The story
I have used this cello banjo on many scores, but always as an invisible color.
I love it’s distinctive sound and am still hoping to make it center stage of a main track one day.
It’s a banjo that had a few too many the night before and alongside the recognisable cheerful twang also has a low, raspy, dare I say, velvet tone.
I thought that by sampling it on a soft pluck (and soft tremolo) I could make something a bit more usable.
I then recorded most samples on a Mono tape recorder – a Marantz PMD 221 – at regular speed and re-recorded them back at half speed. Which gave me an octave below for each tone. Plus the expected tiny bit of wow and flutter for seasoning.
Hope you like it.
Reviews for Cello Banjo Plus
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Not realistic enough for me
While i do think that these samples are recorded really well and have some nice instrument noises, string buzzing and character, i just never finding myself liking guitar type sampled instruments. Something about the articulation of playing an actual guitar instrument just leaves the sampled version feeling very "pianoey" to me. The tremolo patch i think is really cool and more useful for that i do. Thanks for this
Thicc banjo
This is a nicely sampled instrument that suffers from some small issues, that kind of sum up and don't do it justice altogether. You will find 4 patches/articulations.
Staring off with the Plucked patch, it is nicely sampled, and you might notice the 3 round robins, which one of them is very prominent and not randomized. So in case you play one note 3 times, you will hear this specific one.
The Harmonics patch has a nice sound to it, but it would be much better with some noise reduction. There's also the Tremolo patch which has a nice soft and slow tremolo, and there's also the performance patch that combines Plucks and Tremolo via the modwheel, which doesn't really work for me, because the sound signature seems very different.
The GUI is nice, but I wish the knobs could work vertically instead of horizontally. Note that the Amp setting doesn't seem to work for me on the Performance patch.
Swarm of Banjo
This library features 8 sample zones on a single velocity layer and three round robins. I find that choice curious, because with a swarm instrument, I would think it would be more helpful to have multiple velocity layers rather than multiple round robins. YMMV. The mod wheel is mapped to expression, which is super helpful. The instrument has character having been recorded to tape and then played back at half speed. All of that is cool. I'm just not totally sure where exactly I'd use a sound like this.
