The Ruler

Soundiron is known for our willingness to take sampling ever farther, to go to any lengths and explore every inch of the sonic world. Our never-ending quest is sampling literally every measurable sound in the universe that has musical potential. Perhaps we're compensating for a long-hidden fear that we won't measure up, or maybe it's just that we're willing to go miles beyond the rest to set a new metric for excellence. Time and time again, we've set new benchmarks in sampling and elevated the art to a whole new scale. We're willing to break all the rules in our quest. Our goal is always to reach imperial quality, no matter how tall the order. When we find that our catalog has fallen short, rather than inch along, we put our foot down and fill in those gaps, because we'll never sell you short.

Long story short, we've all played with rulers and tape measures and noticed all of the satisfying sproings and wobbles they can produce. When you brace a ruler over the edge of a flat surface so that it can oscillate freely, it can produce a musical tone at a frequency in proportion to the distance it’s able to vibrate up and down. The longer the section of tine that can freely vibrate, the lower the note and the longer it can sustain. As you slide the ruler farther onto the surface and reduce the length of the freely-vibrating overhanging segment, the pitch increases and the duration of the note shortens. Tiny adjustments can result in large jumps, so you need to go millimeter-by-millimeter to produce a wide musical scale.

Because we’re strange, we headed into the garage and grabbed our two best-sounding rulers and a couple of self-winding tape measures and then set out to capture one library to rule them all! We took no shortcuts! As the meters danced, we sampled every inch with millimeter precision, using finely calibrated microphones and pristine preamps to capture even the most minute details. We recorded 30 notes with our 6-inch ruler (15.24cm) and 38 notes on our 12-inch ruler (30.48cm), plus percussive taps, rattles and drops. We also recorded a wide variety of sound effects and percussive articulations with our 25-foot (3m) and 10-foot (7.62m) tape-measures for a more modern take on the concept. We also tried to record a laser range-finder, but it turns out microphones aren't quite sensitive enough just yet. I guess the exception proves the rule: if it moves matter, it can make music.

Because we always bring you miles of value, we've included a collection of uniquely sound-designed ambient pads and tonal atmospheres created by manipulating the source recordings, along with plenty of custom FX presets to let you take the sounds even further. By any measure, The Ruler goes the distance! And now I think we’ve stretched these puns far enough!

The Ruler includes over 24 playable articulations, 20 custom FX presets, 20 sound-designed ambiences, 4825 stereo samples and a full gigabyte of content.