Hammer of Dread

A delightfully aggressive hammering of the strings is transformed into a synth for driving, dark rhythms and Earth-shaking pads.

Hammer of Dread is a wavetable, and multisampled oscillator subtractive synth for the full version of Kontakt 7. All of its samples and wavetables were created with hammered string instruments. It has two wavetable oscillators as well as two 96 khz multisampled oscillators. There is also a 64 step apreggiator and portamento. There are 11 resonant filter options with LFO and envelope modulation.. It comes with 67 striking patches and 19 impactful multis, from harpsichords to distorted filter drones. Every filter and every oscillator has both envelopes and LFOs to control modulation. All of these are editable.

Hammer of Dread also incorporates a new pitch section, with detuning up to an octave and asynchronous LFOs that can be adjusted live for wailing effects. There is also a randomness control which randomly assigns pitch to all four oscillators independently.

We hammered cellos, violins, dulcimers, guitars and ran these through additive synthesis. Then, we flattened them with compression, molding the attack to preserve the hammering string action but allowing envelopes and wavetables to control it.