Canjo is a Kontakt instrument library from Soundiron, built from samples of a homemade single-stringed fretted folk instrument made from a wood stick, string tuner and tin can.
Canjo captures a homemade single-string instrument with a twangy, metallic tone that sits somewhere between a banjo and a mountain dulcimer. The developer describes it as fretted diatonically across a 12-note range, suited to folk melodies. The library includes picked, smooth and harsh plucks, slides, bowed sustains, staccatos and spiccatos, along with ambient soundscapes, pads and drones built from the same source recordings. Soundiron says the sound can also stand in for a brittle viola, a cheap slide guitar or an erhu.
Canjo is built around plucked articulations, from picked and smooth plucks to harsher attacks. Slides, bowed sustains and staccatos give you sustained and short phrasing options from the same instrument.
The library also includes 20 Ambience patches made from the source content. These offer pads and drones for textures beneath or around the plucked material.
The Kontakt interface offers automation-ready controls for swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, coarse and fine pitch, articulation switching, cross-fading and layering.
An LFO system provides selectable shape, target, speed, intensity, tempo sync and fade-in time. An arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. A key and scale lock constrains notes to common scales.
The modular FX rack holds 18 DSP effect modules across 10 slots, and the reverb section includes 99 convolution impulse responses for rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor spaces.
Formats, systems and requirements as listed by Plugin Boutique. Missing details are left out, not guessed.
| Developer | Soundiron |
|---|---|
| Type | Plugin |
| Category | Kontakt Instrument |
| Requires | Kontakt |
| Formats | Kontakt |
| Operating systems | Windows, macOS |
Canjo requires the full version of Kontakt, version 5.5 or later. The developer notes that Kontakt Player is not compatible with this open Kontakt format instrument.
Canjo runs on Windows 7 or higher and Mac OS X 10.9 or higher. The listed minimum is a dual-core CPU and 2 GB of system RAM, with an SSD recommended for this library.
Canjo includes plucked, slid, bowed and staccato articulations of the instrument, plus 20 ambience patches of pads and drones created from the same source material.
REQUIRES KONTAKT
REQUIRES KONTAKT
REQUIRES KONTAKT
REQUIRES KONTAKT
REQUIRES KONTAKT
REQUIRES KONTAKT