Soundiron Frendo (Download)

About

Frendo is a custom-built Soundiron instrument. We created this monster by stringing bailing wire around and through steel plates and bolts, over galvanized steel piping and across wood planks. It was meant to suffer. You can help by mistreating it in horrible ways with screwdrivers, bows, drum sticks, mallets and fingers. The instrument holds a vast amount of otherworldly sounds, which is ideal for composers looking for new disturbing, horror-like textures for their scores. Frendo is partially a mallet instrument, recorded with wooden and rubber mallets, but is also a more traditional string instrument, since we recorded finger plucks and bows. It’s the sound of Satan’s cello, weeping softly for your burning soul.

Made of knotty pine, rusted steel bailing wire, eye bolts, hooks, deck screws, hurricane brackets and an old 24″ bass drum, this 5-stringed son of a bitch was 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. The body had a 26” spine and two separate body segments to allow torquing and bending while the instrument was played. It was strung with black iron bailing wire, wound over galvanized steel angle brackets and plates and through heavy gauge eye bolts that we used as tuners, by way of a pipe wrench.

We experimented on Frendo with a violin bow, screwdrivers, rubber & wooden mallets, picks, hands and fingers, then added an array of controls, presets, effects + tools to grant you total sonic freedom over your newly customized sound. It includes a wide variety of discovered timbres: Strikes, creaks, scrapes, shrieks, plucks, dongs, tremolos, vibratos and more. Frendo is a unique tuned percussion and string instrument in its own right, but also makes excellent effect and sound design material for stingers, trailers, reveals, slates, post production and any number of other specialized production uses.

For Frendo 3.0, we remastered the samples, added them into our efficient four-layer modular template, and created 40 newly haunted ambient pads and soundscapes from the raw source content. We also designed 20 fresh custom FX presets to give you a boost of terror for your next film/video game score, soundtrack or music composition.

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!

Product Specs