Festive Celeste

I have enjoyed creating instruments to reflect the changing seasons. It helps to organize my plans for lack of a better compass. Celeste is an oft neglected instrument unless it’s winter season when it’s bell like tone is momentarily featured in holiday classics. My original thought was to create a hybrid celeste and chime instrument to distinguish it from a basic library, which it thankfully does well, but honestly, the individual instruments in this library are just as magical by themselves.

My workplace just recently procured a new, Schiedmayer 5.5 octave instrument and I was overwhelmed with how beautiful it is. Before sitting down at the keyboard, I didn’t realize how three dimensional it is sound-wise. The hammers and resonators are situated in surprising places. C2 might sound from the extreme left, while E2 sounds from the extreme right. After realizing how unique the layout is, I switched from the plan to record in fifths and instead sample EVERY KEY. This resulted in a sh*t ton of sample work, but I hope you get a sense of how immersive this instrument sounds through Festive Celeste.

The Chimes were sampled with the same three mic setups: Sanken CO-100Ks for close mics, Neumann KM184s in an ORTF for the mid mics and Schoepps MK2s for the far mics. Everything was recorded in 192kHz, but downsampled to 48kHz to make the package size tolerable. The session took place in the Truist Pavilion of the New World Center in Miami Beach, FL. A beautiful room with wooden floors and 100′ high ceilings.

Some things to note:
-The celeste close mics are done in four velocity layers, the remaining layers are 3 velocities each
-While the Truist Pavilion sounds great, it is not sound isolated. There is a noise floor which is most audible in the celeste mid and far mics. It’s tolerable IMO and mostly adds a distinct character to the sound rather than annoyance.
-I did do some noise reduction across the board, but was conservative to avoid effecting the sounds
-I’m including 20 preset patches to play with which BARELY scratch the surface of what’s possible

This took an immense amount of work to record, edit, process and program. If you use it and like it, I would very much appreciate hearing so. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel as a form of payment if you are willing: https://www.youtube.com/@glorifiedbuttonpusher

Thanks for reading and I really do hope you find this instrument captivating and inspiring as it is for me.

Requires Kontakt 7+ Full.