Expressive Tongue Drum

A good friend bought me a tongue drum for my birthday this year. I’d never played one before, and plonking around with it for a while it struck me that, since this was an instrument whose timbre changes drastically with stroke velocity, this would be a great opportunity to try doing something I’d been putting off for a while – creating an expressive sampled instrument with an OTT velocity depth.

In the end, I decided on four round robins and six velocity layers, for 24 samples per note. After some gentle processing and UI design, I was very pleased with the finished product – having real expressive control and a smooth velocity curve is something I always crave (particularly coming from the world of synth patch design, where I can breathe life into a preset via velocity-bound modulation to my heart’s content); this scratched my itch.

I’ve found you can achieve some great washy textures by cranking the chorus dial and tuning the instrument down – pairs very nicely with spacey pads. Anyway, I really enjoyed the process of putting this together and I hope it inspires you to make some beautiful things!

Will