Hopkin Instrumentarium: Weighted Strings

Custom Lyre & Zither Samples for Kontakt

Weighted Strings is a set of two amazing custom creations from the mind of master instrument inventor Bart Hopkin: The Weighted Lyre and Weighted Zither. These handcrafted experimental instruments use small weights on the strings to alter overtone relationships and create unusual, beautiful sounds. Made of wood and metal, they have a richly acoustic essence that resounds brightly through each plucked note.

The Lyre has 17 main strings, as well as three additional strings that run over a narrow neck and can be fretted. The weights on the Lyre strings are carefully placed to prominently bring out an octave overtone. The Zither has 34 chromatically tuned main strings. Unlike the Lyre, the weights on these strings are not placed to bring out any particular overtones. As a result, the overtone recipes are highly inharmonic and random, varying from string to string, with highly inharmonic tone qualities.

Soundiron faithfully sampled every interesting sound they could get out of these instruments, with three stereo mic positions: Close, Room, & Contact. The also included a wide selection of custom FX presets and plenty of signature sound-designed ambient content, crafted from the raw acoustic source to give you complete creative freedom.

Product Specs

• Weighted Lyre & Zither plucks, glisses, harmonics, SFX in three mic positions: Close, Room, Contact

• 20 ambient pads and evolving drones created from the source content

• 22 Powerful Kontakt .nki instrument presets

• 9,204 stereo samples in unlocked .WAV format

• 23.4 GB Installed

• Made for the full retail version of Kontakt (version 6.2.2+)