Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.5/5 Stars
The zither is perhaps forever immortalised by Anton Karas’ theme for the 1948 film The Third Man. You’ve almost certainly heard it, despite the piece’s distinctively whimsical folk style not being in high demand for contemporary film music. It’s perhaps just as well, then, that a new zither library from Edu Prado Sounds for Kontakt 8 and Kontakt Player hasn’t been created with the Karas aficionado in mind. EPS Zither comprises nine instruments aiming to blend the zither’s Eastern European folk roots with more sophisticated textures and sound design elements.
With a zither typically comprising 30 to 40 strings stretched across a thin wooden body, Edu Prado and Jan Pfitzer have meticulously sampled the plucking of these strings with both fingers and a pick as separate instruments. Each pitch offers 12 variations — four velocity layers multiplied by three round robins — and an instrument containing pure harmonics is also provided, which is a nice touch.
An SFX instrument contains a selection of very usable percussive taps, knocks and atonal scratches, great for both added realism and rhythmic loops. And the only comparatively weak offering supplies an octave’s worth of ‘strummed’ major chords, with the next octave employing the same samples, only reversed. It’s a surprisingly limited inclusion, especially since similar content can be created with more flexibility using the picked instrument.
The pristine sound quality perfectly captures the sparkling, high‑frequency veneer one associates with such an instrument, similar to a hammered dulcimer, and makes it a joy to play. And if you’re unsure how to best wrangle a zither, the inclusion of a simple sequencer (which is more of an arpeggiator) makes it easy to create convincingly idiomatic performances. You just need to watch out for the top velocity layer poking out too much, although such triggers can easily be dialled back.
A technical omission is the lack of support for MIDI Expression (CC 11). And, to take this a step further, including a control to set fixed or relative velocity values for incoming notes would have been the cherry on the icing on the cake. Although, to be fair, this trick is easily implemented with Kontakt’s Multi Script feature.
The zither’s traditional sound can be mangled beyond conventional expectation thanks to several parameters exposing internal effects.
As you’d expect from a modern Kontakt offering, the zither’s traditional sound can be mangled beyond conventional expectation thanks to several parameters exposing internal effects. The ‘crystals’ section is the most pleasing, while the ‘heat’ controls are the least interesting — distortion, especially when applied to plucked stings, always runs the risk of sounding like a naff electric guitar.
When it comes to sound design, while snapshots usefully demonstrate the effects parameters, the real potential is undoubtedly in using the standard techniques as a springboard to create unique and more imaginative content. The final few instruments exemplify this perfectly, especially ‘Low Wobble Drone’, even though its nomenclature doesn’t do justice to the evocatively foreboding rumble that might convince your neighbours they’re experiencing an earthquake when the mod wheel is all the way up. If you’re a TV composer who buys EPS Zither and fails to write a cue deploying this drone, you’ve definitely got bigger problems!