Virtually Conducted Productions has released Nokia 3310 Composer For Kontakt, a fun little Kontakt instrument featuring the multi-sampled monophonic ringtone sounds of an old Nokia cellphone.
The library includes a custom NKI patch for use in Native Instruments Kontakt, however it also includes uncompressed WAV versions of all 34 sampled notes, making it compatible with virtually any sampler instrument on the market. The provided Kontakt patch is rather minimal, providing nothing more than a monophonic playback setting for the mapped samples and a custom wallpaper. If you’d like to experiment with different playback modes, note polyphony or portamento, you will need to open the advanced editor in Kontakt and do some manual tweaking.
The actual sound quality of the provided samples is pretty neat. The output of a Nokia 3310 speaker was recorded with a Shure SM58 microphone, so you get that well-known tinny sound which is associated with old cellphone ringtones. The samples are around one second long and they lack loop points, which can be a bit of a drawback in certain situations. If you want to play longer notes, you will need to set up the loop points manually in your sampler or wave editor of choice (here’s our round-up of free wave editing applications).
To grab your free copy of the Nokia 3310 Composer sample library, simply visit the product page linked below and hit the download button. There’s no need to sign up for a user account or a mailing list, as the sample pack is available as a direct download from the Virtually Conducted Productions website.
Although a library such as this one may seem like nothing more than a gimmick, it can actually work great for adding a lo-fi chiptune vibe to your music. Since the sounds were recorded coming through a real cellphone speaker, they are way more authentic out of the box compared to what you’d get from a VA synth or even a dedicated chiptune software synth.
https://soundcloud.com/eamonnwatt/nokia-3310-composer-for-kontakt-demo-1
Download
Nokia 3310 Composer For Kontakt is available for free download via Virtually Conducted Productions (8.29 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 34 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format, 1 instrument patch in NKI format for NI Kontakt).
Last Updated on August 12, 2015 by Tomislav Zlatic.
