Irish Bouzouki

This is a sampled version of my only really ‘good’ instrument, an Irish Bouzouki made by Melbourne luthier Daniel Hoban. It’s my main instrument and the only one that has accompanied me on several transhemispheric migrations. The Irish Bouzouki has a fairly convoluted origin story, but basically it’s something like a cross between a guitar and a mandolin that has probably re-occupied a niche in folk music that used to be filled by instruments like the cittern (and indeed can basically be considered
a 4-course version of the modern 5-course cittern).

Daniel’s instruments normally have sophisticated astrological names, but since my first cheap ebay bouzouki was aptly named ‘Buzz’, this one was baptised as ‘Woody’. Out of a desire to do Woody justice, I spent several hours sampling it, and many more putting them together (though this basic version only uses around half of the total because I don’t have the skill with Kontakt right now to achieve what I want with the others). I then spent even more hours procrastinating about it not being ‘ready’ enough to release before finally deciding to just get it out there. I’ve already been using it in several projects to save having to do live recording, so I hope it will be similarly useful to others!

This version includes regular picked notes (Keyswitch D0), harmonics (C0) and tremolo (C#0), with 2-4 RRs and Velocity Layers.

Everything is stretched to fill the same range, but be warned the harmonics sound a bit weird in the lower notes since these are derived naturally from an octave above the basic instrument range. The ‘real’ instrument usually has its lowest note at G2, but I drop-tuned to a D2 (the usual low-string on a 5-course instrument) and then further stretched down to G1 to give access to probably as low a range as anybody would ever want/need when writing for this type of instrument.