The story
The Closet Harp is a fully sampled Troubadour harp, a Lyon and Healy style celtic harp. As one might guess, it was recorded in the beautiful acoustics of a closet with only one decent microphone. The harp itself is beautiful, with an unusual resonance for its size.
It is currently being rented away to a client. I was lucky enough to receive it during a brief vacation of a client, and decided to sample the instrument. So logically the best use of that time was to sit in a dense closet for 3 hours, recording every string on the harp. I’m surprised how well the instrument turned out given the…interesting recording technique and environment.
The harp was recorded with 3 dynamic layers and 3 round robins per note (for the most part….).
I have stumbled upon one misfortune: the library is 1 Gb (zipped) to download and is about 1.5 Gb uncompressed (even with ncw files).
The problem seems to stem from its 24-bit nature. Note to self: just use 16-bit.
It plays in the full version of Kontakt 5.6.1 and higher.
Please see the video in the link provided which features a demo, other key details, and a comparison with another harp library.
Enjoy the ethereal sounds of a celtic harp. It’s absolutely wonderful with a large hall reverb. :]
Kalen Smith
Reviews for Closet Harp
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Absolutely beautiful!
Hi! I tried out this beautiful sounding Celtic Harp with some other good sounding free orchestra patches (making it almost sound like a pedal harp), and I think it sounds extremely perfect for anything that I arrange and/or transcribe! Thank you so much for creating such a masterpiece!
An excellent free harp for all your needs!
I was expecting something more experiemntal, but this is actually an awesome harp for everyone here. There IS some white nose that can build up if you hold too many notes with a sustain pedal, but still it's very much worth it. Some samples are not properly cropped as well. There were times that at the very end of a sample, there was the beginning of another one. That's an easy fix if you check the waveforms of the samples though. I'd also like the GUI not to have 2 separate tabs, and if the graphics were more minimal.
Work Horse
Have used this in a few productions, works well stand alone or layered Cool Sample
Nice and simple sound of harp
Sound is very nice! Simple but warm. I think the sound a little low, but very well recorded library.
Pretty Awesome Harp
This is a pretty nice sounding harp. Its fairly deeply sampled with 3 round robins and three dynamic layers. Even though im not totally in love with the sound but i still really like it and I think its the best harp on pianobook. Its pretty astounding that this is the sample makers first instrument. The GUI, although stock offers a decent amount of control. i also like that the signal is dry giving us the opportunity to add reverb rather than baking reverb into the samples. There are some issues with the editing and programming but its still really good for a first instrument. Id love to see an updated version of this with everyones critiques taken into account and everything you've learned about sampling since then.
