The story
healingBOWL is the combination of different sized Tibetan Singing Bowls recorded in Round Robin at different velocities and tuned for your musical needs. Sounds are Polyphonic and offered with 4 key-switch articulations including two different bell hit & sustains to bring any project a unique sense of calm.
Delay, Reverb, and Chorus effects are added by default, but not necessary for a variety of sounds. Complete with highness, lowpass Filters, full ADSR, and Tuning available in real time, makes sound design a breeze.
Keyswitches available on C-2 and D-2 for Bell 1 hits and sustains. E-2 and F-2 are used for Bell 2 hits and sustains.
Lower velocity samples are much darker due to the nature of the sound. The Filters come in handy when using these options.
Enjoy!
healingBOWL- Free VST Plug-in available for Decent Sampler
Interface
Reviews for healingBOWL
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Awesome sound with a few issues
At a first glance, this is a majestic bell-mallet-like instrument, with a fantastic character in my opinion. The attack is very prominent and the overall sound is super resonant. The GUI is fantastic, and if you click the arrow on the left to shift the keybed lower, you will see that there are 4 keyswitches that swap sounds between 2 layers with 2 articulations each.
There are a few issues though that hold the instrument back, and may be hard to deal with in general. I will list some things that I noticed:
- At first, when you open the instrument, you get the two main sounds mixed up. Two layers are not tuned the same, with one being lower, creating a perfect 4th (playing C gives a G instead).
- Once you press a keyswitch to select one bell over the other, there is no way to re-select them as a combo, unless you restart the instrument.
- If you select the bell 2, it remains tuned differently, which makes it weird as a solo instrument.
- The sustain switch for the bell 1 doesn't exist for me, as I get just 2 "hits" with no sustain like the bell 2. (I think it should be the C-2).
- If you play many notes or in a legato fashion, the ring of the previous note may get canceled out.
- For such a resonant instrument, there is a lot of white noise on many samples, that gets cut off suddenly if you hold a note for too long.Even though there are a few issues with this patch, I find the sound very intimate and resonant, and I wish I'd see an update sonner or later addressing some of those issues!
Almost Organ Like
I hit the key switches by accident then later discovered what they were. I like the darker sounds played at a low velocity, very smooth.
Noisy but A Good Start
The Samples
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2 bowls sampled
x 3 velocity layers each
x 4 round-robins each
= 24 total samplesMany of the samples are very noisy, especially the ones that were made at low 'velocity'. Sounds like they were normalized by a large amount, bringing the noise level up commensurately. Recommend:
1. Re-record the samples in a quiet environment, or
2. Use iZotope RX to reduce noise, or
3. Delete the low-vel-level samples, and use only the high-vel-level samples (this will require some re-scripting). I tried this, and it made the instrument much less noisy, although it also takes away from some of the timbre changes you enjoy from multiple-velocity-level sampling.The Instrument
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A great UI, including:
- ADSR Envelope
- Tuning/Volume
- Chorus, Delay, Reverb, LP & HP Filters (samplist - please label the filters next time? it would not take away from the beauty of the UI.)
- 4 key switches - to switch between bowls, and to go from unlooped to looped playback.I myself would probably not use the looped playback -- I found the looping to be jarring at times. Maybe some extra work finding smoother, more natural loop points?
All in all, a great front end, but I feel the underlying samples (and the looping of the samples) needs some work.
