Whether you're after a classic music-box tone for atmosphere or soundtrack work, or something more steampunk-alternative-universey for sound design purposes, Music Box offers up all kinds of faery tines, ghostly echoes and glittery pinpricks of sound. At its heart is a meticulously-sampled 3 octave musical box mechanism. We recorded this clamped onto the soundboard of a Takamine acoustic guitar, with its open strings tuned to the musical box's pitch, so that the core waves are very rich and sustained – and then we went a lot further...
As well as the core musical box tines – or "lamellae", as they were called in Victorian times – Music Box provides a dedicated sub-oscillator plus three additional Tone components. These dial in synthesised FM waves of increasing harmonic complexity, sampled from our vintage Yamaha DX5, and allow you to push Music Box firmly into sound design territory. There are also controls for Release noise on key-off, Mechanism noise (so you can get that clockwork whirring going in the background if you want), plus a simple but powerful Tilt EQ. Samples can be force-pitched down two octaves for subterranean doom-laden rumblings and grumblings, and reversed for eerie, spooky builds and atmosphere work. Finally there is of course a full ADSR envelope and a comprehensive suite of effects: in combination, this lot can wring a whole load of strange, inspirational tones from that little metal mechanism!
Music Box is on launch offer until the end of the month, so you can get it at 20% off its usual price; and audio demos, more info, and some pretty pictures are all up on the website here:
http://www.rhythmicrobot.com/product/music-box
More cool stuff soon
Best wishes,
The Professor (and Mongo)