String Bundle

Struck Grand Piano

The Struck Grand Piano is an extraordinary instrument collection that delves deep into the fine art of piano abuse. This 9 GB collection explores all of the ways a 1926 Steinway Model L parlor grand piano can be "played" from the far side of the hammer. You'll find well over 4000 samples of pick plucks, steel hammers, finger mutes, harmonics, slides, mallets, glisses, scrapes and otherworldly sustaining effects over the full note range. This collection shines as equal part stringed/tuned percussion and super-harp/mega-zither with a huge key range and rich, complex musical character.

The Struck Grand features 3 extraordinary new control systems that will unlock new creative and production possibilities. The new "Layer Builder" system let's you easily create an endless variety of unique complex sonic flavors, with total control over up to 12 independent layers of sound. Let us re-invent your whole concept of tuned percussion with the simple turn of a dial. The library also includes a bonus selection of real-world space and FX convolution impulses and ambient drones, tonal pads and evolving soundscapes, all with custom morphing and dual-layer mix control.

Twine Bass

The Twine Bass is composed of a pair of very special instruments: a modified cello and a traditional Kenyan fretless stringed instrument called a Bolon. We strung the cello with rough hemp twine in various tunings and played it as a stand-up bass. The resulting sounds are deeply sonorous, with rich, warm resonance, powerful low end and a woody, soft quality. The bolon has a cow's horn for a neck and a gourd as a body, with four twine strings and a goat-skin resonating head that the strings pass directly through. In addition to deep-sampling the strings with 10x round-robin and up to 14 velocity layers, we sampled a number of other sounds such as legato slides, string mutes, tuning peg pluck/twists, finger taps and brushes, and other percussive effects on the instrument's body.

This unique custom instrument collection features our brand new, exclusive glissando/chord generator. This powerful tool gives you deep control over a wide variety of chord and glissando functions such as speed, range, scale, stroke direction, string dynamics, humanization and more. You can choose from 26 different chords and 13 different scales. The number of strings is adjustable from 1 to 24 in Glissando mode and 1 to 6 in "guitar" Strum mode. There is also a bank of 16 assignable key-switches for instant access to your favorite selection of chords.

Street Erhu

The Street Erhu is a truly unique live-performance phrase library featuring over 4600 high-quality traditional Chinese Erhu violin phrases. Weighing in at over 6 GB of content, this collection covers 8 different Erhu violins, ranging from bass to treble and in a variety of tunings. This one-of-a-kind library combines the authenticity of an emotive street musician with granular deep sampling fully controllable through our powerful custom user interface.

This Street Erhu features 83 presets for Kontakt. There are 1328 bass erhu, 2543 mid-range erhu and 341 treble erhu phrases recorded in a dry studio environment, plus 398 bowing and fingering sfx. There are also 12 additional songs recorded live on busy city streets and 40 songs recorded in a bustling underground subway station. We've also included 48 ambiences created from the source material allowing users to experiment with a wide range of soundscapes and FX. As always there is a range of automatable LFO, EQ, filter, custom convolution and sound-shaping systems to expand on the creative possibilities that this library offers.

Bizarre Sitar

The Bizarre Sitar may not seem so strange at first glance. It has most of the elements found on any other sitar, with it's traditional gourd body, both main playable strings and sympathetic resonating strings, parda (adjustable curved frets), kunti (tuning pegs), dandi (neck), ghoraj (main bridge) all complete with orante hand-painted accents. At just over 24" in length, however, this little beauty is barely half the size of a standard sitar. Simply being small isn't bizarre by any means, but what is bizarre is how it can achieve such a lush, full-bodied sound while being so small.

At the heart of our Bizarre Sitar library are the strumming patches. Two main strumming tunings are included, a fifth and and octave/unison. An onboard "Speed" knob (MIDI assignable and defaulted to the modwheel) allows you to sculpt the speed of the individual strum from very tight, fast strums to slower, plucky strums. The unison articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in several octaves to give a very full sound. The fifth articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in fifths, similar to the Pancham-Kharaj tuning popularized by Ravi Shankar. By recording several different strumming speeds for both the fifth and the unison strumming articulations, this library allows you to create realistic sounding strums by adjusting the speed in real-time. The strums are tuned and spread across the entire keyboard, providing deep, droning sounds in the low end and sharp, mandolin-like plucks in the high end.

Frendo

Frendo is a custom-built Soundiron instrument. We created this monster by stringing bailing wire around and through through steel plates and bolts, over galvanize steel piping and across wood planks. It was meant to suffer. You can help it by mistreating it in horrible ways with screwdrivers, bows, drum sticks, mallets and fingers. The instrument holds a vast amount of otherworldly sounds, which is ideal for composers looking for new disturbing, horror-like textures for their scores. Frendo is partially a mallet instrument, recorded with wooden and rubber mallets, but is also a more traditional string instrument, since we recorded finger plucks and bows. It's the sound of Satan's cello, weeping softly for your burning soul.

Made of knotty pine, rusted steel bailing wire, eye bolts, hooks, deck screws, hurricane brackets and an old 24" bass drum, this 5-stringed son of a bitch was 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. The body had a 2"6 spine and two separate body segments to allow torquing and bending while the instrument was played. It was strung with black iron bailing wire, wound over galvanized steel angle brackets and plates and through heavy gauge eye bolts that we used as tuners, by way of a pipe wrench.

Zitherette

The Zitherette is a simple 8-string fretless zither, roughly 12 x 20 inches in size. Zithers are a broad family of hollow-bodied string instruments common throughout all of Europe and Asia. Variants range from the dulcimer to the Koto, with countless other flavors unique to each region and culture. Common to each of them is the arrangement of multiple strings over a hollow body. The oldest known variant of the zither family dates back to 4th century B.C China, while new additions continue to spring up to this day. Our particular hand-held zither has steel strings, with a smooth, dark tone, with a clean biting attack and long, natural decay. At it’s softest, it has a pristine, almost harp-like sound, while the hardest notes bend deeply at the attack, with a pronounced twang.

We chose a pluck articulation and captured it very close and dry, in wide stereo. We sampled our little zither extensively, as we do with all of our instruments. Each string has an average of 8 velocity layers, with 4 round-robin variations per layer. We also captured palm mute release triggers, with 2 velocities and 4 round robins per note. We created a variety of presets, to allow maximum flexibility and intuitive playability. We also created an array of custom sound-designed fx patches, extending the creative possibilities even further. Lastly, we’ve created a “wet” version of most of the core patches with a convolution reverb effect preloaded. These "wet" patches feature select custom impulse responses recorded from some of our favorite locations.

Bowed Bucket Bass

The Bowed Bucket Bass is what happens when you hammer together an big fat instrument out of a 5 gallon plastic bucket, a wooden 4×4 beam, bass turners and cello strings. The bucket was fitted with tuning lugs and then holes were drilled out to allow individual strings to pass through, using the bottom wall as the bridge, so that sound projected outward and down. Then a 4×4 wooden beam was affixed to the bucket and the strings were then stretched up the heavy wooden neck, roughly nailed in place and hand -tuned. Remember that old string and paper cup trick from when you were a kid? Yeah, think bigger.

We bowed it, plucked it, struck it with drumsticks in a close, dry setting to get tons of tonality and then programmed it into a living, breathing self-contained bucket band. We then manipulated all that raw material to created a variety of playable atmospheric pads and ambiences to bring out the full creative potential of this rather odd contraption. Bowing the strings produces a surprisingly clean, yet rich and beefy sound, with plenty of growl and low end and a nice clear bite. It’s sound is a little similar to electric cello, but with a unique rawness and body. For our percussion, we simply banged on it like an idiot, with results just as you’d expect – plastic bucket drums. We captured various bowed articulations from both inside and outside of the bucket. We also plugged in our custom polyphonic Sim-legato and Uberpeggiator systems to some instruments, just for kicks. And of course, as a bonus, we’ve also created a variety of very cool lead, pad, ambient droning and FX presets to expand your creative options.