Hopkin Instrumentarium: Aquaalt

About

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.

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!

Product Specs