Unique Kontakt instruments built from the dusty hardware of the past.

We are a small enterprise sampling vintage musical hardware to make uniquely characterful Kontakt instruments. Our Kontakt libraries are built for all versions of Native Instruments Kontakt from 4.2.3 up, so you can run them on older versions of the software or the latest and greatest. Our mission is to take the synths, drum machines and keyboards of yesterday and bring them sparking and crackling back to life on our laboratory bench – before capturing their essence, bottling it in sampled .nki form, and sending it out for you to play with. From classic hardware of the past to unique sonic creations built from humming walls of old signal generators, if you’re looking for obscure and unusual signature sounds, you’ve come to the right place.

Our virtual instruments are built on meticulously recorded 24-bit samples of authentic old kit, taken to the next level with custom interfaces, clever scripting and tons of added functionality. We love our dusty old boxes, and hope you will too.

An example of how we sample vintage synthesisers and turn them into software virtual instruments. On the left, the original Jennings Univox; on the right, our Kontakt user interface for the same instrument

“Kontakt instruments don’t get much more esoteric than this. Bursting with warmth, crackle and analogue life… uniquely evocative”

Computer Music magazine rate our software instruments as excellent!

Computer Music Magazine

“Rhythmic Robot are a small outfit dedicated to breathing life into the strange and the obscure… impeccably sampled

Sound on Sound magazine review our Native Instruments Kontakt Instruments

Sound on Sound magazine

“Rhythmic Robot specialise in building software so vintage you can smell the dust in the code… a unique flavour from a bygone era”

Future Music magazine (technique and technology for making music) describe our Kontakt instruments

 – Future Music magazine

Vintage analogue synths, early digital instruments

The strides music technology has taken in the past few decades have put fully-featured recording studios within the reach of anyone with a home computer. But all too often, when we create tracks “in the box” using a DAW we find that they lack some of the warmth and organic texture that tends to characterise vintage musical hardware. How often have you heard people say that software instruments don’t compare to the real thing, or that soft synths sound too sterile or cold compared to genuine analogue keyboards? Our mission here at Rhythmic Robot is to change that perception, by capturing all the quirky, erratic, unstable character of choice vintage machines – and then putting it right there in your DAW in Kontakt form.

Give your tracks some warmth

Whether your musical taste is fully contemporary or vintage-flavoured, our sampled instruments aim to give you a more organic, left-field, unusual edge to your sound. We specialise in old analogue synthesisers, keyboards and drum machines, quirky acoustic instruments, and early low-bit-depth digital machines. These are lovingly sampled in our laboratory and crafted into Kontakt versions that use all the user interface and scripting possibilities of the Kontakt framework to give you uniquely responsive and musical libraries, right there in your DAW. We even have some Kontakt freeware to give you a taste of our style. Our libraries are used by top musicians around the world in all kinds of genres. We like to think of them as the antidote to “cold” digital sounds!

Find your way around our Kontakt libraries…

The Laboratory – for unique, original Kontakt instruments created from a variety of obscure and peculiar musical sources. Go here for unusual music-making tools to inspire your creativity.

The Keyboard Vault – for recreations of classic vintage hardware keys, synths and acoustic instruments. This is where you’ll find everything from organs to synths to string machines. If it’s real, and it has keys, chances are it’s found its way in here.

The Beat Room – for vintage analogue and digital Kontakt drum machines. Here we have software versions of some drum classics, plus more unusual oddities, in both analogue and low-bit-depth digital flavours.

The NanoMod enclosure – this houses our growing collection of NanoMods, tiny inexpensive Kontakt modular synths and drum boxes. With a lot of creative control packed into a small, powerful footprint, NanoMods are a one-stop-shop for cool tones.

Mongo’s Cupboard – for everything that doesn’t fit in the other categories. Downright strange stuff. Tread carefully…

We also curate a small but growing collection of free Kontakt instruments, to which you’re welcome to help yourself 🙂 And if you’re a fan of the factory patches of keyboards past, check out our PatchVault collection, at only 20c a sound!

Our instruments all require Native Instruments Kontakt (version 4.2.3 or later) to run; you can find out more details on the FAQ page. Kontakt is included in NI Komplete. We also sell our instruments on KontaktHub (you can find them here) and KVR’s Marketplace if you’re fans of those sites. And if you want hints on who else we think is cool in the world of Kontakt libraries, be sure to check out our list of indie Kontakt developers!