Soundiron Frendo v2.0

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 2"6 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 played it with a violin bow, screwdrivers, rubber and wooden mallets, picks, hands and fingers and have provided an array of custom controls, presets, effects and tools to allow total sonic freedom and control over the sound. This library is a unique tuned percussion and string instrument in it's 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.

Contents

• Two stereo microphone positions (heads – internal mics), (tail – external big hall mics)
• Wooden mallets: "tuned", 3-4 velocity layers, 10x round-robin
• Rubber mallets: "tuned", 5 velocity layers, 10x round-robin
• Finger plucks: "tuned", 1-3 velocity layers, 6x round-robin
• Bowed FX: bow scrapes, staccato notes, 1-3 velocity layers, 6x – 9x round-robin
• Bowed high notes: stabs and sustains, 1-3 velocity layers, 4x round-robin
• Bowed low notes: stabs and sustains, tuned and un-tuned, 6x round-robin and looping "legato" patches
• Bowed tremolo: effects and sustains, with fast, medium and slow variations
• Screwdriver slides: long and short
• 3 large sound effects patches, including creaks, cracks, groans, tuning twangs and sproings.
• All recorded with natural acoustics in our tile, glass and stone hall or from inside the Frendo resonance chamber itself.