Rain Catcher
A metallic percussive sound created from water falling into a rain catcher.
ByAlexander Edward Ling
The story
I have tried to capture the changing pitch and timbre as my rain catcher fills with rain. You can hear the water swilling around the bowl in the high velocity layers at the low end of the instrument.
Attic Instruments are made in my attic in south east London. Keep an eye out for more instruments coming soon.
Reviews
How can a bowl sound that nice?
My first thoughts is that this sounds very nice! There might be an issue regarding pitch in some cases, for example C3 and C4. The panning is spread from left to right across the keyboard range, which acts like the typical piano way and is always welcome.
There are are some noises to be heard from time to time, and you might also hear some random uncut samples at the very end of a tail, if you manage to hold the notes unrealistically long. You need to keep in mind though that, the higher velocities produce some very harsh and long tailed harmonics, that might need some serious EQ treatment in order not to sound horrific in any mix.
The GUI is cute, but with just a little work it could be perfect!
Interesting Bell like tones
This is a really unique with an interesting bell tone. There are a good amount of round robins and dynamic layers which is awesome. The GUI is also really nice and professional looking, giving you a good amount of control. In some of the harder hitting dynamic layers it gets a bit piercing. Also it can be a little pitchy sometimes but this won't always be an issue. . It also sometimes has an interesting pitch bendy resonance. Overall this is a really cool instrument i could see myself using sometime
Rounded Bells
Once you reconnect the samples --this was saved with absolute paths -- You're treated by an innovative and cute GUI that gives control over attack, release, cutoff and reverb. It's great that there's an easy way to eliminate the reverb. The sound of the rain catcher is obviously metallic and its sound is somewhat similar to a kkwaenggwari 꽹과리 -- a small Korean gong. As is the case with many instruments with a metallic sample source, there are a lot of inharmonic overtones in this sound. These tend to pile up when playing lots of notes and makes the sound less usable in that context. If you're looking for a bell like sound to play a melodic line, this might just be the ticket for you, though!