Harmonium van Dijk

Some unforeseen incidents in this year caused me finding myself in a beautiful and very old house behind the dike in a very small village at the Dutch coast of the North Sea. In the parlor next to an old closet taken from a ship I found an old harmonium, build by the company “Liebig” from Zeitz in Germany. After interpreting some old western songs, which, backed by the harmonium sounded like chants directly from hell, I decided to sample that instrument.

Although I just have some really inexpensive microphones (cheap LDC + SDC) which are also not suited well for a stereo recording in the end I’m quite happy with the results. I decided to record every note, just because all of these beautiful imperfections, broken reeds and detuned notes. I wanted to bring them all home. I also recorded with each two round robins two dynamic layers, which differ from each other by air pressure and the use of different registers or stops and which you can blend with an expression pedal.

For further informations about functions and controls you may read the included README.txt. Please feel free to alter the Kontakt patch, export to other formats, try more interesting effects, create a GUI (images included) and a better way of MIDI assignments.