ZIP

In addition to the big ZIP button above, this library can be downloaded from Audiobombs, which seems to be faster from most locations.

For thousands of years, bagpipes have been the sonic terrorist's weapon of choice. Cowsynth brings that terror to the 21st century by taking samples of bagpipes and treating them as oscillators in a simple synthesizer. Though designed with obnoxious big room plucks in mind, it turned out to be a lot more than that. Bagpipes with their strong upper partials make a very nice organic substitute for a saw wave oscillator, and with eight-voice unison they make great pads, strings and organs. And obnoxious bagplucks, too. The pipes themselves were built based on a medieval drawing (so they're not very Scottish), and the bag is cowskin - that's why we gave it the Cowsynth name.

The synth-style controls include AHDSR envelope, pitch vibrato speed and depth, low-pass filter with cutoff and resonance, and extra detune or pluck filter controls sometimes. The mappings range from reasonably bagpipey to totally synthy. The seven mappings are Baggy, Wheezy, Lonely, Asthmatic, Fancy, Shifty and Doc.

The whole package requires Plogue Sforzando - some things might work in other SFZ-compatible samplers but the envelope and filter controls might not work in anything except Sforzando, especially if you want to tweak them from the GUI. There aren't a lot of samples here, we just mapped them to death, so the library itself is only a 13 MB download.

The below demo features fancy plucks, shifty leads and asthmatic pads.

http://soundcloud.com/karoryfersamples/for-elises-cows-cowsynth-demo

Cowsynth is a free download and royalty-free for all commercial and non-commercial use, including adaptation to other sampler formats.

via

Code:

http://www.karoryfer.com/karoryfer-samples/wydawnictwa/cowsynth