The story
My first ‘finished’ sample instrument – A toy / holiday souvenir harp sat atop a bouzouki to aid resonance. My Mum brought this souvenir harp back from a trip to Donegal – surprisingly, it came with a tuning key despite not really being functional as an instrument with 5 tiny strings and little in the way of a soundboard. I decided to tune it to the practical limits of its range and try to make a functional sample instrument. With the high pitch and nylon strings I was expecting something resembling a ukulele, but the sharp attack with little sustain ends up with something more like a kalimba or xylophone in sound. The range extends from G2 – E5 ~2.5 octaves, with 3 velocity layers 0-50; 51-89; 90-127 and 2 round-robins for most notes, and a basic reverb set up with a knob to vary the ‘send’ output. I hope it can be useful! Should work on Kontakt 5+.
Harpaphone demo
Reviews for Harpaphone
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A brilliant, quirky little library...
I don't believe the other reviews are being fair. You only have to READ THE DESCRIPTION and look at the cover picture on this page to see that you're not going to get a 'Harp' library. This is a great little instrument that offers brilliantly quirky, woody tones. Perfect for evoking those Mark Mothersbaugh sounds. This would have been perfect on a score I did last year. That just goes to show how useful PB, and libraries like this can be.
A toy-like harp
...that doesn't really sound like a harp. It has a kind of detuned and childish, but that's really what it has to offer for you. The lower range sounds very artificial and stretched, so the actual usual range is limited. The sampling is good enough to play a simple tune and not hear any noise. Other than that, don't have super high expectations.
Almost a harp...
It's a strange little library. The samples don't appear to have quite enough tonality to be super useful outside of a more percussive instrument. GUI is a little plain as well and might benefit from some more controls. Additional processing or synthesized sounds from these samples might also be a logical expansion for this library to have a little more content.
Kind of Artificial sounding
I dont want to come off too negative but this instrument just didn't do anything for me, even with reverb i didn't like the tone and it sounds a little stretched and artificial. It plays well but for me personally i would never find a use for this. Maybe I'm just not into the instrument itself
Mallet-type sounds with some intonation issues
This sample library offers up some nice plucked sounds. There are even two round robins, and three velocity layers. There's no perceivable noise in the samples, and they're well edited. As I've been listening to tons and tons of libraries on PB, I've come to realize that what makes a library great is starting with a great instrument, playing it well, recording the playing well, and then programming it well. There are exceptions to that, of course. You'll find amazing sounds made from sound sources which would seem unusable, but as a general rule, you need to have those four things. If one of them is lacking, the chances you'll create a great library decrease exponentially. Where this library falls down is that the instrument itself isn't great. It's really really out of tune in large parts of its range, which makes it a lot less playable, and a lot less usable, which is unfortunate, because it is certainly unique.
