Kalimba

About

The Kalimba is a modernized version of the ancient African Mbira, also often called a thumb piano. It has a humble, melodious percussive plucking sound with a marimba-like warmth and tonal body. It is often used in conjunction with pianos and other tuned percussion instruments to add a sharper attack and playfulness to the sound. Our instruments were made of wood and coconut shell, with hammered steel tines suspended over their sound holes. The notes span about an octave and a half for the smaller of our two instruments and over two octaves for the larger kalimba. We recorded kalimbas in 3 different environments: Close and Dry in our studio; at medium distance in a small bright chamber; and in a large, long linear hall, at both close (1 meter) and far (15 meters) microphone distances. We call our long hall “The Bunker”, because that’s exactly what it really is – a deep underground World War 1-era artillery bunker. It’s one of our favorite secret locations, used for some parts of the Rust 2 library and several other instruments in our collection. The dry recording was done with a stereo pair of large-diaphragm condensers at 2 inches away in a very dry space. You’ll hear a little bit of wood scuffing and creaking. We think those elements help to give the instruments a truer life-like sound and feel. For Kalimba 3.0, we remastered the samples, inserted them into our efficient four-layer modular template, and created brand new ambient pads and soundscapes from the raw source content. We also designed 20 new custom FX presets to give you instant inspiration for your next film/video game score, soundtrack or music composition.

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