Concert Zither v2

The Sound of the Alps

The Zither is a stringed instrument, having many strings stretched across a thin, wooden soundbox. It is played by strumming or plucking the strings with fingers or a plec. The Zither is commonly found in Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, northwestern Croatia, and Germany's southern regions. The instrument became famous due to the charismatic central theme composed by Anton Karas for the 1949 film noir called "The Third Man".

The Zither instrument Cinematique are presenting is a Concert Zither. The strings are arranged as follows: 5 fretted melody strings, placed above a guitar-like fretboard, then 14 unfretted "accompaniment" strings; followed by 11 unfretted "bass" strings and finally 6 "contrabass" strings. The concert Zither has a rough and dirty sound often described as "mellow".

Cinematique have handled the Concert Zither harshly: They plucked, stroked and strummed all the strings to get every possible sound, noise and articulation the Zither can produce. Finally, they assembled 5 different patches. Firstly there are two main patches with all 36 strings recorded in 4 round robin variations and several (up to four) dynamic layers. Cinematique additionally recorded the 31 accompaniment strings in a muted variation. In detail, you get five articulations: Finger, Plec, Muted, Reverse, and Bow.

These notes were recorded with two different microphones: a large-diaphragm condenser pair and a classic dynamic microphone. To shape the sound, Cinematique added a complex script to achieve many variations of the Concert Zither. Besides the principal complex patches, they provide another 4 useful FX patches: glissando (controlled by the mod-wheel), rotary, drive and an octaver. Here you find a great assortment of rare and exceptional FX string sounds. 
Finally, they have included an arpeggiator and a step sequencer to add even more possibilities to this instrument. The Concert Zither is a perfect supplement to all the other Cinematique Strings instruments: rare and unique.

Update: With update 2.0, Cinematique now have a completely new instrument. Not only have they assembled all the individual nki files into one big instrument, but they've also recorded a new "finger" articulation, added more features and gave everything a new design.

Features

• Approximately 2100 samples
• 800 MB of compressed data
• Rare and unique alpine strings

System Requirements

• The FULL Version of Kontakt 5.8.1 or higher is required.

Important Notes:

• The FULL Version of Kontakt 5.8.1+ is required in order to use this instrument.
• You will be stuck in DEMO MODE if trying to use this instrument in the FREE Kontakt Player.