Fragile and inherently musical bell-shaped the sight of an old incandescent light bulb has always fascinated us, and we knew that time was running out for this poor little device. That is why we have to present you Luminabells – the mysterious and angelic essence of a simple ordinary light bulb, captured as a tiny starry galaxy of modest but beautiful sounds.
We’ve recorded all kinds of old filament lamp sizes and shapes, lovingly sculpted into a rich collection of tuned and out of tune percussion, sustained melodic tones and otherworldly effects.
We recorded several different tube sizes and shapes using different play articulations to explore the sonic potential of each. We tapped our fingers, palms, sticks, hammers, other bulbs, and other instruments, focusing on every timbre and tone that we could extract from each bulb.
We have paid special attention to ensuring that the unique filament in each of them vibrates as much as possible, without breaking either it or the glass bulb itself.
The sound recorded for this library was very quiet, often produced by very small and usually very fragile glass bulbs. In order to amplify many of these musical sounds to acceptable levels, some low frequency rumbles and high frequency hiss are inevitably amplified as well.
We deliberately left these impurities in the sound in place, rather than filtering them out, in order to preserve the most subtle aspects of these sounds and expand creativity.
The Kontakt interface includes a set of ready-to-automate sound shaping controls for complete creative flexibility. You have control over swell, attack, decay, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse and fine), articulation switching, crossfading, layering, and more. We’ve also included 20 unique special effects sound presets that will give you tons of creative options.
This library comes with an adaptable LFO system with selectable LFO shape, modulation target, rate, intensity, tempo sync, and decay time. You can also apply your choice of 12 low-pass, high-pass and effect filters with assignable modulation targets such as velocity, mod wheel, expression, post-tap, key position, and step sequencer table control. Our customizable arpeggiator offers a velocity table and controls for direction, timing, swing, randomization and arpeggio duration. We have included a key and scale lock system to restrict your notes to common scales and keys for easier melodic composition and live performance.
The interface is complemented by our modular FX rack panel with 18 different DSP effect modules that you can assign to any of the 10 available slots in any order. You’ll find classic phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cabinet simulators, compressors, equalizer, rotator and more. The Reverb Effect includes our favorite convolution reverb impulse response, including 99 different rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor environments, plus 40 more customizable FX impulses to radically transform sound and open up whole new worlds of musical possibilities. We’ve added a great bank of factory presets for the FX chain to get started!
• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• Tuned & untuned tonal resonant dings, rings, pings, pops, clacks and other transient impacts from 40 lightbulbs of all shapes and sizes
• 20 Ambience patches created from the source content
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• 1,649 Stereo WAV files
• 1.2 GB installed
• Flexible and intuitive multi-layer user interface controls, with LFO, filter, glide, and arpeggiator
• Full FX rack with convolution reverb with custom rooms, halls, chambers & FX environments