Guzheng: Chinese Plucked Zither Kontakt Instrument by Wavesfactory

Guzheng offers five articulations: fingers, pick, stick, bow and e-bow. Fingers give a mellower tone, while the pick and stick add a more percussive attack. The bow articulation uses a violin bow on the strings, and the e-bow is sampled with an electronic bow that gives an organ-style quality.

Each articulation has four velocity layers and four round robin repetitions. The developer says the round robins are true repetitions intended to avoid the machine-gun effect when notes are repeated. A realistic tremolo effect re-triggers the last played note on release, and the pitch wheel bends the last played note to imitate stretching the string.

The mixer lets you control pan, volume, mute and solo, and stereo width from 100% stereo to mono for each articulation. Each articulation also has a load/purge switch, and an output selector routes the channels to separate outputs for mixing in your DAW.

The library includes an effect script with eight slots per channel. Available effects include EQ, several compressor types, chorus, flanger and phaser, distortion, saturation and tape emulation, algorithmic and convolutional reverb with more than 40 impulse responses, and amp simulators. The settings page controls dynamic range, velocity curve, and the attack and decay or release times for the plucked and bowed envelopes.