The story
It is one of my favourite instruments of the last months. I’ve used it in several soundtracks, combining it with harp, with xylophone, with the real harp and classical guitar. Very soon some of my pieces will be performed with a symphonic orchestra and we’ll use this sound in life performances, too.
So… It is a few-minutes instrument made out of several samples of an old soviet crystal glass. An empty glass was standing on my table giving out very nice sounds when I used to graze it unintentionally by my hand, so I decided that this glass must become the part of an art.
I’ve sampled it with two mics on different distances – with Neumann KMS-105 and the cheapest mic ever occurred in my hands – Shure 14A (I’ve never bought it, but an Internet says it costs about 15 USD… I’ve ‘stolen’ this mic from a studio of my friend in 2004 to use as a talkback mike but at some moment I’ve mentioned that the low vocals and even acoustic guitar very often sound even more reach rather then into Neumann Gefel CMV-563 or something else quite expensive… It sounds much better then 57 or 58. I do really don’t know how could other exemplars of Shure 14A sound, but exactly this one sounds very amazing and I use it quite often as a pair to vintage mics… In Internet everyone says that it’s the worst (even – worstEST) mike they ever tried… You know, I’ve made experiments, blind tests with quite known musicians and engineers – we’ve recorded male vocals on several expensive valve mics and on this Shure… and most of them have rated it higher then other really expensive mics… I write this and still don’t trust myself too much. Probably, someone in China at the beginning of 00’s has made several perfect dynamic Shure’s by a mistake, but later they’ve caught their mistake and fixed it starting making normal chinese shitty mics… who knows…)
It’s strange that the glass didn’t change its pitch when I added water into it, but it has changed the main pitch depending on the place of striking it.
Reviews for The Glass
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Nice bell sound
Nice bell sound with a little bit of character. I would still suggest adding FX delay, reverb, phase, etc to see where that leads you with this sound. Enjoy!
A lovely glass mallet
This is a lovely glass-mallet instrument that is sampled really well and plays well too. It takes effects very nicely, and the sound quality is very good, with some barely audible noise that won't bother you at all. The pad patch is seems like the same patch with a slower attack, but it doesn't last as long as you might expect from a pad patch. In both patches, all the keys from F3 to E4 are repeating the previous octave for some reason, which makes it very weird, but it is something very managable while programming.
Crystal Clear
Its really crisp and clean. E3 and E4 seem to be playing the same sample making one of them an octave too high.
Nice instrument but suffers from a few issues
This is a bell instrument with an interesting round tone. Its pretty nice sounding but i can't say i love it. Resonances occasionally do jump out pretty hard which makes it a bit unpleasant. Also theres alot of noise but it seems like its more present in some samples than others so it will also jump out and in during a performance. Its not a bad instrument but there are honestly many very similar instruments on pianobook that i think have a better tone, are more playable and usable.
A Lovely Bell with some issues
This glass does indeed produce a very musical sound. Unfortunately, some samples seem to be missing, some samples have the wrong root key assigned, and the tone is not particularly even from sample to sample, all of which significantly degrade the usefulness and playability of the instrument. Hopefully this instrument can be edited to be more playable in the future.
