The German Harpsichord 1741 library features another rare German harpsichord built by Christian Zell in 1741. The instrument provides an elusive majestic texture and beautiful upper mid harmonics unlike any other harpsichord. Residing at the Organeum in the Northern Germany, the harpsichord is in excellent playable condition.
The sample library features six sounds sampled seperately - the front and a rear 8' stops, both together, the 4', Lautenzug and the tutti combination. The Zell harpsichord is now available in the sampler in its Bach-Kellner tuning at 399 Hz (presets at 440 Hz are also available).
Like all harpsichords, the instrument is not touch-sensitive like a piano. However, even if the differences are minuscule, not any given note will sound the same twice due to different resonances of body and strings.
Up to now, many keyboards and samplers represented harpsichords by always triggering off the exact same digital sample, leaving a cold and sterile sounding impression. In order to pay tribute to the liveliness and depth of this antique instrument, we captured every sampled stop with eight variations per note (Lautenzug and 4': four samples per note).
The key release sounds are also of major importance: What was originally side noise is now often overlooked and even simply left out in digital simulations, resulting in a very abstract overall picture. Therefore, we recorded four release samples per note.
The sample library contains close to 3,300 single samples.
Presets are included for HAlion, Kontakt (full version required) and EXS24 software samplers.
For the recordings, we employed custom-made Wagner U47w® tube microphones in conjunction with Crane Song Flamingo® preamps and Universal Audio 2192® digital converters. The samples were recorded at 192 kHz/24 bits, downsampled to your resolution of choice.
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