dhilowitz

Patron Exclusive: Tongue Drum Sample Library

Added 2025-01-25 00:10:25 +0000 UTC

A couple of months ago, my wife got me this beautiful tongue drum as a gift, and it's been a fixture in my studio ever since. It has a very pleasant, meditative sound. The instrument consists of a single, bean-shaped pod of metal with eight U-shaped slits cut into the top. The slits form the tongues, which give the instrument its name. When struck with a mallet, each tongue produces a different note. It came with two rubber mallets, but I prefer the slightly more distinct sound of my own home-made wine-cork-on-chopstick mallets.

In real life, the instrument's eight notes form one octave of an A minor scale, and because of that, its easy to improvise on its at length without ever getting the feeling that one has played a "wrong note." Of course, in the sample library version of the instrument, we can play any notes we want.

As beautiful as the natural sound of the drum is, I thought it would be fun to put it through some audio effects as well. This week, I've been working on a special sample set for a large music tech company. As part of that project, I've had to make a large number of different sample libraries using outboard effects, as well as some "in-the-box" signal processing. One plug-in that quickly rose to the top as part of this process is Transit 2 by Baby Audio x Andrew Huang. It has a reconfigurable signal chain, and I ended up using the plug-in for all ten of the effects libraries included in this library. I'm really happy with how this library came out. Hope you enjoy it!

As always, you can download the sample library through the Decent Sampler plug-in, assuming you use the same email address for Patreon as you do for DecentSamples.

– Dave