Edition Beurmann - Italian Harpsichord III

The Italian Harpsichord III library features an instrument built around 1690 by an anonymous maker. Featuring three sounds – a front and a rear 8’ register as well both together – it allows for the traditional rich and slick Italian harpsichord tone, of-fering additional flexibility by choosing the adequate 8’ or using the gentle 2 x 8’ combination with its inspiring and complex harmonics.

While it is very typical for the Italian style to feature a housing seperated from the painted cabinet, this instrument is one of the rare Italian harpsichords with a fixed housing. Instead, it belongs to the category of so-called “false inner-outer” instru-ments: The edges of the body as well as the offset cheeks are used to pretend that it features a separate housing.

Although the keyboard is showing signs of wear, the harpsichord still remains in fully playable condition despite its age. It is now available for the first time in the sampler with the Italian Harpsichord III library, presented in its original Kirnberger III-tuning at 382 Hz, captured with all three register variations - front 8’, rear 8’ and both 8’ registers together.

Like all harpsichords, the instrument is not touch-sensitive in the sense of a piano. However, even if the differences are minuscule, not any given note will sound ex-actly the same twice due to different resonances of body and strings.

Until now, many keyboards and samplers represented harpsichords by always triggering off the exact same digital sample, leaving a cold and sterile sounding impression. In order to improve upon previous recreations and to pay tribute to the liveliness and depth of this antique instrument, we captured every sampled register with 8 variations of each note.

The release sounds of the keys are also of major importance: What was originally side noise is now often overlooked and even simply left out in artifical simulations, resulting in a very abstract overall picture. Therefore, we recorded 4 release samples of each note.

The sample library contains more than 1600 single samples.

To start right away, presets are available for all common sample formats including HAlion®, Kontakt2® and higher, EXS24® and GigaStudio3®.

For the critical task of recording the harpsichord, we employed custom-made Wag-ner™ U47w® tube microphones in conjunction with Crane Song™ Flamingo® pre-amps and Universal Audio™ 2192® digital converters to do the instrument justice. For maximum sound quality, we recorded in 192 khz/24 bits resolution, downsampled to 44.1 khz/24 bits.

In addition to the samples, the library contains an essay from Professor Andreas E. Beurmann himself, explaining both the historical background of the instrument.

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System requirements

This Multi Format Library does not include any software to play the sounds on your computer. Moving your mouse over * Multi Format Library in the product header will highlight all the included formats. Any compatible software is required to load and play the sounds of this library.