Ambient Cello - Inventive Instruments

Inventive Instruments by Richard Pryn

Buy Ambient Cello Kontakt Instrument

Welcome to the first instrument to be revamped and rereleased from my Inventive Instrument collection.

What is the Ambient Cello then?

The ambient cello is a collection of recordings of me playing the cello. I stuck a tuner on the cello to make sure I stayed in tune and played two different articulations; col legno (bowed), and tremolo.

I wanted to get a couple of different textures going on.

From there we took the samples and chucked them through some of my favourite effect chains.

Exported the resulting sounds and then mapped them all out within Kontakt.

The resulting sound can be heard all over my ambient side project, This Shimmering Sky.

Ambient Cello Walkthrough

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I am however offering this as a gift to my subscribers who can access the download by following the link below:

Click here to download the ‘Ambient Cello’…

How I build my own Kontakt instruments

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt about sampling is to plan backwards. Before you hit record, decide how the instrument will work in Kontakt: which playing techniques you want, and whether you really need velocity layers and round robins. I once went into a friend’s studio thinking I’d record five round robins with six velocity layers for around twenty instruments, and I ended up half-doing all of it. Simple and usable beats huge and unfinished.

When I record, I mic up close to capture as much detail as possible, even if it brings a bit of boxiness or room with it. I record a few seconds of silence at the start so I have a noise profile to remove later, and I keep a tuner in front of me so the notes stay roughly in tune. A little variation is fine; it sounds more musical. For long notes I record across several octaves, spaced around a tone or a minor third apart, because pitching a sample down sounds better than pitching it up.

Then comes the tidying. I use iZotope RX to learn the noise from that silent section and remove it from every file. When I normalise, I normalise the whole file rather than one part of it, so the levels stay balanced. When I chop the notes, I leave the same small gap before every one so they all trigger at the same point, add short fades to stop clicks, and name each file by its MIDI note.

Finally, I drag the samples into Kontakt and use the Mapping Editor to spread them across the keyboard, then adjust the sample start points so nothing lags behind.

If you’d like to try this yourself, Make your own Kontakt instruments EASILY shows the whole process from scratch, How do I get my award winning Cello sound? is all about my cello sound, and the Free Horror Music Sample Pack gives you dry cello, violin and vocal recordings to play with. My custom Kontakt instruments and sample packs are also included in The Composer Academy.

Happy composing!Rich