Rast Sound has released Kemenche, a sample pack featuring 550MB+ of deep and expressive world music strings, including a wide variety of loops, phrases and long improvisations, as well as a fully playable instrument for Native Instruments Kontakt.

Kemenche Strings is mainly a sampler instrument aiming to bring you both a seriously playable solo authentic world string and an invaluable spicer for layering with your other strings due to the humanly, deep and expressive sound it generates.

As usual we included recorded long improvs, phrases, processed loops etc. for the wave heads but we maintained a higher than usual focus on the sampler instrument this time; as this most of all is an instrument we truly love and admire.

Kemenche or kemençe is a name used for various types of stringed bowed musical instruments having their origin in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle Eastern particularly in Turkey, Iran, Armenia, Greece and regions adjacent to the Black Sea.

We bring you what is called the classical kemenche, which has a softer and more sophisticated sound when compared to rather primitive, dancey, harder sounding versions.

Quite interesting to this instrument is that it is played by touching the strings gently with the nail from the side (rather then pressing them down or against a fret) which, combined with it’s small, resonant roomy body and bowing, gives the instrument it’s unique mesmerising sound character.

The library covers all typical and some atypical articulations, immediately usable trough keyboard switching while playing, combined into one rich instrument. In addition to straight sustain articulation, we sampled recorded vibrato too for a highly authentic sound for the sampler enthusiast.

The sample pack is available for purchase for 28 EUR.

More information: Rast Sound / Kemenche