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. 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, to allow maximum flexibility and intuitive playability. We also created an array of custom sound-designed fx patches, extending 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.
