Aerocity has released Vintage Chord Organ, a free NI Kontakt sample library featuring the lovely warm sounds of an old Magnus Chord Organ instrument from the 1960s.
A chord organ is a compact keyboard instrument which looks like a small reed organ, although it sounds quite similar to an accordion. I used to own a cheap Bontempi version of a chord organ a long while ago and I’ve always regretted selling it without sampling it first. That’s one of the reasons why I was so happy when I stumbled onto this free Kontakt instrument by Aerocity.
Vintage Chord Organ is a free sample library based on a Magnus Chord Organ, featuring 37 fully playable keys (with infinite hold time) and fixed tuning of the original instrument. The brief interview with Aerocity below contains additional information about the sampling process and some other interesting details.
BPB: First of all, thank you for releasing these chord organ samples for free! Can you tell us a bit more about the original instrument? How did you get it (it’s pretty vintage stuff)?
Aerocity: My Pleasure! I’m afraid I don’t know a whole lot about the history of chord organs, I found mine by chance. It was sitting in somebody’s front yard with a $5 price tag, caught my eye as I drove by and I had to pick it up. As soon as I brought it home, I fell in love with the sound like so many others over the years. I’m moving 1600 miles across the country soon and was pretty bummed about leaving it behind, so I decided to create a virtual instrument I could bring anywhere.
BPB: How did you manage to record it so well? It’s definitely not easy to sample such an instrument because it doesn’t have an audio output, so you need to use a microphone.
Aerocity: My recording chain was just a Shure VP88 stereo microphone through a Digi 003 rack into Pro Tools. The VP88 is absolutely brilliant, very true to the source. No processing done aside from re-tuning the instrument within Kontakt to fall in line with standard tuning, which miraculously didn’t affect that gorgeous character.
BPB: I took a listen to some of the tunes on your SoundCloud page and you have some great stuff published there. Are there any other places where we can find your music projects?
Aerocity: Thank you very much! Right now, I’ve got all my public projects on SoundCloud. More serious releases go to my Bandcamp. I’ve been writing an EP that I’m hoping to put out sometime this winter, and it’ll be free on both pages.
Please note that you’ll need the full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5 or higher in order to use the library without any limitations (15 minutes only in the freeware Kontakt Player). Individual WAV files are not included. The library is hosted on Bedroom Producers Blog with permission of Aerocity.
Audio Demo
Check out the Vintage Chord Organ audio demo:
https://soundcloud.com/aerocitymusic/vintage-chord-organ-free
Download
Vintage Chord Organ (135 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 NKI file for Native Instruments Kontakt 5 or higher)
