12-Bit Crunch, a website for crate-digging producers and beatmakers, has released Jazz Machine, their début Kontakt Instrument. It's part sample-player and part chord-progression generator.
Conceptually think of it like this: imagine you're digging for vinyl and you find some sort of holy-grail library record that has 300 open chords played on various cool vintage instruments. 'Jazz Machine' is like a sampler patch with all those crackly chords ripped, pre-loaded and ready to lay some drums under.
Depending on which octave you're playing in, you'll hear a different chord flavour. From bottom to top you have Major 7, Minor 7, 13, ♭13, 7#9, Sus and m7♭5. That's 84 different chords.
On the fly you can switch between 4 vintage instruments:
- A Challen Upright Piano
- A '66 Epiphone Casino Electric Guitar
- A Rhodes home piano (i.e a '73 mkI).
- A Deagan Vibraphone
12-Bit Crunch say "If you're new to music, you'll be sounding like a real jazz cat in no time. If you're a fully fledged keyboard player, we guarantee you'll come up with some new progressions, as Jazz Machine's 'one-finger-per-chord' method requires a totally different approach to playing a regular keyboard patch."
Aside from all these chords, you also have 4 different articulations to play: Straight, Chops (attack trimmed off), Rakes and Melody top-notes.
Price: £29.99
Please note the system requirements, there are no refunds if your Kontakt version is too old:
- Native Instruments Kontakt 5.6.5 or higher (full-version only).
- Mac: OS X 10.11, macOS 10.12 or 10.13 (latest update), i5.
- Windows: Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10 (latest Service Pack, 32/64-bit) Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 64 X2.