Tonehammer Releases: Zitherette

We're pleased to announce the release of our latest instrument, the Zitherette on October 28th, 2009. This enchanting little instrument is a simple 8-string fretless zither, roughly 12 x 20 inches in size. Zithers are a broad family of hollow-bodied string instruments common throughout all of Europe and Asia. Variants range from the dulcimer to the Koto, with countless other flavors unique to each region and culture. Common to each of them is the arrangement of multiple strings over a neck-less sound box. The oldest known variant of the zither family dates back to 4th century B.C China, while new additions continue to spring up to this day. Our particular hand-held zither has a smooth, dark tone, with a clean biting attack and long, natural decay. At it's softest, it has a pristine, amost harp-like sound, while the hardest notes bend deeply at the attack, with a pronounced twang. We chose a pluck articulation and captured it very close and dry, in wide stereo. We sampled our little zither extensively, as we do with all of our instruments. Each string has an average of 8 velocity layers, with 4 round-robin variations per layer. We also captured palm mute release triggers, with 2 velocities and 4 round robins per note. We created a variety of presets in several different tunings, to allow maximum flexibility and intuitive playability. We also created an array of custom sound-designed fx patches and ambient drones, all of them user-sculptable to extend the creative possibilities even further. Lastly, we've created a "wet" version of most of the core patches, using our own custom-captured convolution impulses. A selection of these impulses are includes in the library, compatible with most major convolution plug-ins. Instruments/articulations

• 4 sets of Zitherette (natural scale BmHarmonic, w/ palm/mute)
• 2 sets of Zitherette (tuned scale w/ dampener)
• 2 sets of ZItherette (tuned scale w/ mute)
• 2 sets of Zitherette (tuned w/ arp)
• Zitherette experimental patches:

  Saturn (w/ MW warp)

  Saturn Rings (w/ MW time stretch and pedal damp)

  Saturn III (w/ MW warp/mute)

  Splattern

  Splattern Anti Arp

• Bonus: 4 custom ambiences
• Extensive read me (.pdf) install, patch and hint documentation
• 24 instrument patches, 335 Samples
• 650 MB installed, 353 MB .rar download
• Sample resolution: 44.1KHz / 24-bit stereo WAV format
• Format(s): .NKI and .WAV