Hopkin Intrumentarium: Flat Gongs

About

Hopkin Flat Gongs is an experimental custom creation from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: A three and a half octave set of flat aluminum disks, each hammered at the center for fine tuning and tone quality. Unlike Asian gongs, these aluminum flat gongs are designed to produce very clear pitch, with the prominent modes tuned to octave relationships so the pitch is unambiguous. The largest gong has a diameter of 30”, and produces a booming C2 pitch. The smallest is just under 7” and produces a G5. The tone is dreamy and ethereal, with a floating, swelling presence. We've faithfully sampled every interesting sound we could get out of these gongs, with two stereo mic positions: Contact mics, and mixed mics. Soft mallet center strikes, hard mallet center strikes, hard mallet edge strikes, knocks, taps, rubs and scrapes are all easily accessible with our four layer GUI. With up to 8x round robin and 8 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. 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!