The story
The tines of a celeste kalimba are mounted on a highly resonant piece of solid kiaat wood instead of the traditional hollow resonating box. Their sound strongly resembles a child’s music box. It is beautiful, innocent, and to my ear, at least, feels filled with wide-eyed wonder at the possibilities of sound. I then resampled the samples of the instrument through a wide variety of pedals listed in the supporting documentation.
Because some folks have asked, I’ll mention that this is a pretty big download at 9.9 GB. It includes three dry patches, and 85 patches processed through different pedals. Hopefully, you’ll find it worthy of the time and hard drive space when you try it.
Celeste Kalimba Sample Library Demo
Piano Drop!
Interface
Reviews for Celeste Kalimba
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Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A massive library of a majestic combination!
Within this massive 7TB download and over 9GB of actual sample size, you will find an enormous library that consists of 87 different patches (I might be missing one based on the description). Each of one combine the dreamy Celeste and the loving Kalimba in a different way through various types of processing.
The first three, non-processed ones are very nicely sampled, with the minor exception of some tails containing some weird cuts that could have been faded out. This results in those cuts being repeated through the other processing patches, but it is very minimal, and barely noticeable in most cases. Other than that, the combined sound of those two instruments is simply magical to my ears.
The other "problem" is that the rest of 84 patches are not labeled based on the actual effect, so you will have to spend some time to explore them. It's absolutely worth it though, because each of one can be very different by everything else, and they can all inspire you in a completely different way! I found some awesome reversed patches, lots of delays, special slap-backs, glimmers and swarms, and even some with synthesized additions.
In each patch you will find two mixing knobs, one for the Direct signal and one for the FX, so you can blend them and mix them in pretty much any way you want. Though there are way too many of them, I highly suggest experimenting and try to combine some patches together!
It should also be somewhere indicated that there is EXS availability as well (which is within the Kontakt download), so Logic users do actually have access to this goodness for absolutely free!
Great Recording but could use some better organization
This is a huge download size which always gets me excited. You get so many different pedal effect chains here, i suspect this is the bulk of the information. I'll start by saying that the samples themselves are very clean and well recorded. For my personal taste i prefer some of the more rounded, warm and, imperfect kalimbas on the site but that's just me. I also wish there could have been one even softer dynamic layer. As far as the effect pedal chains go you really have to spend a lot of time going through them and figuring out which ones you like and which ones you don't. Maybe putting them into your own sub folders. I know it would have been more work on Sams part to come up with names for all the patches but descriptive names definitely would have made the experience more navigatiable. I really loved some of the pedal chains and didn't care much for others ( as expected with so many different ones). The more sci fi blip kind of sounds don't suit my taste much but i really loved the bouncing granular delay type sounds. Id also note that its awesome to be able to blend the direct signal with the effected one instead of just being stuck with a premade balance. This is a pretty great library that could just use a bit more organization when it comes to those pedal chains.
Huge but disorganised
No bones about it, this is a massive library, and that's purely down to the huge range of sounds available from the multitude of pedals used.
Sometimes I do wonder whether sampling through pedals is necessary as we can all add things in post, but some of the sounds that are created are simply stunning.
As others have commented, the organisation could be better as it's tricky to have the faintest idea what a sound will be like from the names, but then you do get the wonder of surprise.
