Hopkin Instrumentarium: Rumba Boxes

About

Rumba Boxes is a creative assortment of large wooden bass kalimbas from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin. This library features 2 unique handcrafted instruments with memorable shapes and mechanics. They have a richly acoustic essence that resounds brightly through each note. We've included a wide spectrum of playable articulations, sound-design textures, pads, drones, and multiple microphone options to give you fresh musical inspiration. Rumba Box is a name used in the English-speaking Caribbean for bass kalimba. Typically the player sits on the box, reaching down between his legs to pluck the tines. Most are chromatic, with tines made of spring-tempered steel rods or bars. Some tines have been reshaped to adjust the tuning of the most prominent overtone relative to the fundamental, making a more coherent tone quality. Some have rattles on the tines. The rattles bring out the re-tuned overtone and give a distinctive edge to the tone. Rumba Box includes plucks, picks, and percussion. Arby McCone is a rumba-box/cajón/percussion-gadgetry agglomeration. Originally it was just a rumba box, but it also worked very nicely as a cajón — a wooden box made to sound good under a variety of hand-percussion strokes. Arby is aided by sympathetic resonance in the tines, which greatly enriches certain kinds of percussion strokes. Bart Hopkin then attached more percussive sound-makers, including spring-mounted metallic sounds & clave sounds, shekere-type beads, shakers, rattletines, and a couple of bells. This thing is really fun to play. Arby McCone includes plucks, mallets, percussive taps, knocks, slaps, and a variety of aux percussion. We've faithfully sampled every interesting sound we could get out of these instruments, with two stereo mic positions. Also included is 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. We've also included 20 unique sound-designed custom FX presets to give you lots of creative options. 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 18 different DSP effect modules that you can assign in any of 10 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