Fine Cut Bodies has introduced Gombulator, a free NI Kontakt sample collection featuring the sounds of the Yamaha PSR-15 toy keyboard.
PSR-15 is one of the early entries in Yamaha’s PortaSound series of portable keyboards, featuring no more than six factory patches, along with a basic drum set. The six patches on offer cover the following instruments: piano, flute, organ, trumpet, violin and harpsichord.
See also: Free Yamaha PSS-390 Sample Pack (WAV/Kontakt)Although Yamaha PSR-15 is certainly not the most popular keyboard out there, it was extensively used by the Hungarian synth pop band The Gomb on their album Breaks (and Amends). Fine Cut Bodies have teamed up with Ambrus Tövisházi (one of The Gomb members) and thoroughly sampled this little synth, providing the results as a freely downloadable sound library for Native Instruments Kontakt 5 (full version required to remove the 15 minute limit).
Gombulator’s user interface is based on the “Breaks (and Amends)” album artwork and it is actually rather nice looking. There’s not much you can do with the user interface, though, apart from clicking on the water to trigger sampled chords and rotating the moon to change the active instrument. On the other hand, not having loads of dials and sliders on the interface can be quite inspirational and force you to rely more on your performance and imagination as a musician.
The library can be downloaded completely free of charge from the product page linked below, although please note that a valid email address is required in order to receive the download link. By the way, Fine Cut Bodies have released a freeware VST plugin called La Petite Excite a while ago, and it’s actually one of the better freeware exciter effects around.
Gombulator is available for free download via Fine Cut Bodies (115 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 instrument patch in NKI format for NI Kontakt 5).
