Ink Audio Archive

Ink Steel was inspired by modern pedal steel players like Daniel Lanois, Russ Pahl and BJ Cole.

It fits great behind singer/songwriter, americana, ambient, or what Brian Eno called ‘zero-gravity country music.’

Play with the onboard effects or run it through your favorite plugins or pedal board. It's simple and a lot of fun.

Ink Vocal is a small group vocal library for Kontakt. Play four singers at once with real sampled transitions.

There are three articulations (Mmh, Oh and Ooh) with two male singers and two female singers. Humanness and flaws were left in intentionally and not every note or transition is perfect.

You can choose between poly or legato modes. Poly is for chords and legato is for lines. For the legato, not only were the notes sampled, but also the transitions between the notes. There are almost 4,000 samples here. The singers hate me. You will love it.

Recorded at the quietest levels, Whisper Rhythms is a unique approach to vocal percussion for Kontakt.

Play and manipulate more than 1,300 loops and one shots to create realistic parts, impossible performances or can’t-put-your-finger-on-it textures. Whether featured or tucked in a mix, it's a great way to create subtle urgency, organic subdivision, a low-key found-sound element, or understated motion and accents in a very flexible interface.

Play twelve different whistling articulations for outside-the-box textures and melodies.

These samples were recorded as quietly as possible to capture more air in the tone and more irregularity in the sustains. My favorite articulations are the aleatoric longs and trems. Holding chords with these can lead to some unexpected and really satisfying moments. You can get anything from cheerful to haunting with these sounds. For the ‘+ scoop’ articulations, the scoops are played at the higher velocities and the sustains are at the lower velocities, making melody playing easier without having to keyswitch.

There are over 1,100 samples in a simple interface with controls for attack, release, stereo, compression, delay and reverb and articulation selections.

Articulations:

Long + Scoop, Long Falls, Long Aleatoric, Trem + Scoop, Trem Falls, Trem Aleatoric, Staccato + Scoop, Staccato Falls, Staccato Aleatoric

Ink Pads is a collection of evolving analog synth pads that are combined randomly in different ranges to create interesting and unexpected soundscapes.

Nashville Toolkit is a collection of instruments for Kontakt that brings Nashville’s personality to any production.

The Toolkit has fifty libraries with over 4,000 samples that include electric and acoustic stringed instruments, basses, drums and percussion, reeds, keyboards and background vocals.

It fits great with singer/songwriter, Americana, ambient, folk pop, country, indie and sync cues or anywhere you need a little Nashville in your sound.

These are imperfect libraries with character being favored over flawlessness. There’s wonkiness, slide wiggle, feedback, vibrato, string buzz and variety in all these samples to let them stay human, organic and intimate. For each instrument there are six controls to give some flexibility to tailor the sound to your needs without having to menu dive. The mod wheel is left to assign to whichever control you like. Bring a Nashville studio with you wherever you go.

Early Bird is a percussion library about that feeling right before a hit lands. 

To me, shaken percussion isn’t just about the beats—it’s about the stuff that happens in between. When you catch those sounds leading up to a hit, it gives everything so much more weight. So we use loops for those kinds of textures, but they’re pretty limiting because the performance is the performance. So, I made Early Bird—a quick, easy way to add some gravity right before the beat hits.

Here’s how it works:

Start by playing your parts in one-shot mode. Then, switch to early mode, drag the MIDI back two beats, and you’ll hear those before-the-beat textures come to life. It’s one extra step, but it makes a big difference in the energy.

There are 49 sounds total across four octaves that shake, swish, rattle, rustle, jingle and clack. Many of the instruments have both a 'back' and a 'forth' sound which are different and are on adjacent keys.

Large Kokiriko, Small Kokiriko, Voodoo Clacker, Small Seed Pod Stick, Big Frog, Med Frog, Little Frog, Pangi, Pala, Chacha, Juju, Waterfall Rattle, Wood Bird Rattle, Double Caxixi, Single Caxixi, Single Caxixi 2, Jingle Caxixi, Maraca, Light Plastic Shaker, Medium Shaker, Heavy Shaker, Tambo 1, Tambo 2, Tambo 3, Tambo 4, Ocean Drum, Jingle Stick Brass, Jingle Stick Aluminum, Ganza, Jingle Bell, Ajuch, Finger Bell Chimes 

Wish I Had a Heart started with this idea: take the worst keyboard I can find and make it human. I like the tension between hi-fi and lo-fi and blending them to make something strange and alive.

Here’s the process; low-bit PCM keyboard or drum machine —> layer with keys, clicks, creaks, rustles, hums, rattles, taps, slides, breaths, etc… —> impulse responses from the room and the original instruments themselves. Over 2,500 samples.

But something happened along the way…

Sometimes I found myself muting the original samples and leaning into the layers, pairing them with synths or other samples. It’s a cool way to add some interesting-ness to something that feels too inside-the-box.

Patches: Banjo, Bass, Cello, Drum, Flute, Guitar, Horn, Piano, Slide, Wind, Another Bass, Another Guitar

Ink Slide is a two part Slide Guitar library for Kontakt that explores the softer side of slide. It was recorded with a glass slide, neck pickup, Boss CS-3 into 1176 compressor. Mellow tone, lots of texture, sounds cool with effects, plays well with others.

The auditory inkblot test.

Sometimes you need a sound that feels like it came from something real but it’s hard to place what it is. 

Something weird.

Something that’s not a synth or already going through a pedalboard.

Something that makes people say ‘what was that?’

Ink Rorschach is for the kind of sounds that start somewhere familiar and end up somewhere left of center.

It was recorded in creative and backwards ways to catch another side of the instruments and then manipulated beyond recognition in the editing process. This was done using a combination of non traditional playing techniques, obscure instruments, bowing, mallets, slides, friction mallets, odd mic placements, time stretching, pitch shifting, contact mics, reverse playback, hard tuning, cutting transients, creative eq and compression.

One morning, my two-month-old daughter was struggling to breathe. In the blink of an eye, my wife and I were in a hospital room with her surrounded by doctors and nurses. She was going to be there a while.

Somewhere around the time when night became the next morning, her vitals started to improve. I sat looking at all the instruments and devices and drips and wires weaving around her. I stared at the beeping lights and blips on screens and thought about all the little machines that help us along the way.

I love how instruments feel at their lowest volumes. You hear all the texture of the bow, the click of the keys, more of the overtones, more air. Playing in this fragile way is hard to control and can give you a lot irregularities and character.  Sometimes it makes the instrument almost hard to recognize and becomes it's own thing. Sometimes it becomes a sound that you feel more than hear.

Sometimes when I record an acoustic guitar or piano with a singer songwriter and want to add orchestral elements to it, I want to feel like it’s recorded in the same environment by the same kind of player. I might want it to sound like someone pulling an old instrument out of the attic and blowing a few notes for a unique texture, or picking up an instrument for the first time and just seeing what happens. The attacks are inconsistent, the tuning isn’t perfect and the air comes and goes.

That’s what Amateur Orchestra is for. The DIY orchestral sound at your fingertips.

There is a really wide range of tones here and a lot of niche instruments and beginner instruments were sampled for more options. From plastic brass to contrabassoon to someone trying a cello bow for the first time to someone who hadn’t picked up a trumpet in 20 years. None of these are perfect recreations of any instrument. Just a really big collection of colors to choose from that get you to a place where it’s clearly not your big city philharmonic.

Banjo Rhythms is a sample library for Kontakt that randomly combines rhythmic single-note loops in different key ranges to create interesting and unlikely arpeggios. It gives you the banjo sound without being traditional. The idea is to play chords and let the rhythms surprise you.

Body Percussion is a library of sounds for Kontakt that explores claps, stomps, thumps, slaps, pops and clicks from the body. I've found that my stomp/clap libraries are mostly group oriented and I wanted to create something solo. It's a single person but it's really immediate and really useful. There are 856 samples here to make dynamic and life-like productions. Use the mod wheel or UI to add stereo layers for added players.

Articulations: Cheek Slap, Cheek Tone 1, Cheek Tone 2, Chest Pound, Chest Slap, Clap 1, Clap 2, Clap 3, Clap 4, Finger Clap, Finger Snap 1, Finger Snap 2, Lap Slap, Mouth Clap 1, Mouth Clap 2, Mouth Click Tone 1, Mouth Click Tone 2, Mouth Click Tone 3, Mouth Click Tone 4, Stomp 1, Stomp 2

Sticks Kit is a four-part deeply sampled drum kit instrument for Kontakt. A great sounding drum set was sampled with sticks in four treatments; open, with blankets, soft and super quiet. The result is a really natural and versatile drum kit that can be used in productions whether you need something loud, subtle or somewhere in the middle.

Minimal processing was done to the 8,000+ samples for this library to focus on the most natural sound possible. You will hear some kick bleed in the tom mics and tom bleed in the snare mics, etc. Between the direct mics, overheads, rooms and effects, you can dial in a lot of different moods.

Mallets Kit is a deeply sampled drum set instrument for Kontakt. These yarn mallets are soft and warm and perfect situations when something more subtle and round is what you're looking for. The kick was played with a felt beater and the drums were covered up with towels to deaden things up.

Minimal processing was done to the 5,000+ samples for this library to focus on the most natural sound possible. Each hit was recorded with each mic, so you will hear some kick bleed in the tom mics and hat bleed in the snare mics, etc. Between the direct mics, the overheads and the rooms, you can dial in different moods.

Brooms Kit is a deeply sampled drum set instrument for Kontakt. The bristled hot rods give you a great sound that's a hybrid between sticks and brushes. The kick was played with a fluffy fleece beater and the drums were muted with towels to be soft and subtle.

Minimal processing was done to the 5,000+ samples for this library to focus on the most natural sound possible. Each hit was recorded with each mic, so you will hear some kick bleed in the tom mics and hat bleed in the snare mics, etc. Between the direct mics, the overheads and the rooms, you can dial in different moods.

Vocal Rhythms is a rhythmic vocal looping library for Kontakt. Key switch between 9 different vocal humming rhythms in 3 different tempo ranges to add intimate vocal energy to your recording. 686 loops were recorded to make a really subtle and natural sounding library. 

Rhythms: Quarter, Dotted Quarter, Half, Half Variation, Eighth, Dotted Eighth, Whole, Whole Short, Whole Rise