Bizarre Sitar

A Little Twist On A Traditional Indian Stringed Instrument For Kontakt

Bizarre Sitar may not seem so strange at first glance. It has most of the elements found on any other sitar, with its traditional gourd body, both main playable strings and sympathetic resonating strings, parda (adjustable curved frets), kunti (tuning pegs), dandi (neck), ghoraj (main bridge) all complete with orange hand-painted accents. At just over 24" in length, however, this little beauty is barely half the size of a standard sitar. Simply being small isn't bizarre by any means, but what is bizarre is how it can achieve such a lush, full-bodied sound while being so small. Intended as more decoration than instrument, we feel this little guy has been highly underestimated. Although soft-spoken and possessing fewer strings than normal (5 main and 6 sympathetic), all this "baby" sitar needed was someone to listen closely. And we did. Very close.

The Bizarre Sitar includes chromatic plucks as well as strumming articulations. Two main strumming tunings include a fifth and octave/unison. An onboard "Speed" slider (MIDI assignable and defaulted to the mod wheel) allows you to sculpt the speed of the individual strum from very tight, fast strums to slower, plucky strums. The unison articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in several octaves to give a very full sound. The fifth articulation was tuned with strings in unison and in fifths, similar to the Pancham-Kharaj tuning popularized by Ravi Shankar. By recording several different strumming speeds for both the fifth and the unison strumming articulations, this library allows you to create realistic sounding strums by adjusting the speed in real-time. The strums are tuned and spread across the entire keyboard, providing deep, droning sounds in the low end and sharp, mandolin-like plucks in the high end.

Contents

The Kontakt interface includes a suite of automation-ready sound-shaping controls to give you total creative flexibility. You have control over the swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more. We've also included 20 unique sound-designed custom FX presets to give you lots of creative options.

This library comes with an adaptable LFO system, with selectable LFO shape, modulation target parameter, speed, intensity, tempo-syncing and fade-in time. You can also apply your choice of 12 low-pass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, mod-wheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. We’ve included a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance.

The interface is rounded-out by our modular FX rack panel, with 18 different DSP effect modules that you can assign in any of 10 available slots, in any order that you wish. You’ll find classic phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ, rotator and so much more. The Reverb effect includes our favourite convolution reverb impulse responses, including 99 different rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor environments, plus another 40 custom FX impulses to radically transform the sound and open up whole new worlds of musical possibility. We’ve added a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started!

Features

• Bowed (staccato, tremolo and sustains)
• Plucked (10x rr, 5-6 velocities)
• Strummed (10x rr, 4-8 velocities)
• FX (includes mutes, scrapes and other special effects)
• Ambiences created from the source material

Product Specs:

• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• 603 Stereo Samples
• 1.86 GB installed
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• Unlocked Kontakt presets and wav samples to allow user customization
• Plucked, Bowed, and Multi-Speed Strummed articulations
• Effects including string mutes, fret scrapes and more
• Flexible and intuitive multi-layer user interface controls, with LFO, filter, glide, and arpeggiator
• Full FX rack with convolution reverb with custom rooms, halls, chambers & FX environments

Kontakt Format

This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or later is required to use the nki files in this library.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats. The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.

System Requirements

The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 5.5 (or later) is required to use .nki instrument presets included in this library. The free Kontakt "Player" and "Add Library" import process do not support this standard open-format Kontakt library. Windows 7 or higher. Mac OSX 10.9 or higher. Dual Core CPU, 2 GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.