Sound Dust makes some of the best and most innovative Kontakt libraries on the market. For the second time around, Spitfire Audio has combined 5 of their recent libraries into a very well-priced collection. Including: Flutter Dust, Infundibulum, Oddhop, Pendleonium, and Ships Piano. Its currently available for only $149 until November 20th, but the full retail price is only $199.
Sound Dust Vol. 2 is available from Spitfire Audio here.
I purchased the previous Sound Dust bundle, Dust Bundle, and I fell immediately in love with the Plastic Ghost Piano (my song 'Plastic' from my album Sleepless was heavily inspired by the sound of the library, and I used it throughout that song as the main piano sound).
Lets dive right into each library...
Flutter Dust
Flutter Dust by Sound Dust is a kind of wavetable sample instrument, before Kontakt actually had wavetable capability. Each .nki of Flutter Dust has a unique multi-sampled 30 second loop, and the interface allows you to control the start position and loop length to create some incredibly interesting sounds. Sound processing can be performed on a letter-note by letter-note basis (C, C#, D, etc), allowing from some very deep sound design.
The library ships with 6 .nki's, 3 loop based ones and 3 wavetable type ones. All the sound sources appear to be acoustic in nature, but hard to actually identify what the source instrument is. Sometime's you'll hear a piano, guitars, bells, or bowed instruments. Its very hard to even describe this in writing, so I think i'll just let the instrument speak for itself:
Ships Piano
Made out of a selection of three characterful pianos - a ships piano, a school hall grand, and a altered home piano with some serious sound design. The library includes the ability to blend each of these piano and apply vibrato, filtering, ADSR and convolution reverb to each piano independently. The result is a one-of-a-kind piano library with a lot of character, and the ability to morph it to unheard territories.
Infundibulum
Infundibulum takes its name from an excellent Kurt Vonnegut book - Sirens of Titan. Sound Dust has created some type of polyrhythmic pluck machine for this, with three different arpeggiators that go at different speeds and lengths.
Pendleonium
Pendleonium (no matter how many times I write it, it never gets easier to spell) is an interesting library created from six stringed sound sources: two Danelectro baritone guitars, two Fernandez infinite guitars with Sustainiac pickups and built in EBows, and a Spring viola hardwired through a Roland space echo (whew!). The result is an incredible diverse library that blends the plucked sound of a guitar, with the hybrid nature of an EBow used on a guitar, with an endless pad string-pad.
The sound sources can be blended and panned as well as controlled using ADSR, filtering, vibrato, chorus, and reverb on a per-instrument level. In addition to this there is a global effects section with distortion, EQ, rotor, reverb, delay, and more reverb.
Conclusion
Sound Dust is one of the best sample library companies for unique sounds you can't find elsewhere, and this bundle is no exception. I'm very happy they've been able to collaborate with Spitfire Audio to deliver this bundle, as the last bundle they did was also fantastic. I think almost everyone can benefit by purchasing this bundle or at least one of the libraries inside of it. It has a little bit of everything if you're light on Kontakt libraries, and it has very much new to offer in terms of new sounds in a way that can be applied to almost any track.
