Hyperion Strings Oktobass

The Oktobass is the deepest concert string instrument, with a thunderous, room-shaking growl. We've sampled this bone-rattling beast to build a massive virtual instrument offering 30+ articulations and over 12GB of content. You'll find a variety of sustains, shorts, dynamic expressions, true legato, creative effects and hundreds of aleatoric melodic phrases. As part of our Hyperion symphonic series, it provides a suite of intuitive options, flexible tools and inspiring performance features, from intelligent arpeggiation and articulation switching, to flexible tempo-synching and sound-shaping DSP effects, all at your fingertips to make it easy to craft brilliantly life-like arrangements.

The first Oktobass (also spelled “Octobass”) was built in 1849 by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, but it drifted into legend by the end of the 1800s, lost but not forgotten for over a century. Then in 1996, double bass player Nicola Moneta, luthier Pierre Bohr and bow-maker Piero Cavalazzi constructed the first modern Octobass. Moneta has gone on to play it in nearly 150 concerts around the world over the last 25 years, though it still remains one of only a handful in existence today.

This 3.48 meter (11.5 ft) mammoth is played from a raised platform, using a row of mechanical levers to control the fingerboard. The cavernous instrument body produces a surprisingly nuanced character, with intense stereo movement and subtle mechanical ornamentation.

We worked with Giorgio Riolo and Daniele Bertinelli to capture the Octobass at Moneta's private gallery in Milan, Italy. It was recorded using a close pair of large-diaphragm mics at the F holes to achieve a dry and intimate sound, and a wide-spaced pair of omnis at 2 meters for a bright and vivid chamber quality. The mics can be blended in real-time, and the instrument can be freely positioned on our virtual stage, featuring a huge menu of our custom environments, so it's easy to mix into any arrangement you desire. Your creative options are endless with the Hyperion Solo Strings Oktobass!

This library includes one epic Oktobass with Master and Phrases nki presets. The Master presets include a wide selection of articulations, each with their own range of customizable real-time performance options, key-switch and mapping options and performance tools. The master preset allow you to blend and switch effortlessly between sustains, a variety of shorts and naturally dynamic tempo-based expressions.

The Sustain articulations give you a plethora of sustain types with p, mf, F, tremolo p & F, sforzando, swell, flautando, and true legato.

The Short articulations include staccato p & F, spiccato p & F, pizzicato p & F, pizzicato F mute, col legno, bartok pizzicato, and more! Each short articulation provides 4 round-robin variations per note, making it easy to humanize your arrangements and find the perfect emotive expression for any musical moment.

The Expressions allow real-time dynamically-aware release sample triggering, tempo-synching and time-stretching. We’ve included Crescendo, Decrescendo, Sforzando, Swell, and Swell Tremolo articulations. When combined with the Offset and Attack controls, you can carve out just about any dynamic shape you could ever need. There are also a variety of wild bass SFX like chord staccatos, harmonic sustains, percussion, rolls, scrapes, and more.

The phrase presets feature a massive collection of live phrases, organized intuitively by root key. Tempo-synching, time-stretching, and pitch transposition give you complete freedom to customize. You can also shape, blend and sequence phrases with our phrase-legato, step sequencer, speed-control, and live waveform editing.

This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 6.2.2 or later. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform. You can view screenshots of this library's custom graphical user interface in the image gallery above. This library is packed with features to provide you a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode. Learn more about Kontakt by Clicking Here.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats. The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.