Bunker Samples has announced a limited time promotion on its Kontakt instrument library featuring the sounds of the Vietnamese Đàn Bầu, an ancient monochord instrument, played in an unconventional way.
Before increasing the price of Off-World Vol. 1 from $39 USD to $59 USD to bring it into line with the pricing of Off-World Vol. 2, the library is back to its original intro price of $29 USD for the next few days.
Developer and composer/violist Nicolaj of Bunker Samples shares some thoughts on the library.
The saddest instrument in the world?
I have always been fascinated with the Dan Bau, an ancient one-stringed instrument unique to Vietnam, which in its modern day incarnation uses a guitar pick-up to amplify its unique sound. With only one string and no fingerboard, it’s performed by picking the natural harmonics that exists along the string, and to get the in-between notes you have to change the string tension on the fly with a flexible bamboo handle. This is incredibly difficult to master, but this bamboo handle also makes the Dan Bau a very expressive instrument – so expressive in fact, that in Vietnamese culture it is said that unmarried girls should not listen to the Dan Bau because it sounds so sad that it will make them depressed that they are not yet married.
From bau to bow
I love this instrument so much that I own several, and one day I was messing about with playing one of them (wrongly) with a violin bow, while performing pitch bends with the bamboo handle. Just for good measure I decided to run the output through an octave generator, distortion and reverb, and what came out was the craziest sound I had ever heard: massive, bold, and – to use a word I normally hate – cinematic. The problem of course was that played this way, I could only play whatever note the string was tuned too, and then slide up or down from that note.
36 ways to bend
The solution to this problem was of course sampling. By painstakingly sample different tunings, the result was a truly playable instrument that could never exist in the real world. Off-World Vol. 1 is a cinematic pitch bend compendium with 36 different way to play each note, easily selected via the 3 main controls which sets the pitch bend range, direction and length. Throw in a really good gate sequencer and the result is a truly unique and expressive instrument, which (I’m proud to say) has been used by lots of the big names in our industry, my personal favourite being Jospeh Trapanese’s use of it on his score for The Witcher.
Back to $29 one last time
On August 4, the price of Off-World Vol. 1 will go up from $39 to $59. I know… price increases on virtual instruments are never popular, but I believe this one has always been worth more than just $39 and this brings it in line with the pricing of Vol. 2 which has always been $59. But before the price goes up, Off-World Vol. 1 is back to its original intro price of just $29 for one last time. That is, in my admittedly biased opinion, one hell of a good deal – but only until August 4.
More information: Bunker Samples
