Particle Sound releases "Forks" - Tuned percussion and soundscapes instrument for Kontakt 5

Particle Sound has released Forks, a Kontakt 5 instrument that is designed to combine both acoustic and synthetic elements to create unique sounds for composers and sound designers. 100 presets, 51 custom impulse responses and over 7GB (when uncompressed) of 96kHz samples in all.

Forks is based on an extensively sampled collection of scientific tuning forks that have been used and abused. A plethora of thuds, rattles, jangles and buzzes all make appearances here in addition to the traditional pure ringing tones tuning forks are known for. These acoustic samples were then heavily processed and twisted to produce companion sounds that can be layered and added to the main elements along with raw waveform samples from an Arp 2600 synthesizer. This is designed to make it possible to create anything from detailed electric pianos and vibraphone like tuned percussion to otherworldly soundscapes and pads. The included presets take advantage of this diversity and showcase the breadth of sounds that are possible while being easily tweakable from the logically laid out front panel.

Forks features a dual layer interface with individually linkable sections that is an evolution of Particle Sound's original Carbon interface and affords sound mangling power in an intuitive and straight forward way. Each of Forks 2 layers features dual sound sources, one of which is selectable from a drop down menu, sample start point modulation, state selectable filter, 3 envelopes, 2 LFOs with available tempo sync and a dedicated controller section.

There is also a dedicated Global and FX page that features 4 freely assignable insert slots along with master delay and convolution reverb. Each of the insert slots lets the user select between one of 18 different effects including EQ, dynamics, distortion, reverb, delay and modulation FX, while the convolution reverb features 51 custom impulse responses hand crafted to compliment the included sounds. In addition to more traditional reverbs these include out-there special effects like granular delays and artificial environments created by attaching contact mic's to an abused metal spring.

Forks Features & Specs:

• 100 crafted presets using Kontakt Snapshots.
• 3,446 total samples.
• 4.27GB lossless compressed .NCW files (7.17GB equivalent).
• Up to 24 random robins per instrument.
• Up to 26 velocity levels per instrument.
• 7 acoustic articulations captured at 96kHz.
• 36 alternative, processed and synth multi-samples captured at 96kHz and 48kHz.
• 51 custom impulse responses captured at 96kHz including special effects.

Price: $59.99.