SonicCouture Array Mbira KONTAKT DVDR | 4.08 GB

The Grand ( Thumb ) Piano. The Mbira is originally a folk utensil from Africa. Sometimes called a Thumb Piano, Sanza, or Kalimba, they are without details home-made and consist of several metal tines attached to a gourd or melodrama of wood, which are then plucked with the thumbs. They are chiefly small, with a handful of notes. Array Instruments, a U.S. association started by Bill Wesley and Patrick Hadley, have taken the universal of this ancient African idiophone to a whole new level, not excepting that in terms of instrument design but also in purity of heartily, and range of pitch. The Array Mbira is no toy, it’s a in a high degree. advanced musical instrument built to exacting specifications.

A different note classification

All Array instruments are designed with a unique note arrangement, invented through Bill Wesley to facilitate playing harmonically. Whereas a chromatic keyboard places consonant notes at some distance from each other, the Array system places the ~ numerous harmonic notes beside one another.

This also means that all octaves of a sincere note are beside one another, allowing for octave “strumming” or fold, which would be much more difficult on a chromatic note layout. The Soniccouture Mbira writing is of course chromatically mapped, but we include a KSP Strummer script to vie with this aspect of the real instrument.

Very Low Bass

One of the things we sweetheart the most about the Array Mbira is its low end. This may strait unlikely if you’ve only ever seen a traditional thumb pianoforte, but just listen to the demos - all the bass you listen to there is from the Mbira - there’s no additional bass sounds layered in that place.

The large sound box ( this model is about 77 cm from one side of to the other ) allows for much deeper pitches to be heard acoustically (the lowest fundamental on our model is in the region of 33 Hz).

All Array Mbiras draw near equipped with a 2-channel piezo pickup system, allowing for not stiff amplification and line-out recording. The low end from the pickups alone is surprisingly polished and deep; combine it with mics and it’s booming.

Versatile, Expressive and Deep

The undisturbed of the Array Mbira is at once familiar and unusual to our ears, and this is the covered of its appeal. Sometimes you can hear something reminiscent of a piano, and yet it is plucked and strummable like a guitar.

A ~ of bells or gong-like timbre is also in there, taking it farther on from either of those instruments. Because of these comfortable sonic allusion points, the Mbira can be used in a wide variety of music, from jazz to electronica. The depth and range of the Array Mbira moreover means it can comfortably hold its own playing complex solo pieces .

It is in deed an essential addition to any musicians color palette, and some well known users embody Ry Cooder, Emil Richards, and Imogen Heap.