Household and natural objects recorded raw, then fractured into two granular layers.

Found & Fractured is the first volume of the Found Sounds series — an instrument built entirely from objects that were never meant to be played. Household and natural material, organic and synthetic, gathered over a long stretch of recording: birds and zippers, plastic bricks and wooden branches, stones, switches and coins are only a few of the things that ended up in here. All of it recorded up close, raw, and then pulled apart.

Every source appears three times:

Layer 1 — the original recording, untouched
Layer 2 — a granular transformation of that same sound
Layer 3 — a second, further-mangled granular version of the same source
Because all three layers come from one recording, you can blend from the literal object to a pure texture without ever leaving the same sonic material behind. Push the granular layers up and a coin becomes a shimmering cloud that still remembers what it was.

What it is best at: organic percussion with a twist. The raw layer gives you a real, physical hit with all the grain and inconsistency of a genuine object; the granular layers give the same hit a tail, a body, or an atmosphere that no drum sample has. Build a kit out of stones and zippers, then blend it into something no one can identify.

The samples are spread evenly across the keyboard and play at their original pitch — this is a palette, not a pitched instrument. No velocity layers, no artificial stretching, nothing standing between you and the source. Play one key for the object, hold a chord for a soundscape.

70 presets · 3 layers per source · 2.65 GB

Found_Sounds_01_Fabric_Movement_Granular

Tape transports, cassette mechanics, tools and metal, fractured into two granular layers.

Broken Artifacts is the second volume of the Found Sounds series, and it trades the organic world for the mechanical one. Where Vol. 01 recorded stones and branches, this one records the machines that used to move tape.

The sources are mechanisms rather than material, and the list runs long: tape machine and reel-to-reel transports, cassette recorder mechanics, DAT drives, workbench and hand tools, kitchen utensils and a great deal of metal, among plenty more. Motors, latches, springs, spool brakes and the specific clack of a mechanism doing its job — or failing at it.

Every source appears three times:

Layer 1 — the original recording, untouched
Layer 2 — a granular transformation of that same sound
Layer 3 — a second, deeper granular transformation of the same source
Because all three layers share one recording, blending them moves you along a single line from object to abstraction. Nothing collides, because nothing is foreign to anything else. A reel-to-reel brake becomes a metallic drone that still has the brake inside it.

The samples sit evenly across the keyboard at original pitch, with no velocity layers — an instrument for texture and gesture rather than melody. One key gives you the mechanism; a held chord gives you the room it broke in.

124 presets · 3 layers per source · 3.99 GB

Found_Sounds_02_Metal_Impacts

Found_Sounds_02_Tape_Machine

90 presets of retro sci-fi built from analog synths — saucers, laboratories and arpeggios.

The sound of the future, as it was imagined a long time ago.

RETROGRADE INVADERS is a retro science-fiction instrument for DecentSampler, built almost entirely from analog synthesizers and processed with analog gear. It is aimed at the era when the future was made of oscillators and tape: flying saucers, laboratory equipment, invasion signals, and the restless arpeggios that ran under every low-budget space sequence ever shot.

Nothing here was cleaned up into modern hi-fi. The analog signal path is the point — the drift, the hum and the slight instability are what make these sounds read as vintage rather than as a plugin doing an impression of vintage.

90 presets, each one its own instrument.

Retrograde_Invaders_Pattern_Impact

The complete Electric Taishogoto — over 20 hardware FX chains and every articulation, in one instrument.

One instrument, 20+ different amplifiers of the same strange little machine. 

The Electric Taishogoto is a virtual instrument based on the traditional Japanese Taishogoto, also known as the Nagoya Harp — recorded from an electric red soprano model made in Japan in the early 1990s. This is an older instrument with its own charming flaws, noise, and mechanical quirks, all of which we embraced rather than polished away. Its DI signal was recorded deeply, then run through a large collection of real analog hardware: overdrive and distortion pedals, guitar preamps, vintage 90s rack FX, a broken 70s tape delay, an 80s reel-to-reel recorder, a Japanese spring reverb and a stack of lo-fi pedals. No software emulations at any point in the chain.

Nothing here is split across separate volumes. Every FX chain and every playing technique sits in one library, rebuilt from the ground up for DecentSampler: over 20 hardware chains, each one its own preset.

DS_Taishogoto_Shimmer

DS_Taishogoto_DrivenDrama

DS_Taishogoto_BrokenTapedelayBow

I'm a TV post-production producer with 15 years of experience, based in Munich, Germany. I'm also working as a freelancer, creating sound effect libraries tailored to meet the needs of motion designers, app developers, editors and other creative professionals.

DS_Taishogoto_BrokenTapedelayBow

Christian Bartrow Sounddesign

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