Orchestral Tools' latest library is called Sångara, and features 70 southeast Asian instruments, some of which have never before appeared in a sample collection before, apparently.
Sångara is Orchestral Tools' fourth collaboration with the film and TV composer Richard Harvey, who has worked on many soundtracks including The Lion King, Interstellar, Luther, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Previous OT collaborations include Andea, a library that focussed on central and southern American instruments.
This time around, all of the instruments are from southeast Asia. Harvey is an avid instrument collector (he has around 700!) and he hand-picked all of the percussion, wind and stringed instruments used in the library. They were then recorded for Sångara at Karma Studios in Thailand, and were all played by local, skilled musicians.
Some of the more unusual instruments in Sångara include a Burmese saung-gauk (a 16-string arched harp), a kong wong lek (a circle of tuned gongs) and several kentongans and grongs (those are hollow percussion instruments that produce a snappy natural sound, apparently).
Sångara is certainly one of the more unusual libraries that we've come across and represents something of a departure for Berlin-based Orchestral Tools. The company is better known for titles like its Metropolis Ark collection of bombastic orchestral sounds, and the more recent Peteris Vasks Strings, which we reviewed a few months ago.
Sångara costs €249 (rising to €399 after November 8). You can get more information over at the Orchestral Tools website and there's a detailed walkthrough video below.
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