Surface Tension

Surface Tension is a unique sound design tool that allows you to quickly and easily create a huge range of rich, organic, complex and unusual sounds based on samples entirely derived from various forms of used and abused electric guitars.

The Kontakt instrument combines a state-of-the-art user interface with samples and impulse responses to give you a highly flexible tool for creating a huge variety of beds, drones, pads and FX. It comes with over 200 presets but of course you make your own presets from the samples provided - there are over 29,000 different combinations available - and then you can manipulate the sounds any way you wish with the amazing interface that offers untold amounts of sonic manipulation.

Playing techniques used include violin bows, screwdrivers, e-bow, extreme detuning, striking, bottleneck, feedback, distortion, scraping and plucking.

Then, a whole range of digital processes was applied to take these sounds into a deep electronic realm whilst still retaining the complexity of raw organic recordings.

The other key part of the instrument is the bespoke impulse responses, which are used to create unique reverbs of great character within Kontakt’s convolution reverb engine. To maintain the depth and organic detail, these impulse responses were derived from real world sources, circuit bent FX units and vintage delay lines.