Review: Soundiron Cathedral Of Junk

It might be a small-ish download but you get a lot of big sounds and options for very little cash. It’s the best pile of junk you’ll ever hear.

When you purchase through affiliate links on MusicTech.com, you may contribute to our site through commissions. Learn more
Soundiron Cathedral Of Junk

Value award

Review $19
Contact Soundiron | Time+Space

Cathedral Of Junk key features:

  • Library based on a junkyard!
  • 20 custom sound-designed FX and ambient presets
  • 542MB Installed
  • 521 samples
  • 24-bit/48 kHz uncompressed PCM WAV
  • Controls include LFO, filter, glide and arpeggiator
  • FX include convolution reverb with custom rooms andFX environments
  • Full version of Kontakt req’d

Vince Hannemann is the Junk King of Austin, Texas, and has built the amazing Cathedral Of Junk, a 50-tonne, three-storey pile of just about anything he could lay his hands on. It’s situated in Vince’s backyard and clearly the sort of thing that even Mike and Frank from American Pickers might be taken aback by. “This guy’s nuts… but we love him!” Mike would say.

The Cathedral is packed full of ‘old TVs, car parts, machinery, building materials, appliances and an endless host of scrap, parts, objects, toys and stuff’. It is perhaps not the most obvious place to produce a Kontakt sound library, but it’s a fresh idea.

Soundiron is behind the Cathedral Of Junk library, which is the result of a team of people pushing and prodding the Cathedral to result in playable patches, based around many pieces of junk, from the sound of bike spokes to chemical-drum bashing.

It’s a Kontakt instrument and a relatively small 341MB download for a very small outlay. Given that price, you also get quite a lot to play with onscreen, including envelope, LFO, filter and arpeggiator, plus four layers to blend.

There are more than 500 samples to explore, but the collection comes into its own over the 20 presets which make use of double layers of samples plus an Ambience and Sub Synth layer to give each huge sound more of a tuneful feel. These presets really are the heart and soul – you get everything from booming crashes to quite frightening drones – all of it in-your-face and menacing, but with a healthy amount of melodic application.

We were surprised with how usable many of them are, thinking initially that this would be just a collection of bashed metal samples and the odd bit of broken glass. Junky Funk, for example, could be a guitar, albeit a very scruffed up one. There are loads of hits and smashes in there, don’t fret, but with so much onscreen to mess with – and a very cool and well-featured effects rack – there is plenty to take these junkyard sounds into all sorts
of territories. And for just 19 bucks? Are you kidding?

logo

Get the latest news, reviews and tutorials to your inbox.

Subscribe
Join Our Mailing List & Get Exclusive DealsSign Up Now
logo

The world’s leading media brand at the intersection of music and technology.

© 2024 MusicTech is part of NME Networks.