Closet Harp
An ethereal celtic harp that sounds wonderful with a large hall reverb.
ByKalen Smith
The story
The Closet Harp is a fully sampled Troubadour harp, a Lyon and Healy style celtic harp. As one might guess, it was recorded in the beautiful acoustics of a closet with only one decent microphone. The harp itself is beautiful, with an unusual resonance for its size.
It is currently being rented away to a client. I was lucky enough to receive it during a brief vacation of a client, and decided to sample the instrument. So logically the best use of that time was to sit in a dense closet for 3 hours, recording every string on the harp. I’m surprised how well the instrument turned out given the…interesting recording technique and environment.
The harp was recorded with 3 dynamic layers and 3 round robins per note (for the most part….).
I have stumbled upon one misfortune: the library is 1 Gb (zipped) to download and is about 1.5 Gb uncompressed (even with ncw files).
The problem seems to stem from its 24-bit nature. Note to self: just use 16-bit.
It plays in the full version of Kontakt 5.6.1 and higher.
Please see the video in the link provided which features a demo, other key details, and a comparison with another harp library.
Enjoy the ethereal sounds of a celtic harp. It’s absolutely wonderful with a large hall reverb. :]
Kalen Smith
Reviews
Absolutely beautiful!
Hi! I tried out this beautiful sounding Celtic Harp with some other good sounding free orchestra patches (making it almost sound like a pedal harp), and I think it sounds extremely perfect for anything that I arrange and/or transcribe! Thank you so much for creating such a masterpiece!
An excellent free harp for all your needs!
I was expecting something more experiemntal, but this is actually an awesome harp for everyone here. There IS some white nose that can build up if you hold too many notes with a sustain pedal, but still it's very much worth it. Some samples are not properly cropped as well. There were times that at the very end of a sample, there was the beginning of another one. That's an easy fix if you check the waveforms of the samples though. I'd also like the GUI not to have 2 separate tabs, and if the graphics were more minimal.
Work Horse
Have used this in a few productions, works well stand alone or layered Cool Sample