Hopkin Instrumentarium: Aquaalt
Aquaalt is an experimental creation from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: A unique Lute with a steel bowl resonator. The bridge delivers string vibrations directly to the bowl’s flat bottom. As the strings sound, water moves in the bowl, creating unusual, dreamy sounds.
Aquaalt is an experimental custom creation from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: A unique Lute with a steel bowl resonator. This handcrafted contraption’s bridge delivers the string vibrations directly to the bowl’s flat bottom. As the strings sound, a small amount of water moves in the bowl, causing ever-changing resonances and creating unusual, dreamy sounds. Made of wood and metal, Aquaalt has a richly acoustic essence that resounds brightly through each note. With the body mounted on a swaying stand, the player can rock the lute to keep the water in the bowl moving. It can be played by plucking or bowing, occasionally with a slide to vary the string pitches.
We've faithfully sampled every interesting sound we could get out of this water lute, with two stereo mic positions: Close, and direct line in. Plucks, Bow Long, Bow Short, Bow Sul Ponticello, and Glisses up and down are available in all four layers to easily mix and match. With up to 8x round robin and 6 velocity layers per note, you’ll be swimming in beautiful timbres in no time. We've also included a wide selection of custom FX presets and plenty of our signature sound-designed ambient content, crafted from the raw acoustic source to give you complete creative freedom.
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Artist
Bart Hopkin [website] [music] [amazon]
Bart Hopkin has been active in many facets of music-making, including instrument building, performing and recording, composition, arrangement, education, and ethnomusicological research. Bart is also an established author, with ten books published on the subjects of instrument design and optimization.
Since 1974, Bart has been designing and constructing all the far-flung musical instruments he could dream up, with an emphasis on unusual and inventive acoustic art. The Hopkin Instrumentarium now has over 110 original creations and continues to grow every year. Soundiron is proud to bring you this inspiring and distinctive series of bespoke instruments not found anywhere else on earth.
Contents
The Kontakt interface includes a suite of automation-ready sound-shaping controls to give you total creative flexibility. You have control over swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more.
This library comes with an adaptable LFO system, with selectable LFO shape, modulation target parameter, speed, intensity, tempo-syncing and fade-in time. You can also apply your choice of 12 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. We’ve included a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance.
The interface is rounded-out by our modular FX rack panel, with 27 different DSP effect modules that you can assign in any of 8 available slots, in any order that you wish. You’ll find classic phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ, rotator and so much more. The Reverb effect includes our favorite convolution reverb impulse responses, including 99 different rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor environments, plus another 40 custom FX impulses to radically transform the sound and open up whole new worlds of musical possibility. We’ve added a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started!
Kontakt Format
This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 6.2.2 or later. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform. You can view screenshots of this library's custom graphical user interface in the image gallery above. This library is packed with features to provide you a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode. Learn more about Kontakt by Clicking Here.
This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats. The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.
Product Specs
- Water Lute Plucks, Bowed, and Gliss articulations in two mic positions: Close, Direct line in
- 20 ambient pads and evolving drones created from the source content
- 21 Powerful Kontakt .nki instrument presets
- 5,820 stereo samples in unlocked .WAV format
- 15 GB Installed
- Made for the full retail version of Kontakt (version 6.2.2+)
Documentation
System Requirements
The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 6.2.2+ is required to use .nki instrument presets included in this library. The free Kontakt "Player" and "Add Library" import process do not support this standard open-format Kontakt library. Windows 7 or higher. Mac OSX 10.12 or higher. Dual Core CPU, 2 GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.
Note: This digital product is delivered as a download via the Amazon S3 cloud network. A broadband internet connection is required. Please see our Help Page for licensing information, download and installation instructions, tutorials and to read our End User Licensing Agreement before ordering. All sales are final.
Videos
Walkthrough: Hopkin Instrumentarium: Aquaalt
Composing With Hopkin Instrumentarium: Aquaalt
Bart Hopkin Performing With The Aquaalt
Reviews & Endorsements
"If your definition of world instruments leans on rare and unusual, then there's nothing quite like the Hopkin Instrumentarium Series by Soundiron. Sampling one-of-a-kind instruments created by master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin, we gain a new favorite with each release in the series."