Slate + Ash RUINS

With the Link button turned on, values for parameters like direction, cycle, tuning, and retriggering can be unified across the loops.

Slate + Ash take the guitar to places it’s never been before...

Bristol‑based Slate + Ash bring their signature sound‑design treatment to the electric guitar in their Kontakt library RUINS, with a little help from their friends: experimental guitar luminaries Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, David Torn, Bill Horist, Ben Greenberg and Arjan Miranda, whose performances for the library were recorded at Circular Ruin Studios in New York by producer Randall Dunn. The loops, textures and resonances captured in those sessions were then put through the RUINS playback engine with the aim of deconstructing “guitar textures into raw sonic material”.

The result is more than just a set of samples to play around with. Transformation is at the heart of RUINS and what you have are five playgrounds in which to manipulate the sound: Collage, inspired by the tape‑splicing techniques of musique concrète; Spatial, with four distinct mic perspectives and a chain of convolution reverbs; Effects, featuring six DSP effects; Modulation via LFO, a step sequencer, and MIDI CC control; and, finally, Layers, where the dual‑layer architecture of the instrument allows two independent sounds to be processed simultaneously.

Layers & Loops

Beneath the minimalist design of the interface lies a labyrinthine rabbit hole of controls for every type of sonic manipulation imaginable. With no manual to guide you on your way, your first experience with RUINS can feel daunting, especially if you’re not familiar with its playback engine Collage, which was first introduced in their 2023 library SPECTRES. What appears to be a straightforward polyphonic sampler actually unlocks the complete creative transformation of a sample using looping, granular manipulation, effects chains, spatial processing and other spectral morphing tools.

Browse the vast library of sounds by Player or Tonality for each of the two independent layers.

Samples can be loaded into two independent layers — A/B — from a menu categorised by player and tonality (Tonal, Harmonic, Dissonant). Each sample is then ready to be chopped up into smaller loopable segments, with up to five loops possible per sample. Click and drag to move the loop around or change length. Adjustable parameters for each individual loop include direction, start and end points, cycles, fine and coarse tuning, retriggering and scatter/jitter for timing and volume variation. The Shape menu contains volume and filter envelopes, and the Random controls add variation to volume, pan, tuning, attack, release and filter values for each loop iteration. A drop‑down menu on the top right allows selection of key and scale, while Quantise on the bottom left keeps things in rhythm by aligning all loops to a time‑ or position‑based value of your choice.

Modulation & Mic...