SOUNDIRON Rust 4 – Relics

Rust 4 is the most extensive volume in our classic Rust series of metallic percussive and melodic instruments. For Relics, we explore the remnants of yesteryear at the East Contra Costa Historical Society’s agricultural museum in Knightsen, California. The museum preserves the last 150 years of Knightsen history – a small rural farming community nestled at the edge of the San Francisco Bay Delta where it opens into California’s Central Valley. The ECCHS staff generously let us sample a huge collection of their artifacts and exhibits in comprehensive detail.

We brought our custom studio-grade field recording rigs to roam the multi-acre museum grounds, equipped with large-diaphragm, mid-side pairs, and stereo contact microphone arrays to capture each sound in extreme detail and ridiculously pristine fidelity. We recorded ball, stick, felt and metal mallet percussion on dozens of distinct farm implements throughout the museum grounds, including heavy equipment, agricultural machines, metallic surfaces and objects of all shapes and sizes, from vintage horse-drawn plows, harvesters, combines, and motorized tractors to the complete physical interior and exterior of a vintage railroad caboose. We recorded a 40-foot tall windmill in every way conceivable, a whole collection of pioneer-era farmhouse antiques and vintage household devices crafted from brass, copper, steel, tin, bronze and cast & wrought iron.

We explored every nook and cranny for interesting tones and special effects, powerful booms, eerie screeches and moans, clanks, clatters, ratchets, gongs, musical rings and clangs in indoor and outdoor environments. We then curated and refined the content into a vast collection of playable instruments and effect banks, intuitively categorized into tunable percussion kits by object, style, tone and sonic character. All of the sounds are accessible through a single multi-layer sound designer interface and easy to play as full impact percussion ensembles, or soloed as melodic tuned percussion instruments. Rust 4 offers a vast variety of distinct sounds in every acoustic category, from delicate to brutal, and richly resonant to raw and gritty.