Fracture Sounds Zen: Meditations

ZEN
Containing a range of meditative instruments and sounds from around the world, Zen: Meditations is the perfect addition to your scoring palette, evoking calming tones in your music, or conjuring other-worldly atmospheres using the new Layer Blends engine.

About The Collection
For this library, we pursued sounds closely related to the act of meditation or the creation of other-worldly ambiences and textures that invoke feelings of spiritualism and calm. Containing tuned and untuned percussion, instruments from Indian classical music, alongside 24 inspiring sound-design layers, there is a great variety of contemporary and conventional sounds as part of this package.

Building on years of sampling experience from instruments previously in the Fracture Sounds catalogue, Zen provides a fresh perspective, adding 9 previously unexplored instruments to our product catalogue.

From this experience, we have developed realistic interpretations of the instruments, unique tools such as Dynamic Performance and our brand-new Layer Blends engine- allowing you to easily blend all of the Atmosphere Layers and sustain articulations in an intuitive interface.

14 inspiring instruments
The library contains 14 inspiring instruments from a range of instrument families, captured and programmed with meticulous attention to detail.

Whilst some instruments may look simple on the surface, we have deployed advanced performance scripts behind the scenes allowing for responsive and expressive playing. For example, the performance engine for our bowed metal instruments replicates the slow changes in dynamics, characteristic of the real instruments.

Alongside the acoustic instruments are 24 specially curated Atmosphere Layers – pads and textures which have been designed to blend perfectly with the range of instruments available in the library. Each tuned instrument is loaded with three default layers that are best suited to the instrument in question. However, these can be easily swapped out with any other Atmosphere Layer in the library to create your own unique sound palette.

A new way to blend sounds
Taking the sound design and sample content of Zen even further, we have developed the Layer Blends engine, allowing you to combine the entire range of atmosphere layers and sustained articulations across Zen in a simple-to-use interface. Load up to three sound sources at a time and blend between them using the mod wheel.

Want to quickly generate new combinations to find inspiration? Use the Shuffle button to swap out any of the sounds from the 28 sources in the dropdown menu, which can be further modified with an octave shift or the global ADSR and Reverb controls.

The library contains the following acoustic instruments:

- Handpan – A large, inverted steel pan drum that produces a resonant metallic tone. Played with hands and soft mallets.

- Tank Drum – A smaller rounded steel drum that produces a brighter tone. Played with hands and soft mallets, in both muted and unmuted variants. This instrument has been intricately sampled with an advanced sympathetic resonance engine, which allows the tonal centre of the instrument to be set to any key.

- Sitar – An Indian plucked string instrument with resonating strings, containing normal sustained notes, ornamentations (bends), and glissandi.

- Tanpura – Resembling the shape of a Sitar, the Tanpura is a 4 stringed instrument used to create drones that have a deep and dark resonance.

- Tabla – Two traditional Indian drums. The 'bhaya' drum is larger and deeper in pitch, whilst the 'tabla' drum is higher pitched and has a distinctive resonance. Both drums were sampled with different hand techniques and programmed with an intuitive performance engine.

- Wine Glasses – By rubbing the rims of crystal glasses with water, this patch produces a sustained sound similar to a Glass Harmonica. Finger and mallet hits add short variants to the articulation options.

- Tibetan Bowl – A traditional, large Signing Bowl that has a dark metallic timbre played with options for soft and hard hits, sustains, and a rust layer to add more scraping noises for added realism.

- Tuned Gongs – An array of Tibetan gongs, suspended horizontally with a distinctive spiritual tonality, sampled with soft and hard mallet hits.

- Bowed Vibes – An orchestral vibraphone bowed with a cello bow to create ambient and mellow, sustained metallic textures.

- Bowed Crotales – Similar to the timbre of Bowed Vibraphone, the Crotales offer a brighter and higher-pitched metallic sound.

- Meditation Chimes – A set of cylindrical bells performed with a hard mallet.

- Tingsha Bells – A small set of bells used in ritual meditation that have a clear, metallic timbre.

- Tuning Forks – Metallic resonators that produce a clear fundamental frequency are combined into one sample instrument that produces a very pure Celeste-like tone.

- Bamboo Chimes – Wooden windchimes. With a variety of performed phrases and multisampled 1-shots included, these chimes can be used as a percussion instrument, or as a textural tool to create the effect of flowing water.
The team at Fracture Sounds are a group of composers, and as such, we design every library with playability and usability at the forefront. We worked with composer Jay Witsey to record the subtleties and nuances of the Indian instruments within Zen. For true realism, the Sitar includes keyswitching to different pitch bending ornaments, the Tanpura can both sustain naturally and infinitely, and the Tabla has been programmed with voice muting, which damps the previous note played on each specific drum.
Some products that were discontinued in September 2023 return in Zen: Meditations. The Tank Drum (previously Zen Drum), Bowed Crotales and Bowed Vibes (previously Frozen Crotales and Frozen Vibes) have been polished and updated in the new interface. Not only have these instruments been refreshed and revitalised, but they are now available in the free Kontakt Player.

Whilst we previously had Singing Bowl and Water Glass libraries in our catalogue, the Wine Glasses and Tibetan Bowl included in Zen are brand-new recordings and do not contain any legacy material.
Features

- The new Layer Blends engine offers hundreds of blending options with Atmosphere Layers and Sustains
- A wide array of meditative sounds from across the world
- 14 deep-sampled acoustic instruments
- 24 bespoke Atmosphere Layers
- Highly intuitive programming with a focus on playability
- Full NKS support – works with Komplete Kontrol hardware.
- 8.5GB download size (NCW compressed from a 10GB sample pool)