Tonsturm has released Wheel of Strings, a Kontakt Instrument for composers built from the sound of master luthier Guido Falke's hurdy-gurdies. It's not a strict 1:1 hurdy-gurdy recreation, instead, Wheel of Strings is designed as an expressive pad and texture instrument: evolving drones, airy harmonic beds, subtle movement and organic grit. Plus more synth-like tones and plucky, bright sounds that work beautifully for arpeggios. All captured purely from the original hurdy-gurdy recordings and made playable as a modern scoring tool.
Wheel of Strings runs on the same two-layer engine from Spiral Strings. It's divided into Layer A and Layer B with identical controls per layer, so you can design contrasting timbres and morph between them fluidly. Users of Spiral Strings will feel instantly at home, load, play, and start sculpting without a learning curve.
Shape evolving textures with a flexible modulation system: three LFOs, two Step Sequencers, and cross-modulation options let you animate drones, bow-noise, buzz, and synth-like sounds. Route modulation to key parameters on both the Main and Effects pages to move from steady underscore to restless motion in seconds.
Polish or push the sound using the built-in processing chain, filters, distortion and tape-style saturation. The highlight remains the true-stereo convolution workflow, placing the gurdy in characterful spaces for intimate, cinematic depth.
Tonsturm captured premium IRs, from selected hardware, rooms and landscapes, and optimized them for musical playability. They say the result is a convincing sense of size and space that enhances detail without masking the nuanced bow and wheel articulation.
More info:
- 12 play styles: select 1 of 10 articulations. Independent Drone and Trompette layers are permanently mapped to the lower and upper keyboard ranges, respectively.
- No pre-recorded phrases, fully playable.
- Wheel of Strings was sampled note-by-note. What you hear are long, expressive sustains with rich overtones, wheel noise and subtle movement, not locked riffs. Because the material isn't bound to fixed phrases, you can play any key, any scale, and sculpt textures in real time.
- Three round robins of 10-25 second long files.
- Three microphone positions – recorded with low-noise sound design mics and vintage and modern Hi-End gear grails.
- Uncommon True Stereo Reverb engine with Tonsturm's own crazy IR's.
Pricing & Availability
Wheel Of Strings is available for the introductory price of $99 until December 9th (Reg. $149).
