Hopkin Instrumentarium: Woodentines

Woodentines is a nuanced and expressive selection of wooden lamellaphones by master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin. Featuring 3 unique instruments with wildly different shapes and mechanics, the same crisp and yet ponderously watery wooden essence shines warmly through each one. It includes the Bamboo Idiomount, Big Wooden Kalimba and Woodkal, plus a special bonus instrument called Piezo Tongues.

Soundiron have included a range of playable articulations and multiple microphone/channel options to give you complete freedom. And in classic Soundiron tradition, they have also included sound-designed textures, pads and tones that take the concept beyond its material source and into the realm of pure imagination. They can be played, layered, modulated and blended along with the natural acoustic articulations to achieve and an endless array of new sonic combinations. This collection offers you a broad, flexible palette of musical colours and comes equipped with easy-to-use layer mixing, performance tools and special effects to spark your creativity.

The Instruments

Bamboo Idiomount is a round mbira-like bowl instrument with a hollow resonator cavity and two opposing rows of bamboo tines. It has a crisp, rich and raspy quality. It features 3 stereo mic positions: internal, close and room. It includes plucked notes and a percussive side slap articulation.

Big Wooden Kalimba, also known as the Wooden Idiomount, is a chromatic scale of large wooden tongues bridged over a large trapezoidal chamber. It has a lush and dreamy tone with deep bass. It features 2 stereo mic positions: close and room. It includes finger pluck and stick tap chromatic notes on the tongues, plus percussive taps, knocks and gliss effects.

The Woodkal, also known as Small Wood K, is a 3-octave scale of thin, flat wooden tongues bridged to a hollow irregular pentagonal resonance chamber. It has a tight, raspy pluck sound with a spacious openness and rich low end. It features 2 stereo mic positions: close and room. It includes finger plucks.

Piezo Tongues is an unusual electric instrument comprised of wooden blocks that clamp a rank of piezoelectric tape strips, each cut to vibrate at a specific frequency to create a chromatic scale. Each strip also acts as its own transducer. When played by plucking, they produce a dry, brisk "fwip" or "pop" in a distinct musical pitch. The instrument sounds almost like a musical pop-gun ensemble.

Soundiron have faithfully sampled tine plucks and percussive hand slaps on the instrument bodies, with two stereo mic positions. Also included is a wide selection of custom FX presets and plenty of Soundiron's signature sound-designed ambient content, crafted from the raw acoustic source to give you complete creative freedom.

The Artist - Bart Hopkin

Bart Hopkin has been active in many facets of music-making, including instrument building, performing and recording, composition, arrangement, education, and ethnomusicological research. Bart is also an established author, with ten books published on the subjects of instrument design and optimization.

Since 1974, Bart has been designing and constructing all the far-flung musical instruments he could dream up, with an emphasis on unusual and inventive acoustic art. The Hopkin Instrumentarium now has over 110 original creations and continues to grow every year. Soundiron is proud to bring you this inspiring and distinctive series of bespoke instruments not found anywhere else on earth.

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. Soundiron have 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 low-pass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. Soundiron's customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. Soundiron have 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 Soundiron's 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 Soundiron's favourite 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. Soundiron have added a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started!

Features

• 6 Master presets and 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 4 Unique Hand-crafted wooden lamellophones each with 2 mic positions
• Percussive knock effects, glisses and bonus ambient effects, pads and drones
• 10,280 Stereo Samples
• 1.50 GB Installed
• 24-bit, 48 kHz Stereo Lossless NCW Format for Kontakt presets
• 20 custom sound-designed FX and ambient presets
• 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

System Requirements

• Windows 7 or higher
• OSX 10.12 or higher
• Dual Core CPU, 3+ GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.

This Powered-By-Kontakt Player Edition is supported by the latest version of the free Kontakt Player (VST, AU, AAX) and the special “Libraries” rack.