Musical Chairs

This is technically two “instruments”, but they go together so well both sonically and conceptually I felt they should be bundled together. This is my first sample pack, featuring some samples I’ve had kicking around for a few years now, of two different chairs that I no longer own:

The Chairlesta(metal) preset is based on samples of a drafting stool I used to have. It was not super comfortable, but it did have a footrest bar that was a solid piece of some kind of metal, and would resonate beautifully (and for a surprisingly long time) if banged into on accident (which of course led to me banging into it on purpose). Three velocity layers to hopefully humanize it a bit.

The Chairimba(wood) preset is based on samples of the unscrewed legs of a wooden chair which again just had a surprisingly good resonance when struck. For this preset, I had a much longer file of me randomly whacking the legs together (with no particular idea what I was doing at the time), so I was able to include three sets of Round Robins in addition to three velocity layers for each note, so that may result in a somewhat livelier performance?

Both presets include all the effects and controls I thought might be useful:

• Attack
• Release
• Low pass filter
• High pass filter
• Glide time
• Fine tuning of +/- 50 cents
• the weird overtones of the metal chair made me feel less than 100% confident in my tuning of the sample, so I spun this knob up to help me check that; figured I might as well leave it in once I had it!
• Delay
• Mix
• Time
• Feedback
• Tempo sync
• Reverb
• Mix
• Room Size
• Dampening

Additionally, the Chairlesta(metal) preset includes the following that just didn’t make sense for the wooden chair, since the samples are so short

• Chorus
• Mix
• Depth
• Rate
• Sample looping button to allow for sustained notes if desired

Hope you enjoy!