The story
This is a rare ancient Persian harp dates back to 3400 years ago.The instrument has a very deep oriental vibe/sound from middle east.
DEMO : https://soundcloud.com/masoudcomposer/demo-pianobook-persian-harp
I sampled the instrument last year with a AKG C414 and never had the chance to sit and clean up samples and design UI until now.
It is a very simple diatonic HARP called Arjan Harp (in Farsi چنگ ارجان) tuned on a Persian scale .
I did not TUNE the samples, because I wanted it to sound exactly as it is . so if you need to tune it , you can use melodyne or any other tuner as well.
Have fun !
Contributors
Masoud Yazdi
Reviews for Persian Harp (Arjan)
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A super cool instrument but not the easiest to work with
I always love seeing instruments like this pop up on pianobook because I love folk instruments and hearing new sounds. This harp has an interesting sound but the samples sound a bit washed out, maybe from being overprocessed or being recorded with the mic too far from the instrument?
Unfortunately the way the instrument has been put together in Kontakt makes it quite hard to properly trial and use. There are two 'regions' of notes on the keyboard, one mapped only to white notes which seems to be roughly diatonic and probably representing the harp strings' natural tuning. These notes have many velocity layers but don't seem to follow a consistent velocity curve, and seem like they would work much better as round robins.
The upper region sounds like it might be 'fretted' notes, these ones are mapped to both white and black notes but don't have a readily apparent chromatic logic, and the notes repeat / loop back every 7 or so keys. Again, it seems like these might function better as round robins than being spread across keys.
Ultimately I'd probably want to totally rebuild this instrument from the samples before trying to use it; I think with 2-3 round robins and the notes mapped chromatically (potentially with a separate patch that gives a faithful representation of the diatonic tuning of the harp) it could provide a huge boost to playability.
Overall I'd love to see more like this on pianobook and I hope this review didn't come across too negatively! I'd be happy to provide tips for implementing some of the features I've mentioned to improve playability.
