AP Shakers

AP Shakers

AP Shakers Performance Instrument.

The Sample Instrument You Perform Like the Real Instrument.

With the AP Shakers Performance Instrument, you'll be able to easily add quality, natural, human-sounding tambourine parts with minimal effort and great results. Plus, you'll have a wide variety of shaker tonalities to fit a broad range of musical moods and styles.

Full version of Kontakt 5.8.1 or later required.

(Not for use with Kontakt Player.).

Features

• Performance Instrument.
• Forward shake is a key press.
• Higher velocities, above 91, are an accented forward shake.
• Back shake is a key release.
• Includes a total of ten different shaker timbres.
• Numerous tonal possibilities when played in different combinations.
• Samples are based on a shaker performance.
• Very human-sounding, even with MIDI note quantization.
• Useable over a wide range of tempos.
• At 16th notes, useable from 50 BPM up to 170 BPM.
• Each shaker is mapped on a single key.

• GUI controls for per key shaker volume.
• GUI controls for per key shaker pan.
• GUI controls for per key shaker pitch.
• GUI controls for global reverb settings.
• GUI controls for global distortion settings.
• GUI controls for global one band parametric eq.
• GUI controls for global limiter.
• GUI MIDI activity indicator per key.
• GUI character display of key/sound currently played.
• GUI character display of key switch currently selected.

AP Shakers Overview

The AP Shakers Performance Instrument is a Kontakt based sample library with a wide variety of percussion shakers and tonalities to fit a broad range of musical moods and styles. These are not loops. Each shaker within the patch is based on an actual shaker performance, carefully edited for easy programmability and playability at a wide range of tempos. At 16th notes, a realistic, useable tempo range is from roughly 50BPM to upwards of 170BPM. Since these are not loops, there is no time compression or expansion involved in that wide range of tempos.

Also, instead of triggering a sample via a key press only, we set up this library to trigger a sample on the key press, and on the key release. A key press is a forward shake, a key release is a backward shake. This makes for a more realistic way of playing/performing the shaker parts, and makes it easier to play or record 16th notes at faster tempos.

The human feel of the shakers comes from the variety of velocity layers, which add a lot of "slosh" and varied "rattles." This makes for a dynamic part with quite a bit of feel. Even if you quantize both the note beginning and end to an exact bar/beat grid, it will still sound very human as long as the note velocities are varied throughout the recorded MIDI notes.

Why a shaker library? We compose a lot of music library material, and shakers are a common percussion element used to add drive and momentum to a track. After recording many shaker tracks, we decided to create a shaker sample library that would sound like we had recorded the track with a real shaker, but let us keep it as MIDI for easy editing and tempo changes, etc. We wanted the sample library to be very playable and human sounding, not too perfect, and be easy and quick to program, with a good variety of shaker tonalities. The individual volume, pan, and pitch controls allow you to dial in the mix of each shaker as needed, which is also beneficial when using layered parts.

We hope you'll find our AP Shakers Performance Instrument sample library useful in your music creation endeavors.