Being a huge fan of Exotica music and without a single vibraphone patch for the Organelle on Patchstorage, I thought I’m giving it a go.
To be honest I’m very happy how this turned out. Happy and gutted at the same time. Gutted because I wasted money on buying a NI Kontakt vibraphone library not too long ago. Well, I assume this is the lesson money I had to pay…
Anyway let’s get to the nitty gritty:
https://patchstorage.com/pacifica/
Pacifica! was a sample-based 4-voice polyphonic vibraphone, which allowed “proper” four-mallet style playing. It just got updated to 6-voice polyphony - 6-mallet-style player leave your hideout!
In a real vibraphone, thin round discs mounted on a common shaft and driven by an electric motor rotate at the top of the resonance tubes. The rotation causes all the resonance tubes to open and close periodically, giving the vibraphone its characteristic vibrato depending on the speed of rotation. Basically, however, we are talking about a tremolo here, since the pitch is not changed.
This emulation draws on a modified version of my Brownie tremolo, with the Depth setting fixed as well as a note trigger added to reset the tremolo’s oscillators on each note to give a fuller attack tone.
The speed of the motor has been expanded and is now adjustable between 1 and 12 Hz.
Via a connected footswitch, a damper pedal is emulated, which drastically shortens the release time of the note(s). Typically, the damper is applied just before a new chord is struck. This nice gentleman, can tell you about it in much more detail: How to dampen the vibraphone with the pedal - YouTube
I use audio files from Bandlabs’ Vibraphone Pack, which can be downloaded here: Bandlab Vibraphone Sound Pack | Musical Artifacts
The only modification was a renaming of the audio files, which I just shortened to their pitches to make note selection easier. For details please have a look at the sample-voice.pd abstraction.
Revision 0.3 introduced the octave switch. The full range of notes from F2 to F5 can be accessed with the Organelle keyboard now.
Revision 0.4 introduced 6-voice polyphone, expanded tremolo range and improved gain-staging.
MIDI note in and MIDI note out are supported.
Controls:
Knob1: Motor-Speed (40-140 RPM)
Knob2: Attack
Knob3: Release
Knob4: Octave switch (-1 / 0 / +1)
Aux: Motor ON/OFF
Footswitch: Pedal (Damping)
Enjoy or don’t!