by djnarrative | 15 Feb, 2013 | The Reckorder Project
With Ableton 9's beta you get a load of new instruments and with the full version i think you get the whole lot with suite. One instrument that ive wanted for a couple of years now is a hang drum. I first heard one in Barcelona with the minimal acoustic band, thinking it was a steel drum back then. Then my partner told me about the hang and wrote a letter to the guys in switzerland to apply for one. A few other versions have come out namely the bell and the halo, and all of them have very long waiting lists and are very expensive. When looking through the instruments that you can buy as add ons to ableton i noticed that sonic couture had created a virtual version of it recording a hang, halo and tank drum, and it sounds beautiful. As it will be a long time before i could ever afford a real one, i figured playing this on my pad Kontrol was the next best thing. As sonic couture have sampled the actual drums, the sound is excellent, and theres loads of variations depending on how you set it up. Theres 3 modes, the main 2 being chromatic and set. The way they map onto the 16 pads of a controller in the set mode is similar to the layout of the hang drum, with the middle pads being the note, and the side and top playing the scale. A nice feature in the kontakt version is the bottom 4 enabling you to change articulation, which enables a much more realistic sound. I love...
