Christian Henson lives in a building designed to house doctors and nurses who worked at the infamous St Bethlem mental hospital. AKA Bedlam. It is now the home of the London Imperial War Museum. This is Christian’s family piano, an old 1970′s upright made in London. Christian has a large family so this piano is rarely in tune. “I always wanted a nicely out of tune piano sample but most VIs fall into 3 camps, pristine and in tune, out of tune and pub piano like, and a non-pristine piano pristinely tuned! I want something that will make me sound like Nick Cave or Warren Ellis” he said. So he monitored it’s detuning progress and one day out of the blue notified the King’s Cross team that “she’s baked”. Cicely Balston and Sebastian Truman decamped to Christian’s to sample this piano for all of our pleasure!


One of the beautiful artistic aspects of sampling is “Hyper Sampling” whereby you design an instrument that simply couldn’t be played that way but with a sound that is totally true and organic. Anyone who can give us the latin for this, we’ll have it made into a sign above the door that reads: “If you’re meant to hit it, bow it, if you’re meant to bow it hammer it, if you’re meant to hammer it pluck it, and if you’re meant to pluck it, hit it”. Our beautiful fingered dulcimer played hauntingly with pads of fingers for a magical, less geographically associated instrument.


Of unknown original, Paul discovered this tiny single-stringed (ie not arranged in pairs) Dulcimer which has to be heard to be believed, truly infectious.


A carefully manucfactured array of ceramic desk or “service!” bells. Lovingly sampled here in our new purpose built dry space at King’s Cross by Cicely Balston and Sebastian Truman. The hammer mechanisms within each bell provide for a random pleasingly primitive or school room effect.


Like the desk bells these also have a schoolish or primitive quality. Designed for school use they have a remarkably sonorous instrument. They imitate bell choirs where you have to flick your wrist to produce a tone, limiting each player to two notes. This VI recorded by Sam Bohn cuts down on personnel to recreate these bell choirs!


Like with our Bell Tree range, this is a refresher set of hand claps so you can replace that tired old sample you nabbed off a CD laminated to a trade mag 8 years ago. Recorded from a number of different perspectives with different sized groups they’re deeply sampled with a number of dynamic layers up to 25 round robins and the all important finger snaps!

Available in exchange for a minimum £2 donation PER MODULE to UNICEF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember this is donation - stuff!!!!!!

The "Coming Soon" shite on the pictures doesnt count ... they´re all ready for donation!

 

I'm sure they did something similar last year *yes*

 

I'm sure they released some libraries last Christmas as well with donations going to charity

 

I am fond of their charity libraries, but I wish I would be able to donate to a charity other than UNICEF...

 

Ahhh ...... Yup, you could prolly be right ..... !

Yeah you have a point troslek ...... mail Spitfire Audio and tell them!