Garritan has announced a new World Instrument library presenting a comprehensive collection of expressive and exotic instruments from around the world.

The Garritan World Instrument collection offers a large variety of beautifully sampled flutes – Native American flutes, bamboo flues, Irish flutes, Chinese and Japanese flutes, Indian flutes, clay flutes, pan flutes, nose flutes and many other exotic winds from around the globe. Included is a dynamic array of pitched and un-pitched percussion instruments – Taiko drums, Gamelan ensemble, Log drums, tablas, ewe drums, balaphon, Udu drum, talking drum, steel drums, an array of Latin percussion, and much more. There are numerous types of plucked and bowed strings, including: Indian Sitars, Japanese koto and shamisen, African kora, Middle Eastern oud and santoor, and erhu. A variety of other instruments include didgeridoo, Middle Eastern reed instruments, accordions, Tibetan bowls, and harmonium, to name just a few.

The Garritan World Instruments Library is designed with playability and expressive control in mind. It features controls for dynamics, vibrato, tongue/slur techniques, airflow, auto legato, auto-variability, auto-portamento, trills and more – to make these samples musical, realistic and expressive. There is even support for wind controllers (like the Akai EWI).

Powered by the powerful ARIA playback engine (developed by Plogue Technologies), the Garritan World Instruments will work on a single computer, laptop and even some netbooks, Mac OS X or Windows platform, standalone, or plug-in for all major sequencers (VST, AU, RTAS), works with Finale 2009 and with other supported notation programs. Garritan World Instruments can transform your computer into an ethnomusicologist's dream, according to Garritan.

A unique feature of the Garritan World instruments is its support for Scala files to adjust to different temperaments and tunings. While many ethnic sample libraries are equal temperament based on Western tuning, Garritan World Instruments supports Scala, a standard file format for musical tunings supporting hundreds of different scales. With Scala support, musicians can play an instrument in its truly authentic form quickly and easily.

Pricing & Availability

The Garritan World Instruments will be available soon (Q1 2009) as a download and later on DVD. And you will be able to download new ethnic instruments to add to your collection as they become available. Pricing will be announced upon release.