Bizarre Sitar

https://soundcloud.com/soundiron/sets/bizarre-sitar   [split] About Contents Kontakt Format Specifications   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. Intended as more decoration than instrument, we feel this little guy has been highly underestimated. Although soft-spoken and possessing fewer strings than normal (5 main and 6 sympathetic), all this "baby" sitar needed was someone to listen closely. And we did. Very close. 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. In addition, we've also included individual string plucks for lead lines and accents. The first string on the sitar was recorded in several different tunings with multiple velocity layers. The natural tendency of this instrument is for the pitch to be slightly sharp on the initial attack and bend down gently over time. The effect is increased in the higher velocity layers.Special combo patches give you both plucks in the high end and strums in the low-end for easy playability. Also included are a number of effects (fret scrapes, mutes, etc.), staccato bowing, tremolo bowing and sustained bowing. Though not traditionally bowed, we decided to include several bonus patches of bowed sitar: sustain, staccato, and tremolo. The tremolo patch features an "intensity" knob to adjust through three different intensity layers and a "Speed" knob to adjust the playback speed of the tremolo samples. This allows you to more closely match a specific tempo or crank it up and go crazy. There are also a number of sound designed ambient drones sculpted entirely from the recorded source material. All of these things combine with our custom front panel performance controls and extended DSP FX and arpeggiation systems to make this an extremely flexible and versatile virtual instrument.   Bowed (staccato, tremolo and sustains) Plucked (10x rr, 5-6 velocities) Strummed (10x rr, 4-8 velocities) FX (includes mutes, scrapes and other special effects) All plucked, strummed, bowed and ambience patches are tuned and spread across the entire keyboard range in Kontakt. The FX section provides 7 preset patches with specially dialed in effects to demonstrate the power of our custom controls, convolution reverb impulses and pre-loaded effects. Also included are fret scrapes, strum mutes and other effects. Also included is a set of ambient drone patches created from bizarre sitar source material. There are four master patches with a Pro-53 filter engaged and assigned to the modwheel. A cross-fade patch is included to blend between the first three ambiences (cross-fade assigned to the modwheel by default). Several presets also include our Uberpeggiator system, which allows both simple and complex free-form and rule-based arpeggios and step sequences.   You’ll need the full retail version of Kontakt 3.5 or later to use the nki presets in this libary. We've also included legacy K4 versions of the main presets as well for Kontakt 4 users. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument / software sampler platform. Learn more about Kontakt by Clicking Here Check out screenshots of our custom graphical user interface for Kontakt in the image gallery above. They provide a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode. This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library. However, the sample directories are fully accessible to allow user customization, import and mapping into 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, or import this library into the Kontakt database and Quickload tools for easy navigation, loading and organization.   Product Specs 1.69 GB installed 597 Samples 25 instrument presets 24 bit / 44.1kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples Format(s): Kontakt 3.5 .nki and pcm .wav Unlocked Kontakt presets and wav samples to allow user customization Includes a bonus collection of custom sound-designed ambiences, drones and special FX presets, as well as some of our favorite custom convolution reverb impulses and an advanced Kontakt user interface with full automation support. Documentation Click here for English pdf manual System Requirements The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 3.5 (or later) 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 XP or higher. Mac OSX 10.6 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.