Here come the “holiday gifts.” Arturia adds mallet instruments to its Augmented line, following yangtze, strings, voices, brass, woodwinds, and grand piano. Augmented Mallets Play, a limited preset-based version of the instrument, is available free through January 2.
Now, I briefly thought Arturia was giving away a whole augmented instrument – those are normally $99 at full freight. The “Play” part is the clue, though; the editor/advanced section is disabled. That’s not announced yet, but presumably it’s coming.
Looking this gift horse in the mouth, I think you’ll be impressed. You still get all the Augmented Mallets ingredients, across 50 presets. Those, in turn, are built on three sampled real instruments, 19 processed and additional articulations, 11 natural and prepared articulations, four synthesis types, and two sampler engines. And since the presets include morphing and parameter mapping, including mappings for values like cutoff, envelopes, and FX, you can get quite a lot of mileage out of the free gift.
I really love the Augmented library. I find it does a lot of what the fancy sample libraries offer without the hassle. Unlike the products built on some of the big sampling engines, the interface is fast and resource-light. You can get a ton of expression and creative sound design without dumping gigs and gigs and gigs on your hard drive, thanks to Arturia mixing in effects and synthesis. It just winds up being really quick, and especially if you’re familiar with Arturia’s sound editing, modulation, and effects sections from other products, the goodie bag inside these winds up being great.
Fine, Kontakt. I’m just dancing around talking about Kontakt. There are some extraordinary sample libraries built in Kontakt, but I find that they’re just so bulky, use so much hard drive space, and are so painful to navigate that you lose the creative flow. The idea of the Augmented stuff is, find some quick layers, play them, make some radical editing choices to go somewhere different, done.
Check the freebie here:
You’ll need to install Arturia Software Center, but then activation works as with their other products. Note that you may not see the download right away; it seems they’re staggering availability of downloads based on high demand.
There’s a full playthrough, while you wait: