Review: Cathedral of Junk by Soundiron

Halfway between a playable instrument and sound design tool, Soundiron brings you an eccentric library with the most disparate sampled objects at your disposal.

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Review: Cathedral of Junk by Soundiron

Cathedral of Junk is a very peculiar library… made of scrap. Literally! Soundiron’s team drove all the way to Austin, Texas, to sample all the different materials and odd objects that Vince Hannemann – the so-called “Junk King” – has collected and stored in his backyard, realizing a real Cathedral of Junk!

Cathedral of Junk sells for $19.00 from Soundiron

Thoughts

Soundiron’s Cathedral of Junk is not your usual sample library. It is a library that goes to the roots of sampling, or to the roots of music if you will: hitting different objects and recording the sound they make. The fact that these objects were meant to be hit and produce a musical sound (or not) is totally secondary. They can be bottles, tin cans, a glass lamp or bent cymbals… the important thing is that they all belong to one place: the cathedral of junk! The name itself is quite strange and comes from the actual place (or should I say the actual bunch of objects used for this library?) that can be visited in Austin, Texas. It is a little cathedral, a shrine of junk and strange items amassed by a man, Vince Hannemann, in his backyard. The cathedral is so famous that it even has its own Trip Advisor page and directions on Google Maps!

Halfway between a playable instrument and a sound design tool.

Soundiron’s team decided to visit this mystical place and bring back some excellent sound sources for this library, which is halfway between a playable instrument and a sound design tool.

To have a clearer idea of what we are talking about, here is the full list of the sampled objects you can find in the instrument:

– 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

As you can see there is a good amount of sound sources that have been masterfully multi-sampled and polished to have the possibility of using them in a tonal way (if necessary). The library has a main instrument and a series of presets that can be loaded from the respective folders into your FULL version of Kontakt 5. 5

The presets and the main instrument obviously share the same GUI which is not super intuitive, in my opinion, due to the fact that it offers a lot of flexibility hence requires you to get some familiarity to achieve the desired results. The main tab is dominated by an evocative picture of a Cathedral surrounded by junk (!), at the bottom you have access to the four layers that can constitute your sound – two of the sampled instrument plus an ambience and a sub frequency – and the respective parameters: swell, attack, offset, release, vibrato, filter and tuning. The stylistic choice of relegating these parameters to a lower, and relatively small, portion of the GUI to leave space to the gigantic picture of the Cathedral is quite curious and might not be appealing to everyone.

At the very top of the interface, you have an arrow that will bring up the LFO, Filter and ARP tab, obliterating the “junk” from the GUI. This tab is essential for the instrument, in fact, I would consider it the core of the library since most of the time I found myself in need of an ARP or LFO to achieve the sounds I was aiming for.

all the sounds have been perfectly polished and optimized to be processed further in the engine: this is where Cathedral of Junk shines

At this point, it is worth mentioning that all the sounds are pre-loaded in the main instrument and keyswitching a layer from one sound to the other will happen with a very tiny bit of delay. Also, all the sounds have been perfectly polished and optimized to be processed further in the engine: this is where Cathedral of Junk shines. Think about the Breaking Bad soundtrack and similar! The audio sources can also be used as raw sounds but will not stand out as well as their processed counterpart, possibly because they have been tuned/cut/denoised to perform very well when going through an effect rather than being used as “standalone” sounds. In fact, with no processing, you can notice a lack of naturalness and randomness (as well as dirtiness) of the sound. The presets are very useful as a starting point, especially to choose the right effect and processing chain to use but, very often, you will end up changing the sound source or modifying something to make the result more unique.

The instrument also has a second tab: the FX rack. You can use a good variety of effects (Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Reverb…) up to 8 (yes, eight!) simultaneously PLUS two post/send FX.

Overall, Cathedral of Junk is a very interesting library that excels at a very specific and unique style. If you are looking for something quite different, affordable and would like to experiment with a lot with different sounds I highly recommend it but be ready to get your hands dirty with a lot of processing and crazy effects!

Facts

Cathedral of Junk installs at 0.6 GB  and requires the FULL version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or higher, the Kontakt Player is NOT supported.

Cathedral of Junk has a very specific sound and use at which it excels: rhythmic effects, background sounds and atmos made with unusual sounds, just like Breaking Bad OST by Dave Porter.

The flexibility that it offers comes at a cost: the need to get familiar with the library’s controls to achieve THAT sound you had in mind.

Cathedral of Junk sells for $19.00 from Soundiron

Demos of Cathedral of Junk by Soundiron

Videos of Cathedral of Junk by Soundiron

Contributor Andrea Federici reviews Cathedral of Junk by Soundiron
“Halfway between a playable instrument and sound design tool, Soundiron brings you an eccentric library with the most disparate sampled objects at your disposal.”