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

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Changes and new features for version 1.1:

> Added a new “smooth” mode, which attenuates the inharmonic resonances present when playing in the instrument’s upper octave. Those who prefer the throaty sound of the original can switch back to “classic” mode via a dropdown menu.

> Added a new option for changing the instrument’s ambient characteristics. Users can now select from two different IR Convolution files via a dropdown menu.

> Altered the range for the reverb and filter dials to sit more naturally.