Nastro Soundscapes

Discover the Realm of Analog Beauty

Are you ready to enter a realm of analog beauty? Discover Nastro - the reel experience for Kontakt!

The word Nastro means "tape" in ITalian, and Soundscapes is the first installment in a fascinating series that pays homage to the long-gone world of tapes and reels by providing a powerful 4-track tape machine experience directly to your computer.

Have Audio used some of the best analog synthesizers available to create synthetic lead sounds, loops, textures, noises, and arpeggios for Nastro Soundscapes using samples of some of their favorite instruments. To recreate the true tape sound, they reprocessed all of the recordings using a variety of old tape machines, including walkmans, boomboxes, VHS, and ancient cassette players. Four independent tracks to unleash your creativity, 64 sound sources to choose from, four playback modes, speed control, 80 factory presets, 58 original IR effects made from old gear, and four more FX macros to regulate panning, EQ, compression, and distortion.

Features

• 64 Sound Sources/Patches organized into 6 thematic categories: Synthetic Tones, Synthetic Chords, Synthetic Textures, Arpeggiation, Hybrid, Reel Noise

• 58 unique IR effects created from analog equipment and tape devices

• Built in FX Macros: Pan / EQ / Comp / Sat

• 80 factory presets/snapshots

Sound Sources

64 sound sources, slightly different on each track and for each playback mode, just like in the analog world! Just do your maths and here you got 1024 unique-flavored sources and you still can adjust playback speed for each of the 4 tracks to slow down, accelerate and stretch the reel, deteriorate the sounds and customize the quality of the artifacts.

The 64 sound sources are organized in 6 thematic categories:

• Synthetic Tones - They used a wide array of Synths to create these playable patches. From warm vintage analog to modern, cutting edge digital machines, everything was carefully captured, manipulated and re-processed into different tape machines to catch the magic artifacts of the long gone, golden era of tape recording.

• Synthetic Chords - A tonal set with one-chord-per-key synth sounds, delivering a great starting point for pad and droney stuff. You can choose between minor, major, maj7, min7, sus2, sus4 and augmented. Load chords, engage looping and start composing!

• Synthetic Textures - Richly detailed layers of synth textures crafted by using rare and obscure pieces of equipment, often mixed with sounds of nature to add an organic touch. Add a pinch of built- in FX and turn textures into lush washes.

• Arpeggiation - Let Arpeggiation take the creative strain out of your patches. Multi-note blocks have been sampled into beaming cascading melodies, bringing a luminous and vibrant life to static chords.

• Hybrid - These sound sources were created with super creative phrases performed on electro-acoustic instruments such as sax, electric guitar, bouzouki, saz baglama and persian santoor, subsequently heavily-processed through tape machines in order to get that out of tune, wobbling and nostalgic tone.

• Reel Noise - A set of noises carefully sampled directly from various vintage tape machines with no input: cassette walkmans, dictaphones and big reel to reel units. Add magic to your patches, tones of hiss, wobble and crackling motor sound. We also added a peculiar synth patch made out of a pitched hiss!

58 Unique IR Effects

Nastro's Send FXs are a big part of the game. So many hours were spent creating and fine-tuning unique convolution reverbs and IR effects to push even further Nastro’s capability. Have Audio sampled both real environment responses for organic results, and vintage pedals and devices for extremely unrealistically huge/small halos. There’s also plenty of tuned resonating IRs to enrich your patches with pedal notes of your choice.

Back in the days, iffy frequency response, distortion, tape hiss and noise were unwanted side-effects for everyone recording music on tape. Nowadays, all these artifacts are long gone and often badly missed. For this reason, they decided to develop a Kontakt instrument capable of bringing all the possibilities and "limitations" of their most beloved tape machines. Those that once were limitations can finally become enhancements in this audio engine.

You will find synthetic and hybrid samples painstakingly processed through legendary devices like R2R Akai GX210-D, Sony TC630, Philips 4307, and rare cassette players such as National RQ210-S and boombox Grundig RR1140 just to name a few.

Please note: The FULL version of Kontakt 6.5.2 is required.