Glass Beach

Glass Beach is a unique sample library for composers and sound artists that combines experimental percussion and sound design with an oceanic sfx and ambient soundscape library. We explore a wide variety of different natural beach, bay, estuary, marsh and wharf environments in wide stereo with a detailed quality that puts you right there in the scene.

Once a ecological disaster and obvious hazard, Glass Beach is all that's left of a former garbage dump. For decades, people brought their trash to the sea, dumping into towering piles rising above the surf, until it was closed in 1967. After numerous clean-up efforts, all of the refuse was removed, save for the tons of broken glass shards that were too small and far to plentiful to remove. The beach is now a remarkable example of natures resilience when we clean up our mess a bit and try to leave things alone. Over the years, the crashing waves and abrasive sand has worn all of those millions of glass fragments into perfectly smooth translucent glass pebbles and beads in every color of the rainbow – but mostly clear, brown or green.

From a sonic perspective, the millions of glass beads shifting and tumbling in the gentle surf create a remarkable effect. The sound is not unlike that of ice chips or slush on the shore of a thawing lake, but on a grander scale. The distant mournful wails of fog horns and sea birds casts an eerily serene hue over the sound-scape and the cliffs suppress most of the encroaching highway and city noise. As a whole-body sensory experience, it was well worth the long trip.

We captured several ocean surf and tide pool ambiances, as well as gentle waterfalls trickling through narrow caves and gullies running down toward the beach from the cliffs above. There's also useful foley included, with footsteps that can be cut and re-purposed for sand, gravel and even gritty snow in a pinch. We also created a wide variety of tiny percussive elements, using some of the sea glass that migrated to other nearby beaches. Lastly, we used various sound-design tricks to morph the sounds from our journey into tonal and dissonant pads, synth-tones, ambient dreamscapes and disturbing hellscapes.

Click Here To Listen To Demos Of Glass Beach

Product Specs:

• 2 master NKI instrument banks in open Kontakt format.
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets.
• Multi-sampled acoustic articulations, field recordings and atmospheric sound-design.
• 289 stereo samples.
• 2.73 GB Installed.
• 24-bit, 48 kHz Stereo PCM Wav Format.
• Flexible and intuitive multi-layer user interface controls, with LFO, filter, glide, and arpeggiator.
• Full FX rack with convolution reverb with custom rooms, halls, chambers & FX environments.