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Specifications:
309 samples
5/6 velocity layers for each note
2x Round Robin for each note
3x patches
- Original pitch
- Tuned scale (CDFGBb)
- Chromatic scale pitched
2x Beater options- Rubber (Rubber malletts made from Tires)
- Sticks (The wooden side of the malletts)
Requirements:
210MB Hard Drive space
Full version of Native instruments Kontakt 5
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Feel free to download and play with it if you're looking for something authenically african and I'd love to hear any feedback.
I don't want to dive too deep into a 'How to create a velocity sensitive instrument in Kontakt' post, but there's few thoughts from the process I thought it'd be interesting to note.
My main DAW's are Ableton Live and Logic, but I decided to try using Ableton for this process. The first step was to record the Gyil into Ableton through my SD 702 and soundcard. I only had two Preamps available at the time, so used an XY setup about a metre away from the top of the Gyil. The first note, having a few different mic positions would probably help with integrating the sound of the Gyil with other libraries, but starting with a fairly dry, close recording is great starting point.
The Gyil has 14 notes and I wanted to try 2 round robins of each and have 5/6 velocity layers for each note played with both ends of the beaters. So that's 336 individual samples to edit.
Manually this takes a while and is fairly tedious. Both Logic and Ableton have a feature which slices a piece of audio from its transient markers and creates a new MIDI instrument. However, neither of these cut the audio up usefully for Kontakt. Logic does have a 'Split Silence' feature that does a better job at slicing the regions, with a bit of tweaking, by transient. Either way there is an amount of time spent finessing this, as the hits need to be very closely trimmed to the start of the transient.