I’m very pleased to announce the release of my first premium Live Pack (and free version – download below) for Ableton Live 9.7 Intro and up. For this, I’ve sampled my favourite acoustic instrument, the array mbira. I discovered the existence of the array mbira by San Diego based Array Instruments, that has a brilliant soft bell-like tone, in the early noughts and it took me five years to finally call a 4-octave one my own. I’ve used it in various songs of mine over the years and I’ve also taken it with me on tour.
I’ve been meaning to create a professional sounding digital version of it for quite some time, so I could have the sound at my fingertips, when flying with the acoustic instrument was too costly. And for others to have this possibility as well, since no one else had created a Live Pack for array mbira before.
My mbira is made from African sapele wood and an acoustic body out of douglas fir, which gives it not only its soft tone, but also a lovely medium sustain through the built-in stereo piezo pickups. I’m very happy with the sound of the preset recreations. Check them out in the demos below!
Listen to the demos:
Round robin, once in the traditional sense and once randomised, is included in the presets to alternate between the doubly or even triply existing notes. The notes in all four octaves are arranged close to each other, which invites strumming. This is reproduced in the “Octave Strum” instrument rack and MIDI effect rack. Beside the Array Mbira Acoustic presets for the pure sound, there are also a lot of FX presets, perfect far various sound design purposes, from angelic to mean sounding.
Sonic Bloom Array Mbira contains 34 carefully designed instrument racks, 1 MIDI effect rack and 3 Live Sets and is available for EUR 29 from the Sonic Bloom shop.
SB Array Mbira Lite (No. 62)
The free Lite version contains five presets from the full version, but with only two notes per octave and without the round robin and strum features. Made in and for Ableton Live 9.7 (Intro and up).
If clicking it to download results in a text-file, simply right-click and choose ‘Save Link as…’. To install, just double-click the alp-file and choose the installation path when prompted by Live. And here’s a tutorial on how to use the presets from Live Packs that are not self-installing.
I would welcome a small donation if you are able to do so as a way of saying thank you. Otherwise just add a zero to the price field. Gumroad no longer offers PayPal as an option, so if you’d like to donate using PayPal, you can do so above. Thank you very much!
Questions or suggestions? Please leave me a comment below.
Check out the other free Sonic Bloom Live Packs.
6 responses
Interesting the sound of this instrument.
I like how sound in the ‘Claire De Lune’ track, in special for the paneo
I just wondering how will sound this instrument in deep techno track 😛
Cheers Madeleine
Grab the free version and try it out?
My God,! Debussy sounds so beautiful in this instrument! So intimate,like it’s being played just beside you in bed, there`s a certain whispering quality,Great idea! Blessings.
I`m downloading the free version and thinking about some other Debussy’s pieces,some Satie, even for comping in some Kurt Weill’s songs.Thanks for sharing so good ideas.Blessings.
Hi! Nice sound, thank you.
But… This Pack contains effect devices, that require Suite (Corpus) or at least Standard (EQ Eight and other). So it is impossible to save any of them in User Library for Live Lite and Intro users.
Ah, I’m sorry. You should still be able to use them though if you have them in a folder on your hard drive.