The story
After being inspired by Christians YouTube content and a university lecture from the founder of Slate & Ash, over lockdown I put my free time over lockdown into learning more about how to develop sample instruments to release on my website tomparrymusic.com/shop. I’ve been wanting to contribute to the PianoBook community for some time and feel like I now have the knowledge and skills to do so.
Here’s my first contribution, Distant Brass. The idea for this instrument came from sorting through some stuff at my dads childhood home after my grandmother went into care. My grandfather played trombone, trumpet and soprano cornet in many local big bands and brass bands throughout his life and when he passed away many of his instruments remained in the house. Whilst recording for one of my commercial guitar libraries in my grandmas house during lockdown I found one of his old cornets and decided to sample one note of it. I’m not a cornet player, so this is all I could really get out of it. I experimented with barely blowing the cornet and managed to produce a ‘flutter’ like timbre that sounded very harmonically different to the normal way of playing.
I recorded this with a matched stereo pair of Rode M5 microphones running in to the Xenyx preamps of my Behringer 1002B mixer. When I finally finished the commercial instrument I was working on at the time, I wanted to see if I could make something out of this one sample. I processed it through multiple reverbs, filters and pitch plugins to create the muted distant timbre with three velocity layers. The Kontakt UI comes with filter cutoff and resonance controls along with ADSR envelope controls and a reverb send control. Although this instrument is only made with one sample its still extremely characterful and usable as demonstrated in the short piece I composed with it. It’s available in EXS and Kontakt formats and requires Kontakt 6.2 or later.
Reviews for Distant Brass
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Embrace the darkness
Oh. My. God, I LOVED this. It is deep, it is dark, and it has so many possible uses. Thankfully you can fully control the ADSR envelope, and you also have access to a reverb and your tupical cutoff filter. These options can let you create more a more synthy pad, or you can just stick to the darkness of the heavy low notes - not that the mids and highs are not good - they are trully amazing with a really nice grit on them. I would prefer an even more minimalistic GUI though. Yes. Even more. Don't ask why. Fantastic work, would recommend to everyone!
Nicely deep sampled brass!
It is very dynamic and deep sound of brass. Nicely sampled and has a fat texture in lower register and has interesting effect at higher register.
Deep lower register, with biting higher tones
Sounds amazing! I can't fault the recording or the playability, and the sound is great too! I love the lowest octave, it has a deep, almost war-horn like sound, and the mod-wheel helps to keep the sound evolving, so you could use it as a drone if you wanted to. The highs aren't my thing as much, I'm not personally a fan of the squeaky, somewhat thinner sound, but that is just my personal taste, and some people might like it. Overall, would recommend! A very well recorded and put-together library!
Nothing to be 'brassed off' about here.. This is brilliant!
I love Tom's approach to this instrument and it really speaks to the essence of Pianobook. The sound is unique and really inspires some interesting ideas. It definitely lends itself better to playing big clustery chord pads, and there's no real hint of that 'stretched sample' sound, which wouldn't work for an instrument such as this. The controls are super useful and make it brilliantly versatile. Overall this is one of PB's best Brass/Wind instruments. Can't wait to see what you do next!
Excellent sound designed brass!
This is a really great brass library which is both playable and inspiring. It's well recorded, and musically useful as an organic yet full backdrop for many other things. A very worthy download, indeed!
