Glass Beaker is built around the idea that music doesn’t have to begin with formal training, specialist instruments, or expensive tools. It comes from working directly with sound — placing a microphone in front of a simple object and exploring what happens through touch, movement, and experimentation. The resulting tone feels familiar but resists easy identification, sitting somewhere between a glockenspiel and a celeste without ever fully being either. Glass Beaker acts as an invitation to step away from prescribed methods, to try things, discard them, and arrive at something personal. It treats experimentation as a way of finding sounds that are authentic to you and ultimately original.
Christian recorded these beakers at Gorbals Sound in Glasgow, using an XY pair and a spaced pair of Neumann Km184s and a close miked Neumann U87.
Now let’s dive into what the GUI has to offer. As ever it’s our intuitive Vaults GUI. The first large dial is CHORUS. This effect adds depth, warmth, stereo width, and a shimmering, “watery” quality to the glasses. The second large dial is EXPRESSION which gives you finer control over the expressive potential of the glasses.
The smaller dials are more concentrated FX; the first being LPF, or Low Pass Filter, which gradually cuts a lot of the high end information from the glasses, giving them a haunting, distant quality. The next one along is DELAY, which is an enveloping stereo delay. We also have REVERB: a lush convolution reverb, which you can dial from fully dry to fully wet. Our final small dial is CRYSTALLISER, which is a kind of granular synthesis effect. It can be dialled up for a really sparkly, ethereal effect or dialled down a bit for a subtle ambient bed.
We hope this sample library sparks your imagination and nudges you toward crafting an evocative instrument from something as primitive as a glass. You might just surprise yourself with the range of timbres and moods it can reveal.