Rhapsody by Clustersound.
Clustersound has released Rhapsody, a free Ableton Live pack featuring high quality samples of the legendary Elka Rhapsody 490 string machine.
We have just released Rhapsody, a free multi-sample Live Pack based on the vintage Elka Rhapsody 490.
Rhapsody is available for free download via Clustersound (153 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 21 presets for Ableton Live in ALP file format).
Please note that you’ll need to be logged in to your Clustersound user account in order to download this free Ableton Live pack. The registration process is completely free and only requires a working email address.
This Ableton Live freebie pack contains a collection of sounds form the vintage Elka Rhapsody 490 analogue string synthesizer, a legendary polyphonic string machine from 1975. It has been used on many music albums from the 1970s, including some groundbreaking works by Jean Michel Jarre.
While working on the Rhapsody sample library, Clustersound had access to a modified version of the Elka Rhapsody 490 string machine. This modified instrument features an optional switch for the otherwise fixed chorus effect, thus extending the sound range of the original instrument. As opposed to its hardware counterpart which only features 3 preset sounds, the Ableton Live version of Rhapsody comes with a total of 21 presets!
The presets are based on 6 multi-sample recordings consisting of 49 looped multi-samples each, covering all the notes of the 4-octave Rhapsody 490 keyboard. The multi-samples were then expanded to 21 individual presets using built-in Ableton Live effects.
I’ve downloaded the pack hoping that the individual WAV files could be extracted and then used in a different sampler, but this is not possible. Such a shame! It would be awesome if Clustersound released a WAV or SFZ version of this. For now, it’s available for Ableton Live 9 users only.
Here’s a nice video demonstration of the original string machine, recorded and performed by AnalogAudio1:
