Seeing as Teenage Engineering want to take us back to our primitive past with their new sampler, I thought I’d dig out some medieval samples that we can all use.
Let’s party like it twas 1399! The medieval era has been well and truly thrust in our faces today, with Teenage Engineering launching their EP-1320 medieval Sampler. So with the world likely to be overcome with the sounds of King Arthur’s Court and madrigals, I thought I’d find you some sounds to jump on that bandwagon!
Best Service Era II Medieval Legends
Widely regarded as the ‘go-to’ library for medieval and renaissance sounds, Eduardo Tarilonte’s Era II pretty much nails every possible instrument from that era. It’s a huge collection of beautifully samples instruments that will consume over 13GB of your hard drive space.
Using Best Service’s ENGINE playback system, which is thankfully supplied, Era II covers almost all the bases when it comes to instruments of the medieval era, no pun intended. Flutes, crumhorns, bombards, bagpipes, lutes, nyckelharpas, virginals and many other instruments whose names I struggle to pronounce!
There’s even ‘Pub Chants’ which one presumes are medieval in nature and not what I hear down my local when the Elvis impersonator is on! There’s also a wealth of soundscapes, atmospheres and effects which suggests that the target audience for this library will be those in the soundtrack business.
Era II is available for Windows and Mac and comes as a standalone app as well as a plugin for AAX/AU/VST232 and VST264.
Fluffy Audio Rinascimento
I keep hearing the name of Fluffy Audio bandied around by my soundtrack-writing friends who constantly tell me how amazing they are and judging by the sound of Rinascimento, I reckon they’re pretty much on the money.
Similar to Era II in that it is a collection of medieval and Renaissance instruments (Rinascimento is Italian for Renaissance), this library works in Kontakt 5 and above and is equally full of some amazing samples. The list is long but also quite varied and there are 38 instruments in total, sampled across three mic positions and in a warm hall environment.
There’s even an auto-strummer for the Lutes and plenty of custom scripting for all the different performance styles required and all audio has been captured at 48kHz/24bit. It is worth pointing out that Rinascimento is not compatible with the free Kontakt Player.
You can buy Rinascimento for just €179, which is €120 less than its regular price of €299. Kontakt 7 is also currently on sale with 50% off at just €149!
Sonokinetic Hurdy Gurdy
You couldn’t have a medieval selection of samples without some Hurdy Gurdy action, and so here is the first of a couple of examples, and best of all, it’s free! Sonokinetic’s example of this most medieval of instruments is completely free and will work in Kontakt Player, as long as it’s version 7.
As it’s free, you only get one instrument, which is a Dutch example, also known as a Draailier. But that one instrument has been sampled at 44.1kHz/24bit and contains 1,416 samples! So it’s pretty detailed.
Download it for free at the Sonokinetics Website.
Rhythmic Robot Audio Hurdy Gurdy
Next in our selection of Hurdy Gurdy’s is one from Rhythmic Robot Audio who do some great sample libraries for Kontakt. This one costs a mere €15 at the moment and has a nice and clear scripted UI.
Sadly, RRA’s Hurdy requires the full version of Kontakt 4.2.3 or above but you do get more control over your performance than you do on, say, the free Sonokinetics one.
Grab the Rhythmic Robot Audio Hurdy Gurdy for just €15 while it’s on sale.
Note: This article contains promotional links that help us fund our site. Don’t worry: the price for you always stays the same! If you buy something through these links, we will receive a small commission.
