Silence+Other Sounds CARTAGO KONTAKT
Cartago is a Kontakt library built around an extensive collection of ancient, modern, and custom-designed cinematic percussions. Created in collaboration with renowned sound designer Stefano Maccarelli — whose acclaimed works include the Ethera vocal library series, Elements, Kepler, and many more — Cartago offers a rich array of meticulously crafted sounds organised in two highly powerful Kontakt instruments.
Cartago features a wide selection of both acoustic and designed percussive instruments, from classic orchestral bass drums, timpani, and snares to custom Roman Timpana and various frame drums. Traditional world instruments are also well represented, including Japanese Taikos, Middle-Eastern darbukas, and West African djembes, alongside rare idiophones like the crotala, tintinnabula, sistrum, and scabellum.
Cartago is structured into two versatile instruments: the Acoustic Percussions Sequencer and the Designed Drums Kit. Both instruments are designed for an intuitive, composer-friendly experience, enabling seamless percussion sequencing and drum design that’s as creative as it is efficient.
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1. ACOUSTIC PERCUSSIONS SEQUENCER
The Acoustic Percussions Sequencer instruments features 51 multi-sampled drums.
Each drum features 12 round robins, up to 7 dynamic levels and 3 microphone positions (Close 1, Close 2, Room). The microphone position of Close 1 and Close 2 changes according to the sampled drum: for frame drums, they respectively correspond to front and back, whereas other configurations are used for drums of different size and shape.
For each drum, 3 different kind of hit have been recorded: for larger drums like Taikos, Bass drums or bigger frame drums, these correspond to Centre, Middle and Border respectively, whereas other articulations are featured for smaller drums.
The instrument features 3 independent layers, in order to combine different percussive sounds, with a total of 9 different sounds that can be played simultaneously from the keyboard.
Moreover, the Acoustic Percussions Sequencer features a multistep sequencer based on multiple interchangeable patterns in real time, and further controls like Expression , Tightness and Scale for a further, more expressive dynamic control.
2. DESIGNED DRUMS KIT
The Designed Drums Kit is a sound design oriented instrument that features over 2200 one-shot samples. It has been designed to creatively layer and manipulate pre-designed drum and percussive samples and playing them in a finger-drumming MPC fashion. In fact, the Designed Drums Kit is based on 16 independent pads (on the left of the GUI) to which a sound can be loaded.
The basic concept of the Designed Drums Kit can be summarised as: load any sound to any pad, map any pad to any key on your MIDI controller. Do you want to have an instrument with 16 different kick sounds? You can. Do you want to load the very same snare sample on each of the 16 pads and manipulate it independently per pad? You can. You want to create your own kit by exploring the vast selection of one-shots? You can.
– The samples in the Acoustic Percussions Sequencer are compressed in .ncw format.
– The samples in the Designed Drums Kit are regular .wav files and are accessible from the samples folder. They can be used outside of Kontakt.
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