Bizarre Sitar at first the look may not seem so strange. It has most of the elements found on any other sitar, with its traditional pumpkin body, both main playable strings and resonating strings, parda (adjustable curved frets), kunti (tuning pegs), dandi (neck), ghoraj (main bridge) all complete with hand-painted accents. At just over 24 inches long, however, this little beauty is barely half the size of a standard sitar.
It’s just not that weird to be small, but it’s weird how you can achieve such a lush, full-bodied sound. It seems to us that this little guy, conceived more as a decoration than as a tool, has been greatly underestimated. Despite the quiet playing and fewer strings than usual, this “childish” sitar only needed someone to listen carefully. And we did it. Very close.
The Bizarre Sitar features both chromatic plucking and strum articulation. Included are two basic settings for strumming: fifth and octave / unison. The built-in “Speed” slider (MIDI assignable and default to the mod wheel) allows you to change the speed of an individual sound from very tight, fast to slower, bolder sounds.
The unison articulation has been tuned with strings in unison and several octaves to get a very full sound. The fifth articulation was tuned along with strings in unison and fifths, similar to the Pancham-Kharaj tuning popularized by Ravi Shankar. By recording several different strum speeds for both 5th and unison strum articulation, this library allows you to create realistic sounds by adjusting the speed in real time.
The strings are tuned and distributed throughout the keyboard, delivering deep droning sounds in the lows and harsh, mandolin-like breaks in the highs.
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!
• Bowed (staccato, tremolo and sustains)
• Plucked (10x rr, 5-6 velocities)
• Strummed (10x rr, 4-8 velocities)
• FX (includes mutes, scrapes and other special effects)
• Ambiences created from the source material.
• One master NKI instrument bank in open Kontakt format
• 603 Stereo Samples
• 1.86 GB installed
• 24 bit / 48 kHz uncompressed PCM wav samples
• 20 Custom Sound-Designed FX and Ambient presets
• Unlocked Kontakt presets and wav samples to allow user customization
• Plucked, Bowed, and Multi-Speed Strummed articulations
• Effects including string mutes, fret scrapes and more
• 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
