Hears The Rubs

NOTE: Kontakt version updated 5-13-26 to fix a bug with the Mangle knob.

Back in mid-2025, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole focused on friction mallets. Video after video, I saw musicians creating otherworldly sounds, sometimes extremely aggressive and explosive in nature, while barely moving a muscle. I couldn’t comprehend how such energy could be generated from rubber bouncy balls on the end of fiberglass rods. So… I decided to make some.

With the friction mallets in hand, I raided the percussion studios at the New World Symphony, seeking the most outrageous and exploratory tones. This package contains a smorgasbord of the ‘cream of the crop.’ The UI menu allows switching between the instrument sample groups on the fly. Each dry sample is paired with a heavily manipulated version of the same sample, which I ran through a variety of plugins by major manufacturers like Sound Toys, Aberrant DSP, Nudist Audio, Neural DSP and others. Each mic source recording was treated independently, with intention, to extract even more character. It’s very much a Jekyll and Hyde situation, with a handy ‘Mangle’ knob to crossfade between them. I guess crossfades are becoming a signature element of my instruments (¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

What you have here is a very unique instrument capable of generating everything from organic, sweeping drones to aggressive explosions of sound and color. It has just as much depth as the soliloquy from which it gets its name. “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay there’s the rub.”

Correction, Hears the Rubs.