Rubber Bridge Plucks is an acoustic guitar sample-based virtual instrument from Somerville Sounds that can be yours for FREE.
As a longtime guitarist, I will say that I always give virtual guitar instruments a shot. I have friends who do absolute magic using Shreddage and other libraries, so it’s always interesting to see what’s on offer.
Today’s selection is a little more atypical than your usual guitar plugins and samples. The Somerville Sounds Rubber Bridge Plucks is ostensibly a sampled acoustic guitar, but the sound is rather peculiar.
Rubber Bridge Plucks started as a simple parlor acoustic guitar. I’m sure you’ve seen them around—humble little beaters that are always good for starting an impromptu singing session.
Jon Meyer decided to replace the bridge with a piece of rubber and then proceeded to wedge a rubber eraser underneath the strings. This deadens the sound considerably, but that’s almost to its benefit.
Rather than the sonorous sound you’d get from a fine acoustic guitar, the sound is quite dampened and almost percussive. Sure, it carries a tone, and you can play melodic passages with it, but to my ears, it resembles a mid-range-voiced electric bass.
I’ve been on a recent Warp Records kick, so this has lent itself quite well to a bit of experimentation.
If you don’t want to go to the sound design lab to cook up some unusual guitar sounds on your own, Rubber Bridge Plucks provides a great alternative. It’s a beautiful-sounding and ready-made organic element that you can instantly implement in your productions.
Rubber Bridge Plucks sounds wonderfully intimate and subdued on its own, but you can enhance the sound with your favorite reverb and delay plugins if you want a more lush vibe.
The best thing is that despite appearing to be a Kontakt library at first glance, it is a standalone plugin of its own. This opens things up to everyone and frees up your energy from having to deal with the mercurial Native Access to get things working.
I had the fortune to test Rubber Bridge Plucks on my Windows PC and MacBook, and it works quite splendidly on both.
You’ll need a 64-bit host, but that’s fairly standard these days. Supported plugin formats are VST3, AAX, and AU. It is Silicon-native, but if you’re on an Intel Mac, you’re fine.
Download: Rubber Bridge Plucks (FREE / Pay-what-you-want)
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Last Updated on March 12, 2024 by Tomislav Zlatic.
