Frendo

Frendo is a custom-built Soundiron instrument. We created this monster by stringing bailing wire around and through steel plates and bolts, over galvanized steel piping and across wood planks. It was meant to suffer. You can help by mistreating it in horrible ways with screwdrivers, bows, drum sticks, mallets and fingers. The instrument holds a vast amount of otherworldly sounds, which is ideal for composers looking for new disturbing, horror-like textures for their scores. Frendo is partially a mallet instrument, recorded with wooden and rubber mallets, but is also a more traditional string instrument, since we recorded finger plucks and bows. It's the sound of Satan's cello, weeping softly for your burning soul.

Made of knotty pine, rusted steel bailing wire, eye bolts, hooks, deck screws, hurricane brackets and an old 24" bass drum, this 5-stringed son of a bitch was 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. The body had a 26” spine and two separate body segments to allow torquing and bending while the instrument was played. It was strung with black iron bailing wire, wound over galvanized steel angle brackets and plates and through heavy gauge eye bolts that we used as tuners, by way of a pipe wrench.

We experimented on Frendo with a violin bow, screwdrivers, rubber & wooden mallets, picks, hands and fingers, then added an array of controls, presets, effects + tools to grant you total sonic freedom over your newly customized sound. It includes a wide variety of discovered timbres: Strikes, creaks, scrapes, shrieks, plucks, dongs, tremolos, vibratos and more. Frendo is a unique tuned percussion and string instrument in its own right, but also makes excellent effect and sound design material for stingers, trailers, reveals, slates, post production and any number of other specialized production uses.

For Frendo 3.0, we remastered the samples, added them into our efficient four-layer modular template, and created 40 newly haunted ambient pads and soundscapes from the raw source content. We also designed 20 fresh custom FX presets to give you a boost of terror for your next film/video game score, soundtrack or music composition.