Soniccouture Releases Kora - 21 String African Harp

[soniccouture]

A fascinating traditional African instrument, the Kora is hard to classify. With 21 strings and a cow-hide resonator, it's a type of bridge harp, but with some lute or guitar DNA in the mix.

Soniccouture's VST version is designed to be playable and versatile, featuring a MIDI pattern player for authentic accompaniment and micro-tuning for authentic scales if desired:

• 40 VELOCITY LAYERS + MUTE ACCENTS / KEY OFFS.
• MIC + CONTACT CHANNELS.
• MIDI PATTERN PLAYER.
• MICRO-TUNING.
• 6GB LIBRARY.
• Kontakt Player + NKS.

INTRO OFFER

€89 (€129) | $89 ($129)

Until May 15th 2024. Price as marked on website, no code required. Offer excludes other discount codes.

Click to read more...

 

[Mark Schmieder]

Lovely sounding, and you picked a pro instrument and player, which also helps! Although there are some fairly good (and detailed) koras in a few world and regional libraries, to my knowledge this is the first dedicated kora-only library. I looked up some pro-level koras; they are huge, and not cheap!

 

[Mark Schmieder]

I wasn't sure I needed this, as there is one other excellent one in a regional compilation, but it's a very different model and this one is so nice that I may as well have two voices to choose between, as with acoustic guitars. One thing's for sure: I will NOT be buying a real kora, having seen how big they are (and expensive) and how complicated they are to string, keep in tune, and play!

It took some interesting order of actions for it to show up in NA after registering the S/N with NA, but it could have just been a simple matter of "waiting" vs. the explicit actions I took. It seemed as though NA didn't recognize it as valid until I also registered it at SC's site. I forget; this may be part of the protocol with SC libs.

 

[oepion]

So happy to see such a deeply sampled Kora from Soniccouture, I was running out of libraries to buy from you. And it just happens to be one of my favourite instruments ever, though after going to a Kora class with a Guinean griot I quickly realised it would take me years to play such a beast at a decent level so I'll be sticking to the VI.

Now, if you could go just a bit further North and sample that Guembri... it would make such a great companion to the Kora

 

[Wunderhorn]

Wonderful sounding Kora.
I would have loved to see a more performance based approach with phrases and flourishes that one can piece together. As it is it is great fun to improvise but in order to do more authentic things it is lacking and the MIDI player is just not enough for that.
I hope there will be features like this in the future.

 

[soniccouture]

It took some interesting order of actions for it to show up in NA after registering the S/N with NA, but it could have just been a simple matter of "waiting" vs. the explicit actions I took. It seemed as though NA didn't recognize it as valid until I also registered it at SC's site. I forget; this may be part of the protocol with SC libs.

there's no need to register at our site to get NA to install, but NA does of course require updating for pretty much any new library you buy since NA does not 'know' about very newly released libraries until it's updated with the latest info.