readme.txt

Samples of a cithara barbarica, which is a medieval lyre with 10 strings. Tuning: E F# G# B C# D# E F# G# B. The strings here are metal.

Techniques sampled: plucks with the fingers, muted plucks with the fingers, plucks with the nails, muted plucks with the nails, sul tasto (near the tuners, so brighter than plucking in the middle - unlike sul tasto on bowed strings) plucks with the nails. There's a keyswitch patch and separate patches for each articulation.

With the mode control below 50%, notes ring until the key is released (or the sound naturally decays away). Above 50% is lyre mode - notes with velocity 43 and up ring out until muted by the same key with a note of velocity 42 or below, and releasing the key has no effect on them.

The strumming patch is more of an experiment, and probably a confusing pain to use, but hey, it strums.

The keyboard is split into three parts. The left part (MIDI notes 16 to 37) is the strums, with down strums on white keys and up strums on the black keys. The keys farthest to the left use only the higer strings, starting with the top two, and the keys further to the right use more strings up to the full ten.

By default all strings are muted - hold notes on the middle part of the keyboard (MIDI notes 40 to 60) to set which notes are active for strumming purposes. The right part of the keyboard (MIDI notes 64 to 84) is playable normally, and respects the keyswitches which are on the far right.

With the Mode control below 50%, fingers are used for both upstrokes and downstrokes; above 50%, downstrokes use the nails. The strum time parameter controls the strum speed. There are no single-keyswitch or single-mode versions of the strum patch, but this instrument is open source, and it shouldn't be too hard to make those if desired.