Soniccouture Array Mbira virtual kalimba

General

You may have seen the name kalimba before, if only because the many General MIDI keyboards from the 1990s had a kalimba in the sound palette. It is an African instrument in which metal tongues vibrate a large sound box. Through Soniccouture Array Mbira virtual kalimba, this (otherwise large) instrument can also be used in your studio. A whopping 9GB of samples is present, which is quite a lot for such a single-sounding instrument. The 4112 samples therefore consist of eight velocity layers and three round-robins. The latter means there are three recordings per played note, these are interspersed resulting in greater realism.

Application of Soniccouture Array Mbira virtual kalimba

The instrument (also known as thumb piano, sanza or mbira) is thus originally African. However, you will be surprised how easily you can apply this sound in a Western context. The onset still has something exotic, but the rest of the sound is quite similar to a vibraphone. You could use this kalimba very well in a piece of jazz, new age or dreampop. Especially with a nice reverb, this really is a beautiful musical instrument; forget that keyboard kalimba from the 90s, this sounds like the real deal!

A closer look at Array Mbira

What you will immediately notice is the enormous depth of sound. The case of the recorded kalimba measures 77 cm; the lowest resonances created by this are around 33 Hz! By comparison this is equivalent to the low C on a five-string double bass. There are various parameters to tweak the sound a little, such as envelope, filter, pickup and effects. This product from Soniccouture is a Kontakt instrument that also works with the freely available Kontakt Player 3.5 (or newer).

Please note: The Mbira/kalimba in the photos are only photos of the recorded instrument with the manufacturer. You will only get the Kontakt-library.