Beef up your production and break the boarders with ASSAULT

In one of our last posts I introduced Rick Allen who was involved in the development of Sample Logic’s Assault. I took the opportunity to have a look on this destructive Kontakt5 instrument and asked Rick a few questions about his work on this PlugIn.

Rick Allen recorded the source material for Sample Logics „Assault“. It is a monumental collection of real-world material ranging from rifles, flame throwers, hand guns, jets, dumpsters, monstrous pipes to bells, chimes, glass and an arsenal of traditional percussive instruments.

Rick, give us some background on the product.

Rick Allen: “I teamed up with the guys at Sample Logic and created the sounds for Assault, which is a virtual instrument plug-in for Kontakt.  It was a labor of love.  I can’t tell you how many months went into recording original material and mastering every sound included with that software.  I blew up a lot of things, smashed a lot of stuff and even took a flamethrower out into the desert and recorded as I torched an acoustic guitar.   I have to admit I blushed like a little kid when John Debney, who scored Iron Man 2, Predators, Sin City and End Of Days, told us “not only are the sounds unique and sit just right in a mix, but they’re just the beginning. With the FX and the endlessly easy tweaking, these sounds quickly become your own.”

Interrupters
Let’s have a look at a category of Assault’s inside: the interrupters.

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These fiddly sounds are layered over the keyboard to match the sound to your project’s key. You have the option to decide between a ton of effects to manipulate your sound, f.e. eq, comp, filter, LoFi, distortion, rotator, phaser, flanger, chorus, delay, reverb and an arpeggiator. You can activate or disable each of them separately. Some of the sounds are already processed, but not too much, so it’s always possible to go nuts with it.

Impacts
As another example, the impact section contains a ton of material material, which  can be nicely used to build start effects for drones, starters, cinematic scores and and and.

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I used sounds from the scrapes, risers and impact section and arranged them into a drone FX

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But interrupters and impacts are just a small part of the program beside arpeggiated sounds, combos, reverses, rises & falls, scrapes, sweeps, powerful pre-programmed multis. The multis for example can be used to spice up news music production and imaging or to add edge to breaks and intros in rock music beds. We asked Rick how an imaging guy could use this tool in his daily work environment:

Rick Allen: “It can work for you as a very easy-to-use and flexible collection of risers, hits and impacts.  It comes with hundreds of different sounds.  With the user interface you can tweak and change everything to create tons of additional sounds.  My favorite feature is the “random” button.  Click on that and the effects processors will be randomly reset to create a totally new sound each time you hit it.“

To me:

Assault brings a large amount of rough and hard sound design material to your NI Kontakt5. It can be a helpful assistant to create aggressive workparts by shaping and choosing the right sound.  Rick Allen’s participation was essential for this product and brings this tool (thanks to his recordings ) alive.