The Bizarre Sitar may not seem so strange at first glance. It has most of the elements found on any other sitar, with it's traditional gourd body, both main playable strings and sympathetic resonating strings, parda (adjustable curved frets), kunti (tuning pegs), dandi (neck), ghoraj (main bridge) all complete with orante hand-painted accents. At just over 24" in length, however, this little beauty is barely half the size of a standard sitar.

The main focus of this library is the strumming. The unison articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in several octaves to give a very full sounding strum. The fifth articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in fifths, similar to the Pancham-Kharaj tuning popularized by Ravi Shankar. By recording several different strumming speeds for both the fifth and the unison strumming articulations, this library allows you to create realistic sounding strums by adjusting the speed in real-time.

The pluck articulation is included for lead lines and accents. The first string on the sitar was recorded in several different tunings with multiple velocity layers. The natural tendency of this instrument is for the pitch to be slightly sharp on the initial attack and bend down gently over time. The effect is increased in the higher velocity layers.

Though not traditionally bowed, we decided to include several bonus patches of bowed sitar: sustain, staccato, and tremolo. The tremolo patch features an "intensity" knob to adjust through three different intensity layers and a "Speed" knob to adjust the playback speed of the tremolo samples. This allows you to more closely match a specific tempo or crank it up and go crazy.

The included Convolution Reverb effect features 74 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.
• 597 Samples (standard PCM wav).
• 25 .nki files (unlocked format).
• 1.69 GB installed (864 MB Download).

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.