Alto Xylophone

Alto Xylophone is a deeply sampled Orff tuned percussion instrument primarily found in elementary music classrooms, measuring at just over two feet long. It has a warm plunky tone and fast decay, with 13 rosewood bars laid in a diatonic C major scale from C4 - A5. We used felt mallets to capture each note, then recorded glisses and percussive knocks. We also sampled two soprano xylophones an octave higher: One has 13 notes (C5-A6) with a rounded playful timbre, while the other has 12 notes (C5-G6) with a crisp biting tone, performed with mallets and wooden cube hammers.

All three xylophones were recorded in a dry studio using two microphone positions, with 10 round robin and up to 14 velocity layers per note. After that, we expanded these natural wooden tones with 20 ambient organic soundscapes and 20 custom FX presets to kickstart your creative exploration. Alto Xylophone fits comfortably in any genre from horror to jazz, and it's ready to bring acoustic percussive accents to your next composition.

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.

Listen to demos of Alto Xylophone on Soundcloud

Product Specs:

• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format.
• Alto xylophone and two soprano xylophones, tuned + untuned percussion & FX in two mic positions.
• 20 Ambience patches created from the source content.
• 24-bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM WAV samples.
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets.
• 14,129 Stereo WAV files.
• 3.1 GB installed.
• Flexible and intuitive multi-layer user interface controls, with LFO, filter, glide, and arpeggiator.
• Full FX rack with convolution reverb with custom rooms, halls, chambers & FX environments.

{See video at top of page}