The story
This is my first attempt to share instruments with the community. I’ve already downloaded lots of your contributions as I work in a studio where we have acoustics, mics and instruments,,.. I thought: why don’t you contribute to the community. So I’ve started with a simple and beautiful instrument. Limited to its original key range and with three round robins for each note.
Pd.: I’m a big fan of DecentS. It can work with Pro Tools at the studio and also in my iPad. Thanks! Hope one day it has tempo sync😊
Interface
Reviews for Sansula Kalimba
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Few notes with good sound
Although this pack offers few notes, the sound quality is decent. I wish you had added more controls. Having just the reverb and tone is not enough to get the variety that can be useful.
The background image looks good, but the size of the controls and their names is insufficient. I think the interface can be improved by paying attention to the detail of the controllers.
Krisp Kalimba
I like the sound of the recordings for this but the range is a little limiting (although I completely appreciate the authenticity of only including the notes which appear in 'real life').
I therefore had a quick fiddle with the script to stretch the notes over 2 octaves.
Good samples though.A beautiful but literally limited Kalimba
This kalimba possesses a fantastic character, one of my favourites actually, but unfortunately it has been programmed in a way that you can only access 8 notes with gaps inbetween. The actual notes are A2, C3, E3, F3, A3, B3, C4, E4, which you can argue limits you to play mainly around A minor and F major. There is also a slight white noise on the mid-attack of some samples which can be a little annoying on top of the playability limitations.
Only minor tweaks required...
When Alex R says that this Sample pack has a limitation, then I reach for my XML editor... A few minutes later and I have a chromatic Sansula Kalimba that goes from C0 to C6, has looped samples for very slow swarming, and is suddenly unlimited... but it gradually dawns on me that it has become a very good illustration of why interpolating pitches with a complex timbre is less than ideal... If G wants the edited XML dspreset, then I'm happy to share it! (Ah, but keep reading...)
Ignoring my 'extended version', the actual sample pack is literally a capture of the actual notes produced by a kalimba. There is some noise in some of the samples, but this might be the actual kalimba - there is a strong mechanical linkage between the metal keys/resonators, and this may be causing the extraneous noise. If not, then a little bit of tender NR should fix it.
Or should it? There is a school of thought that says that whenever you capture an instrument with a recording, then you have a new instrument frozen into that recording. So any imperfections are part of the instrument, and any attempt to fix them is, in itself, changing it away from its inherent perfection. So my 'fixed' chromatic version, is, from that viewpoint, fatally and irredeemably flawed.
This is nicely recorded. It sounds like a kalimba. It really does. You can almost touch those keys, press them and slide your finger off them to get that distinctive sound. I really liked it. And the more I liked it, the less I liked my chromatic version with looped bells and whistles...
Perfection is a cruel master/mistress. I couldn't get the 'Tone' rotary control to move - I suspect that there's a bug in the XML code. But I'm now wary of delving inside again... Similarly, the reverb feels slightly wrong, in context, because of its digital perfection. I would be tempted to turn the reverb all the way down and run this through a nice real plate (if I had one), or a crazily expensive modern high quality reverb and see if that matches up better. Maybe a 12 bit OTTO or a CXM 1978 as an alternative 1970s-homage approach.
I am increasingly thinking that Christian Henson has missed a trick by not exploring the Kalimba more thoroughly. For the rest of us, then this is a Kalimba that oozes kalimba-ness and I would like to hear more of G's explorations of Decent Sampler.
(And how about that for a chastising U-turn for me, eh?)
