Plastic Flap
Squeaky noises from protective plastic film
ByMarco Iannello
The story
The sound source of these instrument is a plastic flap, like those one finds as part of the protective plastic films on a newly bought smartphone.
Nonchalantly rubbing it with the thumb and index finger produces a somewhat squeaky noise, and decreasing the speed at which one rubs the flap results in more scratchy noises.
Is that not an excellent reason to create a sample library out of those noises? Of course it is, and here you have seven different patches (some may sound very similar to one another, however there are some subtle moving nuances that make them different) created by time stretching the recordings of rubbing the flap with said fingers in ProTools, processing them with a few different instances of Little Alter Boy by Soundtoys, and applying a generous helping of Valhalla Supermassive.
Reviews
Dark textured synth sound
Interesting synth, and easy to play with. Irregular Plastic Pulse has some gun shot like effect. Very interesting!
I'm not worthy
All of that from a little plastic tab, huh? Clearly I have some things left to learn! While it's certainly amazing that all of these sounds came from that little plastic tab, not all of the sounds are equally useful. Standouts for me included the the gorgeous Plastic Dreams pad and Plastic Drone with it's ridiculously useful and great gate sequencer and effects which are curiously missing on most of the rest of the patches. Some of the others I would probably never use, but even so, these sounds are pretty amazing!
A solid library offering a range os possibilities...
The range of patches and the GUI are enough to forgive some slightly noisy samples, though that is the reason why this review isn't 4 stars across the board. This library offers a lot of content with plenty of interesting stuff. In particular the 'irregular pulses' and the 'plastic scratches' which offer those sound design tools composers are always looking for. Whilst the 'drone' and 'up & down' patches include an expanded GUI and a whole range of options for transforming the already great pad sound. Including a gate. Brilliant!