Soundiron Cathedral of Junk (Download)

About

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 favorite 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!

The Junk King Percussion Ensemble

Bent Cymbal

Bike Spokes

Billboard

Butter Box

Ceramic Jar

Chandalier

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

Product Specs