Kalimba 3.0

An African Mbira Thumb Tuned Percussion Library For Kontakt

The Kalimba is a modernized version of the ancient African Mbira, also often called a thumb piano. It has a humble, melodious percussive plucking sound with a marimba-like warmth and tonal body. It is often used in conjunction with pianos and other tuned percussion instruments to add a sharper attack and playfulness to the sound. The instruments were made of wood and coconut shell, with hammered steel tines suspended over their sound holes. The notes span about an octave and a half for the smaller of our two instruments and over two octaves for the larger kalimba.

The Kalimba was recorded in 3 different environments: Close and Dry in a studio; at medium distance in a small bright chamber; and in a large, long linear hall, at both close (1 meter) and far (15 meters) microphone distances. The space is called “The Bunker”, because that’s exactly what it really is – a deep underground World War 1-era artillery bunker. You can also shape the room decay time easily with integrated Release control, turning the massive hall into a tight room with the twist of a knob. Each tine was sampled with up to 11 dynamic velocity layers with up to 10X round-robin variations each to give these instruments a truly life-like sound and playability.

The Kalimba library features 62 unique soundscapes, pads, atmospheres and drones to the library, each crafted by manipulating the source recordings. Their shared sonic character makes them an ideal accompaniment to the acoustic portion of the Kalimba library. All of it is wrapped up in a customizable performance control system, with lots of sound-shaping tools, arpeggiation sequencing, and flexible DSP effects, such as convolution, EQ, resonant filter, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, amp and speaker simulation, distortion and compression.

Originally released by Tonehammer in 2009, This new version 3.0 adds 62 entirely new custom ambiances and atmospheric pads, a fully custom designed graphical interface with multi-layer sound blending and instrument loading, along with a complete set of deep performance shaping, mapping and tuning options and a comprehensive DSP multi-effects rack with dozens of custom convolution reverb impulses.

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. Also included are 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 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. The customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. As well as this, included is 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 our 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 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. There is also a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started!

Features

• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• Kalimba plucks and strums in dry, chamber, and bunker environments
• 86 Ambience patches created from the source content
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 1,131 Stereo WAV files
• 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
• Mac OSX 10.9 or higher
• Dual Core CPU, 2 GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.

Important Notes: 

• The full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or above is required to run this software.
• This software will not function in full within the FREE Kontakt Player engine and will only be available in DEMO mode.