I'm very pleased to announce Sticks & Stones - Vietnamese Lithophone for Kontakt (full). Sampled in a top studio in the heart of Hanoi by Vietnamese lithophone specialist Ngoc Tran, this one is a bit different - you can think of to as a glockenspiel that goes to 11, but it's so much more than.
Why Vietnam?
Lithophones, instruments made from stone, are some of the earliest musical instruments made, and some of the oldest known have been found in Vietnam, where the stone instrument tradition is still alive today, with lithophones playing an important role in traditional Vietnamese music performed across the country every day.
To capture as much detail as possible, we recorded with no fewer than 8 microphones mixed into four different perspectives: under, close, mid and far. We captured hits and rolls with both traditional hard mallets and non-traditional soft felt mallets. The flexible articulation switching system makes it easy to perform realistic lines on the fly, jumping between hits and rolls the way a real player would. You can have individual ADSR controls for hits and rolls, and even choose to accent the rolls with a velocity sensitive hit. The rolls themselves have been carefully edited to allow buttery smooth crossfading between the three dynamic layers, for ultimate expressivity and realism.
You also get some resonant rubs, with a lovely constant pitch, and you can crossfade seamlessly between 3 different rubbing speeds. To round out the collection we also include some real, pentatonic glissandos up and down the instrument, playable on any root note.
Sticks & Stones is available now, with an intro price of just $19 until June 14 (reg. $29). It requires the full version of NI Kontakt 6.7.1 or later.
