Tonehammer releases Riq Drum for Kontakt

Tonehammer has announced the releases of Riq Drum for Native Instruments' Kontakt.

Tonehammer says: "The riq (also spelled riqq or rik) is a type of Arabic hand drum. Riqs are part of a larger family of classical Middle Eastern instruments that incorporate an open shell frame drum drum with large metal jingles or discs. These specialized drums - including riqs, dafs, tars and mazhars - are featured heavily in traditional and modern Middle Eastern, Central Asian and Eastern European music. Rather than simply being an accompaniment or backing instrument, they can often take a lead or solo role. The jingles, rattles or rings are often played as a discreet component of the drum, along with a broad range of unique head and rim finger and hand articulations."

Tonehammer captured a pair of full-sized drums. The larger 15-inch "daf" drum is from Greece. It has steel rings and bearings and a deep, smooth tone. The slightly smaller 13" riq is from Egypt and has large flat tin discs. Tonehammer also captured a toy frame drum that was modified into a miniature riq, by adding a series of fine sand-filled rattles. Tonehammer explore over 60 finger, hand, mallet, stick and brush articulations, including more than 2300 samples. They also included a very large collection of ambient droning and organi-synth percussion instruments, created entirely through heavily manipulating the source recordings for this library.

Lastly, Tonehammer created a "wet" version of some core patches, using their own custom-captured convolution impulses. A selection of these impulses are includes in the library, for easy use with most major stereo .wav compatible convolution plug-ins.

Riq Drum is available for download now for a special introductory price of $39. The price goes up to $49 after February 12th, 2010.

Note: Native Instruments Kontakt 2/3/4 full retail version required. The free Kontakt Player does not support this library.