Our Bamboo Stick Ensemble is a powerful display of just how far you can take a simple musical ingredient like bamboo poles. By themselves, they provide a powerful clack when smashed together. But when (mis)treated just the right way, they also generate outstanding percussive effects and tonal sustains.

We took the finest 6'-8' x 2" bamboo poles we could find and carefully sampled them in their natural state, as mighty epic percussion instruments. When striking and scraping a stone floor with them, the result is an interesting blend of aggressive slaps, clacks, screeches, drones and even howls. We recorded this library in one of our favorite lush tile and stone recording halls, with the specific goal of achieving the most massive and powerful epic percussion hall sound we could get.

The percussive impacts were produced by striking the bamboo poles against one another, often to the point of shattering. We recorded 10 round robin variations per velocity layer, with an average of 5 layers per note. The swooshes have a very rounded, whistling quality to them. They become tighter and more percussive as you move up their key range. The sustaining sounds were produced by dragging the end of the bamboo shafts against 6" square tile flooring in a large bright hall. The shafts were held almost vertically, with alternating soft and hard pressure as they were being dragged.

The included Convolution Reverb effect features 115 select custom impulse responses recorded from some of our favorite locations. Among those are also fx impulses which are more special effect than reverb.

• Available by Direct Download or DVD.
• 441 Samples (standard PCM wav).
• 27 .nki files (unlocked format).
• 393 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.