Marxophone: Hammered Dulcimer-Style Kontakt Instrument by Wavesfactory

The library was sampled in four ways, each available as its own articulation: Chords, which are strummed with the fingers; Springs, metal keys with springs attached that bounce on the strings to create a tremolo effect; Pick, which uses a guitar pick for more attack; and Fingers, for a mellower tone.

Each articulation has its own load and purge switch, so you can keep only the sounds you need in memory. The developer states that the instrument was sampled with four true round-robin repetitions to avoid a machine-gun effect when notes are repeated.

The mixer offers pan, volume, mute and solo, stereo width from full stereo to mono, and an output selector for routing the channels separately in your DAW.

Wavesfactory's effect script lets you place effects in any of eight slots per channel. The listed options 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 covers round robin, dynamic range, velocity curve, spring release noise and envelope attack and release for each articulation.