Kalimba

The Kalimba, also called a "Thumb Piano," it's a modernized version of the African mbira. Ours has a small balsa woos and coconut shell, with 7 steel tines suspended over a sound hole. The notes span about an octave and a half. It's tuned with a screwdriver and since all of the tines share the same bridge, accurate and stable tuning is more or less impossible.

We recorded it in 3 different environments: dry/close, small bright hall and large, smooth hall. The dry recording was done with a stereo pair of large diaphragm condensers at 2 inches away in a very dry space. You'll hear a little bit of wood scuffing and creaking. We think those elements help stitch the sound together into a believable performance. We've kept the attacks rather tight. While that means you lose some of the natural finger scuffing at the start of the notes, you get a cleaner tone and can play much tighter melodies and more accurate and consistent rhythms. There's no way you could physically play a real Kalimba as quickly, nimbly and tightly as you'll be able to play ours. It would quickly fall out of tune, fumble from your hands and generally sound like a mess.

We recorded two mic distances in the bunker: 2 feet away and 50 feet away. The samples' reverb decay is linked to ADSR sustain, so that it fully rings out if you hold a note down or hold down a sustain pedal. You'll notice that the reflections go on for quite awhile.

The final set is actually an older Kalimba recording we did. This one had 12 tines, but was close to the same physical size as our 7 tine Kalimba. We recorded it in a small, bright hall from about 10 feet away with a pair of small diaphragm condensers. We figured we'd just throw it in this library for the hell of it. There's only one velocity layer, but each note has 8 round robin variations. It's tuned over 2 octaves.

• Available by Direct Download or DVD.
• 1,036 Samples (standard PCM wav).
• 13 .nki files (unlocked format).
• 601 MB installed.

Native Instruments Kontakt version 3.5 or 4 full retail version of Kontakt required to use all .nki instrument program presets included in this library. The free Kontakt "Player" does not support this library.