# Acoustic & Electric Saz - The first truly playable virtual Turkish Guitars



## Peaslee (Mar 26, 2013)

The Acoustic & Electric Saz libraries are the first truly playable virtual Turkish Guitars designed for professional composers and exotic stringed instrument junkies. These are unique 5-stringed fretless hollow-body instruments procured directly from the streets of Turkey. They sound strikingly like guitars in certain ways, but with a very unique flavor and range of capabilities. This pair of multi-sample libraries capture the total essence of both the http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/strings/acousticsaz (Acoustic) and Electric saz baglâma, with a full range of sustained plucks, palm mutes and chokes, true legato slide and release behavior, hand-slaps and more, with deep round-robin sampling per articulation on each string. Our intuitive strum, arpeggiation, gliss, legato and performance controls allow exquisitely life-like fingering and emotive real-time articulation, whether you're in the mood for intricate leads or just banging out strummed grooves and chord accompaniment in a single unified UI. Check out the demos. You will hear no canned chord or phrase samples in these demos at all. Everything you're about to hear is pure multi-sampled power and freedom. 

[flash width=580 height=300 loop=false]http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F4145925&amp;show_comments=true&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_playcount=false&amp;show_artwork=false&amp;color=b99a43[/flash]


You'll experience full control over each string, including key range, string selection, hammer-ons, pull-offs, legato and pluck type, all with key-switch support. Our unrivaled live strumming and chord generation tools can handle any style of lead or rhythm playing you throw at it. Each control can be fully automated by midi and we've designed several preset types to accommodate a variety of personal work-flows and preferences. To put it simply, these libraries not only represent the most powerful ethnic stringed instrument libraries of their kind in the world - they deliver an unprecedented breakthrough in string instrument control solutions, flexibility and pure sound quality. Click Here to check out the screenshots. 






http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/strings/acousticsaz (The Acoustic Saz) is the instrument in its most natural form, with delicate and crisp tonality captured in an intimate dry space with a wide pair of Neumann large diaphragm mics and pristine preamps. With a rich, full-bodied resonance and gorgeous musical clarity, this instrument offers extraordinary musical potential with all of the quality and attention to detail that you expect from the Soundiron family. http://s3.amazonaws.com/soundiron_docs/soundiron_acoustic_saz_user_manual.pdf (Click Here) to check out the full pdf manual. http://youtu.be/71cjnfrvn6c (Click Here) for a detailed feature walk-through with Brad Halverson, exploring both the electric and acoustic and delving into the FX rack.



The Electric Saz is a powerful leap forward in tone and flexibility, with a clean, smooth character captured through both single-coil a humbucker pick-ups. Modified with custom low-noise wiring and pick-up configurations, this instrument cuts through any mix with a dynamic virtuosic voice, whether you play it clean or punch it with our integrated multi-effects rack. http://s3.amazonaws.com/soundiron_docs/soundiron_electric_saz_user_manual.pdf (Click Here) to check out the full pdf manual. http://youtu.be/jEIzOBOcyZM (Click Here) for a full demo walk-through with Ryan Scully, focusing on the electric. 



Each preset in both libraries includes our new Effects Rack control panel, featuring multi-effects (chorus, flanger, phaser), compression, drive and distortion, amp simulation, a variety of different speaker cabs, parametric EQ, tempo-synching delay and reverb, including 45 real-world spaces and 25 original FX impulses. These libraries are designed and optimized for Kontakt 5, but we do include special legacy presets for K4 users that preserve most of our advanced features and options. And while these are massive libraries, we've also included optimized and streamlined "Lite" presets with smaller resource requirements. These libraries are securely watermarked for each user and require the full retail version of Kontakt to run. They are not supported by the Kontakt Player.





http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/strings/acousticsaz (The Acoustic Saz) includes 6971 Samples and weighs in at 6.8 GB. The Electric Saz has 13745 Samples and is 12.7 GB installed. Each one will be priced at $149, but you can get them now individually for a limited time at only $129 through April. 4th! Or grab them both together in our full Saz Combo pack for HUGE savings. The combo includes both the Acoustic Saz and Electric Saz libraries for a special intro price of only $199!


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## Consona (Mar 26, 2013)

Wow, I like it very much. Instrument sounds amazing, especially legatos/slides.


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## germancomponist (Mar 26, 2013)

Coooooool!


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## Ian Dorsch (Mar 26, 2013)

Sounds killer.


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## muziksculp (Mar 26, 2013)

Thanks for developing this Awesome Saz collection Library.

Will be adding this to my sample library collection soon. 

Congratulations !


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## Chriss Ons (Mar 26, 2013)

Done deal, and it's not exactly an impulse buy... been waiting quite some time for this. The intro price for the bundle is almost too good to be true - and the demos are top notch.
Kudos, Mike & team.


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## greggg (Mar 26, 2013)

Thanks everyone! A lot of planning and time went into these libraries, so it's great to see the hard work being well received. We hope to get at least one more video out soon which will explore some of the more complex features of the library in a little more depth. In the meantime, feel free to post any questions you may have and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks!


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## 667 (Mar 26, 2013)

Yeah I grabbed this after hearing the first demo track.


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## HDJK (Mar 27, 2013)

Sounds great!

Good luck with this new library. For now it will go on my list of future buys, but it's definitely on the list :D


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## TheUnfinished (Mar 27, 2013)

Are there traditional tuning options? Couldn't tell from the demos (they were all a bit Western!).

Cheers.


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## greggg (Mar 27, 2013)

Currently, there aren't any traditional tuning options. It's something we considered, but since they're fretless we recorded them in the the chromatic scale with equally tempered intervals. Retuning the patches to the 15 interval "just intonation" scale would be a bit of a challenge at this point, from both a programming and playability standpoint. Not sure how to map 15 notes on a keyboard where the octave is at 12. Would you just put the octave 3 keys up, so like C2 to D#3? Or would you selectively remove certain notes so that it still fits within the 12 note keyboard range? 

We are open to looking into it for a future update, though, if the demand is high enough for it and we can figure out what would make the most sense as far as mapping. Thanks!


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## ysnyvz (Mar 27, 2013)

your library sounds good 
but it's not really a baglama (saz)
because Turkish baglama has 7 strings and is not fretless
and sounds very different than your library


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## Maestro77 (Mar 27, 2013)

@ysnyvz - perhaps they come in different varieties? watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt3K0baKWAg


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## Peaslee (Mar 27, 2013)

ysnyvz @ Wed Mar 27 said:


> your library sounds good
> but it's not really a baglama (saz)
> because Turkish baglama has 7 strings and is not fretless
> and sounds very different than your library



The concept of a "true" anything is an arbitrary concept in the world of musical instruments - for example, an electric saz couldn't have existed prior to the mid 20th century. There are actually variety of configurations that the Saz can come in, especially in more contemporary models. This is a 5 string fretless (w/ unison pairs) purchased in Turkey, but for the sake of working within a standard virtual instrument structure, it's been sampled chromatically to work on a standard keyboard. We'll likely be exploring alternate tunings in a future version of the library, but keep in mind that it needs to work on a standard midi keyboard. A 15 note scale doesn't translate intuitively to the 12 half-steps per octave that we have to fit within just as a matter of practicality. 

At the same time, you can bend and detune notes or adjust the global tuning of the whole instrument if you like. It's not phrase or loop based, so there are no restrictions in how you can play it. Many of the composers who contributed demos for this library had their own vision of how they wanted to use the instrument, but they certainly don't account for all the creative possibilities that any given instrument can provide.


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## ysnyvz (Mar 27, 2013)

@Maestro77
saz is the name of instrument family which has different instruments

but as i wrote before, most commonly used Turkish baglama has frets and 7 strings (divided into courses of two, two and three)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baglama


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## Diffusor (Mar 27, 2013)

ysnyvz @ Wed Mar 27 said:


> your library sounds good
> but it's not really a baglama (saz)
> because Turkish baglama has 7 strings and is not fretless
> and sounds very different than your library



Mine has courses of 2, 2 and 3 and has movable frets. "Baglama" means "to tie" or some such, probably referring to the tied frets.


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## TheUnfinished (Mar 27, 2013)

No worries, an update with tuning options would be interesting. As you say, some carefully dialled in midi via the pitch-bend might work.

Would have been cool to have had a couple of more 'traditional' demos to hear it in that context, but I know you can't always totally dictate what you're gonna get from your team.


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## stargazer (Mar 29, 2013)

Saz Bundle regular price?


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## greggg (Mar 29, 2013)

The regular price of the Saz Bundle will be $229 starting April 4th, 2013. Until then it's available for the introductory price of $199.


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## greggg (Apr 4, 2013)

Last chance to get the Electric Saz or http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/strings/acousticsaz/ (Acoustic Saz) at the intro price of only *$129* each, or the Saz Bundle for only *$199*! The sale ends tonight at 11:59pm PDT _(April 4th, 2013)_.


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