Hopkin Instrumentarium: Handsome Dan

Overview

Hopkin Instrumentarium: Handsome Dan — SOUNDIRON

Handsome Dan is a creation from master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: A stringed Zither with a unique twist. This flat wooden sound box has 14 strings, with a center bridge dividing them into two segments. A magnetic pickup is placed on one side, but the strings are played primarily on the other side, usually with a slide or plectrum. The tone is dreamy and ethereal, with a floating, swelling presence. Handsome Dan is an experimental custom creation from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: A stringed Zither with a unique twist. The key is a clever system for picking up and isolating the harmonic resonances in unplayed strings. This flat wooden sound box has 14 strings, with a center bridge dividing them into two segments.

A magnetic pickup is placed on one side, but the strings are played primarily on the other side, usually with a slide or plectrum. When a frequency sounding on the played side matches any of the harmonics of the same string on the unplayed side, it sets up a sympathetic vibration in the unplayed segment. That’s the sound that comes through the pickup. The tone is dreamy and ethereal, with a floating, swelling presence. We've faithfully sampled every interesting sound we could get out of this zither, with two stereo mic positions: Contact mics, and mixed mics. Plucks, Slides in a variety of intervals, and Glisses up and down are available in all four layers to easily mix and match.

With up to 8x round robin and 6 velocity layers per note, you’ll be swimming in beautiful timbres in no time. We've also included a wide selection of custom FX presets and plenty of our signature sound-designed ambient content, crafted from the raw acoustic source to give you complete creative freedom. Bart Hopkin has been active in many facets of music-making, including instrument building, performing and recording, composition, arrangement, education, and ethnomusicological research. Bart is also an established author, with ten books published on the subjects of instrument design and optimization.

Since 1974, Bart has been designing and constructing all the far-flung musical instruments he could dream up, with an emphasis on unusual and inventive acoustic art. The Hopkin Instrumentarium now has over 110 original creations and continues to grow every year. Soundiron is proud to bring you this inspiring and distinctive series of bespoke instruments not found anywhere else on earth. The Kontakt interface includes a suite of automation-ready sound-shaping controls to give you total creative flexibility. You have control over swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading and layering, and so much more.

This library comes with an adaptable LFO system, with selectable LFO shape, modulation target parameter, speed, intensity, tempo-syncing and fade-in time. You can also apply your choice of 12 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters, with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, modwheel, expression, after-touch, key position and step-sequencer table control. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and control over arp direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. We’ve included a key and scale lock system to constrain your notes to common scales and keys for easy melodic composition and live performance.

The interface is rounded-out by our modular FX rack panel, with 27 different DSP effect modules that you can assign in any of 8 available slots, in any order that you wish. You’ll find classic phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ, rotator and so much more. The Reverb effect includes our favorite convolution reverb impulse responses, including 99 different rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor environments, plus another 40 custom FX impulses to radically transform the sound and open up whole new worlds of musical possibility. We’ve added a great bank of FX rack chain factory presets to get you started! This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 6.2.2 or later.

Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform. You can view screenshots of this library's custom graphical user interface in the image gallery above. This library is packed with features to provide you a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode. Learn more about Kontakt by Clicking Here . This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats.

The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.