Schlagwerk U78 Side Skin Udu

This Instrument is the Schlagwerk U78 Side Skin Udu, which – additionally to the typical hole – has a skin on the right side of the hole which makes for some nice flavor in sound and gives extra levels of dynamic since the skin can be hit quite hard or soft and still sounds great.

Included Sounds
We wanted to keep it simple and focused on just a few sounds:

1) Single fingers hitting the skin while the hole is closed: Middle finger, ring finger and thumb of the right hand hitting the skin. They are placed on three separate notes next to each other on the Keyboard to make mimicking fast finger movements possible.

2) Hole sounds: Three different ways of hitting the hole (short, medium, long) delivering the typical Udo sound. In the current version you are stuck with a fixed timing of those sounds.

3) Full hand (four fingers) hitting the skin while hole closed: Delivers a deep resonant sound. Higher velocities result in an additional ringing sound mimicking a kind of rim shot when hitting the rim of the skin hard with the upper part of the palm (at about nuckle hight) so the fingers get slapped on the skin.

Technical details
There are two reverb knobs to the interface: Room-A and Room-B. Room-A lets you blend in the mic capturing the actual sound of the recording room and Room-B is the sound of a convolutional reverb plugin we love and which just sounds great: SIR2 from siraudiotools – check it out here: https://www.siraudiotools.com/sir2.php

The sounds have been recorded using two microphones: a Brauner Valvet and a Gefell M930. Both have been amplified and AD-converted by an Focusrite ISA828. Some additional digital processing (noise reduction, corrective EQ) has been applied in the DAW.

We hope you enjoy this little instrument!

Contributors

Laguna

Recording and 1/2 of sample processing