Tangent Drum - The Ultimate Steel Tongue Drum Library?

Tangent Drum is the new Audio Brewers sample library, and according to their bold claim, it might easily be the last Steel Tongue Drum you will ever need(!)

Tangent Drum features a Steel Tongue Drum sampled in many innovative ways and techniques, as you would expect from a boutique company such as Audio Brewers, specialized in creating products in native Ambisonics. Let’s find out more about the instrument.

Articulations

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From typical finger tipping and mallets, all the way to playing it with brushes, a wrench an even bowed, they have created a massive set of articulations comprised of 5 Core, 13 Prepared and 10 Sound Design – 28 Articulations in total.

Mics and Mixes

Tangent Drum was sampled with tradition in mind – but this time in immersive Ambisonics: An overhead Ambisonics microphone mixed with an Overhead Pair of mics create a three-dimensional spatial field that will blend with your music perfectly.

But Audio Brewers didn’t stop there. They placed an Ambisonics microphone inside the resonance box of the instrument to capture the unique resonances that happen all around the instrument itself, to help you hear as if you were trapped inside the Steel Drum. A unique perspective!

They also tried something new with their Macro perspective, where they placed an extremely sensitive microphone as close as possible from each tongue so as to capture the sound as soon as it emanates from the steel tongue.
They later mixed this in Ambisonics so you can feel all the tongues surrounding you.

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Sample Deconstruction.

As a Steel Tongue Drum contains around 10-12 notes, you might be dealing with pitch artifacts when you really want to play far from the pitch centre. For this reason, the company developed a technique called Sample Deconstruction, in which each and every single sample are decomposed to their Tonal, Atonal and Resonant properties.

These helped them create an instrument with 6 octaves of full life with no pitch artifacts on the transients – you can now go crazy on that keyboard and have a 6-octave Steel Tongue Drum at your disposal.

Additionally, they created patches in multiple keys (C, D, E, F, G, A, B) so no matter the Key your song is in, Tangent Drum will resonate consonantly with it. And remember, without pitch artifacts, not even in the resonance.

And just to let you know: you can even manipulate all these layers independently with the instrument’s versatile engine, so you have a sound design beast at the tip of your fingers!

Tangent Drum comes both in Stereo and Ambisonics, so no matter if you compose for Stereo, Immersive, Spatial Audio, Surround, Atmos and even custom speaker-arrays, Tangent Drum is natively compatible!

Tangent Drum comes in Stereo and Ambisonics

So it’s compatible with any speaker array configuration, including:

Stereo
Binaural
5.1, 6.1, 7.1
Spatial Audio
Atmos
Custom Speaker Arrays.

Here below you can listen to some demos in stereo and ambisonics, and watch a trailer video:

Trailer

SPECIFICATIONS

Mix, Overhead, Inside, Macro mic positions.
Recorded, mixed and delivered in Ambisonics and Stereo.
28 Articulations (5 Core, 13 Prepared, 10 Sound Design)
25 Tailored Presets.
Multiple Round Robins and Velocities
Pristine 24bit / 48kHz resolution.
Stereo + Ambisonics: 117GB compressed to 37GB (lossless). Over 68.900 samples

Requires full version of Kontakt 6.2.1 or above