Free Old German Concertina By Polkasound Productions (NKI)

Polkasound Productions has announced the release of Old German Concertina, a free Native Instruments Kontakt sound library featuring the sounds of an antique concertina (a free-reed musical instrument similar to a harmonica).

Although the people at “Polkasound Productions” describe this freebie instrument as being “creaky and squeaky”, I actually found it quite nice sounding and outright fun to play. As it’s often the case with sampled reed instruments though, it’s not very easy to pull of a natural sounding performance, but it’s not impossible either.

I guess that the easiest way to success in this case is probably to think as a real concertina player (same goes for programming sampled acoustic drums or guitars), however the big problem for me is that I have no idea how a real concertina or harmonica are supposed to be played. That’s why 90% times my riffs sound like “a dude who’s obviously just playing concertina samples on a MIDI keyboard”. But in those rare 10% cases, I can really pull off some convincing concertina riffs and those can sound quite refreshing when added to certain types of music projects. Composers who make uplifting acoustic corporate music for commercials and promotional videos will probably reach for this freebie pack quite often.

Obviously, Polkasound Productions specializes in polka instrument libraries, however the Old German Concertina is their only free offering. They have seven more products on their website at the moment, so definitely take a look at those if you need more sample libraries of this type. All of their products are priced at $14 and are provided as NI Kontakt 5 instruments which require the full version version of Kontakt in order to be played without any limitations.

Old German Concertina is based on a set of 29 multi-samples (individual samples in WAV format are not included in the pack) which are spread across three octaves on the MIDI keyboard. There aren’t any velocity layers and round robin variations available, however almost every note has been sampled individually so this virtual instrument can sound quite natural in certain cases. The custom user instrument for NI Kontakt is really simple, providing just a single knob for controlling the overall amount of the reverb effect. The instrument can be downloaded completely free of charge and there’s no need to sign up for a user account or anything similar. Simply hit the download button and grab your free copy of the Old German Concertina.

Download

Old German Concertina is available for free download via Polkasound Productions (23.9 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 instrument patch in NKI format for Native Instruments Kontakt 5).