Sonic Bloom has a careful recreation of a unique modern lamellophone with a crystal clear bell-like sound. Array Mbira for Ableton Live comes with two round robin styles and a strum feature.

The pack includes racks for the pure array mbira tone and sound design alike.

For Sonic Bloom Array Mbira I’ve carefully sampled each of the 60 tines of my own four octave array mbira. It is made of sapele wood with an acoustic body of douglas fir that gives it a beautiful soft tone and medium sustain through the built-in two-channel piezo pickup system. Since the arrangement according to the array system repeats each note twice or even three times to allow the playing of fast patterns with both hands, I’ve created two versions that alternate between the doubled or tripled notes, either in a traditional round robin way or in a randomised fashion.

The alignment of all octaves of the same note close to each other invites to play them in strums, which is reflected in the octave strum instrument rack and MIDI effect rack presets. Sonic Bloom Array Mbira includes two folders of 34 Instrument Rack presets total, each of them is fully macro mapped and gain staged.

Array Mbira features

  • 35 presets (34 fully macro mapped Instrument Racks, 1 MIDI effect rack).
  • 3 Live Sets.
  • 1 self-installing Live Pack with integrated lesson in Live’s Help section.

Priced 29 EUR, Array Mbira is available for Ableton Live 9.7 Intro or higher. A version with 5 presets is available as a free download from the product page.

More information: Sonic Bloom