At the 2009 Winter NAMM Show, Garritan announced the Garritan World Instrument, which features a comprehensive collection of instruments from around the world:

• The Garritan World Instrument collection offers a large variety of flutes — Native American flutes, bamboo flues, Irish flutes, Chinese and Japanese flutes, Indian flutes, clay flutes, pan flutes, nose flutes and many other exotic winds from around the globe.
• Also included is an array of pitched and un-pitched percussion instruments — Taiko drums, Gamelan ensemble, Log drums, tablas, ewe drums, balaphon, Udu drum, talking drum, steel drums, an array of Latin percussion, and more.
• There are also numerous types of plucked and bowed strings, including: Indian Sitars, Japanese koto and shamisen, African kora, Middle Eastern oud and santoor, and erhu.
• Other instruments include didgeridoo, Middle Eastern reed instruments, accordions, Tibetan bowls, and harmonium.

The Garritan World Instruments Library features controls for dynamics, vibrato, tongue/slur techniques, airflow, auto legato, auto-variability, auto-portamento, trills and more — to make these samples musical, realistic and expressive. There is even support for wind controllers (like the Akai EWI).

Garritan World Instruments is expected to be released first quarter 2009. Pricing will be announced upon release.

Powered by the powerful ARIA playback engine (developed by Plogue Technologies), the Garritan World Instruments will work on a single computer, laptop and even some netbooks, Mac OSX or PC platform, standalone, or plug-in for all major sequencers (VST, AU, RTAS), works with Finale 2009 and with other supported notation programs. Garritan World Instruments can transform your computer into an ethnomusicologist’s dream.

A unique feature of the Garritan World instruments is its support for Scala files to adjust to different temperaments and tunings. While many ethnic sample libraries are equal temperament based on Western tuning, Garritan World Instruments supports Scala, a standard file format for musical tunings supporting hundreds of different scales. With Scala support, musicians can play an instrument in its truly authentic form quickly and easily.

The Garritan World Instruments will be available soon as a download and later on DVD. And you will be able to download new ethnic instruments to add to your collection as they become available.