The story
I always like to visit Music stores in small towns. They’re Owner-operated which means that the items on sale are personally selected by the Owners and that can lead to some pretty interesting finds. Recently I came across the “Seagull M4 Strummable Dulcimer” made by the Godin company (https://godinguitars.com/), a French-Canadian Guitar manufacturer based in Montreal. “Seagull” is a sub-brand of Godin. This instrument caught my eye because it is do much different than any other stringed instrument I’d ever seen! It’s made from a single piece of wood, has 4 strings tuned 1-5-1 (the top 2 “1” strings in octaves) and has excluded some frets to allow anyone (literally) to able to play it (in the case of the M4 – in the key of “G”)! Amazing! Here, I’ve sampled the octave/unison strings (“G”) for this piano. If you play 1-5-1, you’d be amazed at how much it sounds like Pete Townshend’s intro to “Baba O’Riley” – ENJOY!
Reviews for Robs Strummable Dulcimer Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
You had me at strummable
Right away this is another interesting sound I didn't know I was looking for and now need to build a project around. The Strummability is fantastic, I really like just a touch of the reverb to sit it deep in the background for a video game. But then those low end plucks caught me off guard.. absolute horror in a good way! This'll be in my regular rotation for a interesting ethnic sound.
Very clear and vivid sound of dulcimer
Very nice library! The sound is very clear and distinctive. It is fund to play with this library!
A nice dulcimer with a weird tail
As a first impression, this sounds like a decent dulcimer, with a nice attack and great overall character. If you play a little longer, you might notice the tail having a very wet background noise, but if you play shorter, non-sustained melodies you will be fine. I think, shifting it one octave lower would result in a more natural position, though the more you go to play towards the edges, the more artificial might sound. The included settings make this much more versatile, too.
Good effort but needs more detail
While the sound of this is pretty sweet and plucky, the fact that there's no dynamic layers or round robins leaves this feeling pretty robotic. As a guitarist im usually not into these types of instruments anyway because its nearly impossible to capture the intricacies of actually playing an instrument like this. The GUI offers decent control and its over all pretty cool for a first instrument. Nice job
Noisy but interesting
This library is based around a single sample, so you won't find any round robins, velocity layers or and thing fancy here. Sadly, there's a lot of noise in the single included sample which seems to include some fairly audible radio interference as though there was a talk show playing on an AM radio in the room while this sample was recorded. it's a good first effort at sampling, but there's some definite work to be done before this instrument can be used.
