Steel Tones: Tuned Steel Tongue Drum Kontakt Instrument by Soundiron

Steel Tones is sampled from a Hapi Drum with eight tongues tuned to D-major pentatonic. The Close Dry position uses a stereo pair of large-diaphragm Neumann studio microphones for a direct, present sound. The Far Wet position uses a second, wider stereo pair captured in a hall at 15 feet.

Each note is sampled with seven round robins and up to nine velocity layers. You can choose soft rubber mallets or hard metal mallets, which change the attack and tone of the strike.

The library also includes around 50 ambiences, pads and soundscapes built from the same acoustic source, which suit accompaniment and underscoring.

Two sound layers have independent controls, so you can mix articulations and microphone positions into custom blends. Per-layer controls include swell, attack, sample start offset, release, semitone pitch-stepping and playable MIDI key range.

The arpeggiator offers several modes and a step sequencer for building patterns. The effects rack includes chorus, phaser, flanger, compressor, several distortion types, amp and speaker simulation, EQ, a resonant filter, delay and convolution reverb with a set of cathedral, hall, room and special FX impulses.

All controls are automation-ready in your host, and the samples can be accessed and mapped in other WAV-compatible software.