontakt Format

This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or later. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform. This library is packed with features to provide you with a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats. The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.

Product Specs

• 1 master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 542 MB Installed
• 521 Samples
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav audio
• 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

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 processes 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.

Important Notes:

• The FULL Version of Kontakt 5.5.0+ is required in order to use this instrument.
• You will be stuck in DEMO MODE if trying to use this instrument in the FREE Kontakt Player.