Saturday, June 21, 2014

Aqualignum for Alchemy released on patchpool





The sound library Aqualignum combines waterphone samples from my MachFive library
Scattered Entity Vol. 1 with original oud samples, an arab string instrument especially multisampled for this library.

The mysterious and haunting tones of the waterphone meet the warm embracing string sounds of the orient. Tradition melds with futurism, water, wood and metal compose Aqualignum. This library contains 56 patches (including 1 variation) making use of 1.76 GB of samples, resynthesized sounds and electronic derivatives. Multisampled string instruments derived from the oud with up to 5 velocity layers and 3x round robin (variations per sample), calm and dark drones, beautiful and fragile waterphone pads, ominous and evocative soundscapes, futuristic textures and metallic percussion instruments are contained in this set.

The oud articulations include plectrum-picked strings (played with a special oud plectrum), finger-plucked vibrato tones, up and down slides, tremoli, bowed notes (violin bow), scraped strings and some phrases.

The waterphone was played with two differently sized bows creating all kinds of arpeggio textures with water-modulated decay-phases, scraping and moaning metal sounds, long sustained notes played with a violin bow for creating multisampled tonal pad sounds and the instrument was beaten with various beaters for metallic percussion sounds and bass tones.

As in all my soundsets for Alchemy I make extensive use of Alchemy's complex modulation possibilities and filters, often intermodulating LFOs/MSEGs/sequencers with each other and assigning numerous parameters to a single Performance Controller. This enables the user to deeply interact with the sounds and shape it according to his/her needs and preferences. The patches can also serve as a starting point for the user's own creations when loading new samples into them and then using the pre-assigned controllers and snapshots in the Remix Pad.

All samples in this library were recorded with 3 Neumann microphones in L-C-R in 48 Khz/24 Bit, a U87 as the center mic - a stereo set of KM 184 for L-R, the microphone signals of all oud samples were phase-aligned which improves the stereo picture, enhances the transparency of the sound and makes for snappier transients.

You can view/download the PDF for Aqualignum with more details, the licence agreement and the patch list including playing tips and deteiled descriptions for each patch here.