Zitherette

About

This enchanting little instrument is a simple 8-string fretless zither, roughly 12 x 20 inches in size. Zithers are a broad family of hollow-bodied string instruments common throughout all of Europe and Asia. Variants range from the dulcimer to the Koto, with countless other ?avors unique to each region and culture. Common to each of them is the arrangement of multiple strings over a neck-less soundbox. The oldest known variant of the zither family dates back to 4th century B.C China. Our particular hand-held zither has a smooth, dark tone, with a clean biting attack and long, natural decay. At it's softest, it has a pristine, almost harp-like sound, while the hardest notes bend deeply at the attack, with a pronounced twang. We chose a pluck articulation and captured it very close and dry, in wide stereo. As always, we’ve packed our custom user interface with lots of great sound-shaping controls that give you the ?exibility to warp the shape in many ways. You have control over Volume Swell, Attack, Release, Transient Offset, Vibrato, Filters, Tuning, articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more.

Contents

We sampled our little zither extensively, as we do with all of our instruments. Each string has an average of 8 velocity layers, with 4 round-robin variations per layer. We also captured palm mute release triggers, with 2 velocities and 4 round robins per note. The full pluck and palm mute articulations are chromatically mapped with all 8 notes. In addition, each individual note is accessible as a single articulation, mapped to it’s root key and chromatically spread up and down the entire range. We created a variety of custom sound-designed FX patches, extending the creative possibilities even further.

Product Specs