From the Crow Hill Company comes Harmonium, their latest addition to the free Vaults series.
The Vaults series from The Crow Hill Company has already delivered some wonderful free instruments in its relatively short existence.
Lo-Fi Strings and Bridge Guitar are two great examples from earlier this year.
Harmonium is the latest addition, and, like many Vaults instruments, it comes with an interesting backstory.
If you’re not familiar with the Vaults series, it’s a collection of free instruments ranging from strings and percussion to guitars, synths, and more.
Each instrument is free to download for six months, after which it leaves the free vault. Once you download an instrument, you have it for life, even when it leaves the free vault.
A recent restructuring of the Vaults concept allows us to access instruments that previously left the free vault, and they are no longer lost to time. After six months, instruments are available to purchase for £3, and all proceeds go to charity (Love Music).
Although the harmonium might not be top of everyone’s “must-have” sound list, it’s a beautiful sound that crops up far more than you might expect.
In addition to John Lennon famously playing a harmonium on The Beatles’ track “We Can Work It Out,” bands like Radiohead and The Cure have also embraced the sound of this unique keyboard instrument.
Harmonium features the standard Vaults interface, and this time, the two large dials are Timbre and Room.
The Timbre control introduces upper harmonics, and you can further alter the character through velocity and different dynamic layers.
The Room control morphs between the close mic position and the room sound at Castlesound Studios in Tranent, Scotland.
The four smaller dials are Squeeze (bus compressor), Mod (four-stage chorus), Echo (delay), and Splosh (reverb).
As expected, The Crow Hill Company has captured the essence of the harmonium perfectly, highlighting the instrument’s perhaps unexpected expressiveness.
You can enhance expression and emotion in real-time by adjusting the available parameters, especially the chorus.
I mentioned an interesting story behind Harmonium, and there is, but The Crow Hill Company has left us with something of a cliffhanger (well, maybe not quite edge-of-your-seat stuff).
The harmonium that The Crow Hill Company recorded for this release had a previous owner of interest with some connection to Christian Henson.
The plot thickens: The Crow Hill Company doesn’t yet have permission to name the previous owner, but they are working on it and hope to share it with us soon; excited?
All will be revealed on the next episode of Who Owns That Harmonium?
Download: Harmonium (FREE)
Deal of the day 🔥: Spend $29 on AmpliTube 5 to Get 42 IK Multimedia Plugins for FREE!
More:
Last Updated on October 23, 2025 by Tomislav Zlatic.
