Dan Tranh

The Dan Tranh is a traditional zither originating from Vietnam. It is considerably longer than its European and American cousins, and is also tuned as a pentatonic instrument. 16-17 metal strings run the length of the instrument with bridges halfway for each string. In traditional performance on this instrument, one hand plucks the strings on one side of these bridges using plectrums (finger-picks) and the other hand bends the pitches of the notes as desired on the other side of the bridges. This allows an incredibly dynamic and unique performance which is very hard to sample and replicate.

We have deep-sampled this instrument with multiple Round Robin, a number of velocity layers, a variety of patches (normal, live vibrato, live tremolo, muted/pizz., live glissandi, and a large collection of effects), and both B Pentatonic and Chromatic modes at 24-bit, 44.1kHz.