Hopkin Instrumentarium: Icicles & Pop Ice

About

Icicles & Pop Ice are a pair of distinct string instruments that deliver a bright, crystalline tone, thanks to their short, highly tensioned strings and a rigid stainless-steel sheet soundboard. Suspended directly from the strings, the sheet creates a long, shimmering tail of reverberation, enriching each note with depth and complexity. Icicles features 26 short string segments, each vibrating in unison with the resonant stainless-steel sheet. The result is a pure, shimmering sound that evolves organically with every pluck. Pop Ice takes this further by introducing a thin Styrofoam sheet, placed in direct contact with the strings. This secondary soundboard produces a sharp, percussive pop when plucked, followed by the sustained resonance of the stainless-steel sheet, adding a striking contrast to the tone. In this library, we’ve captured the full sonic spectrum of both instruments. You’ll find three main articulations: pure plucked-string sounds, percussive strikes, and glisses. With two microphone perspectives, up to 8x round robin, and 6 velocity layers per note, you’ll have complete control over the expressive potential of Icicles & Pop Ice. We’ve also included 20 custom FX presets and atmospheric sound design content, giving you even more creative freedom to shape these resonant instruments into something entirely new.

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!