Hopkin Instrumentarium: Rumba Boxes

Rumba Boxes is a creative assortment of large wooden bass kalimbas from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin. This library features 2 unique handcrafted instruments with memorable shapes and mechanics. They have a richly acoustic essence that resounds brightly through each note. We've included a wide spectrum of playable articulations, sound-design textures, pads, drones, and multiple microphone options to give you fresh musical inspiration.

Rumba Box is a name used in the English-speaking Caribbean for bass kalimba. Typically the player sits on the box, reaching down between his legs to pluck the tines. Most are chromatic, with tines made of spring-tempered steel rods or bars. Some tines have been reshaped to adjust the tuning of the most prominent overtone relative to the fundamental, making a more coherent tone quality. Some have rattles on the tines. The rattles bring out the re-tuned overtone and give a distinctive edge to the tone. Rumba Box includes plucks, picks, and percussion.

Arby McCone is a rumba-box/cajón/percussion-gadgetry agglomeration. Originally it was just a rumba box, but it also worked very nicely as a cajón — a wooden box made to sound good under a variety of hand-percussion strokes. Arby is aided by sympathetic resonance in the tines, which greatly enriches certain kinds of percussion strokes. Bart Hopkin then attached more percussive sound-makers, including spring-mounted metallic sounds & clave sounds, shekere-type beads, shakers, rattletines, and a couple of bells. This thing is really fun to play. Arby McCone includes plucks, mallets, percussive taps, knocks, slaps, and a variety of aux percussion.

We've faithfully sampled every interesting sound we could get out of these instruments, with two stereo mic positions. Also included is a wide selection of custom FX presets and plenty of our signature sound designed ambient content, crafted from the raw acoustic source to give you complete creative freedom.

Listen to demos of Rumba Boxes on our Soundcloud playlist

Product Specs:

• 4 Master presets and 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets.
• 2 Unique Hand-crafted Rumba Boxes each with 2 mic positions.
• Plucks, picks, hand percussion, aux percussion.
• 24-bit, 48 kHz Stereo Lossless NCW Format.
• 13,719 Stereo Samples.
• 7.13 GB Installed.
• Made for the free Kontakt Player (version 6+), Komplete Kontrol, all S-Series Keyboards and NKS software and hardware by Native Instruments.
• Works with the Kontakt "Libraries" browser and Native Access.

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