Ableton has released a new pack for Live, Mallets by Soniccouture.

Mallets brings two “expertly sampled” melodic percussion instruments, marimba and vibraphone, to Ableton Live. The dark, velvety timbre of the marimba and the vibraphone’s shimmering oscillations were captured using full-range concert models and include the lower octaves often missing from sampled mallets.

Marimba

For Marimba, Soniccouture used a Yamaha 6100 model, designed with legendary marimba player Keiko Abe, and recorded different velocities. The nuances of the real instrument are preserved in the pack, and selectable via the macro controls on the Instrument Rack.

Recorded in multiple velocity layers, Marimba retains the natural response of the instrument with all its nuances and subtleties intact. Marimba comes with a selection of presets, each with eight Macro Controls mapped for convenient fine-tuning of filter, EQ, overdrive and reverb settings.

Vibraphone

Moving over to the vibraphone, Soniccouture have achieved something new in multi-samples – with samples of its fans both closed and opened and mapped to an LFO, the vibraphone included in Mallets can truly replicate the unique tremolo of the instrument.

Until now, this constant modulation made it impossible to sample and model the vibraphone realistically. To overcome this, Soniccouture took a new approach; they sampled an entire vibraphone twice – once with the fans closed, and once with the fans open.

With Vibraphone, you can now achieve this natural tremolo effect by using a simple sinusoidal LFO (available as a Macro Control in Vibraphone’s presets) to crossfade between these two different sample layers. This gives you not only the authentic, detailed timbre, but also full control over the speed of the tremolo effect.

All presets in Vibraphone are mapped to eight Macro Controls, so you can also readily tweak effects like chorus, reverb, EQ and overdrive.

Here’s a set of audio examples:

Product Specifications. Soniccouture Mallets for Ableton Live consists of 20 presets, 2 live sets, and requires Ableton Live 9.0.1 or higher. Installation size: 5.43 GB Download size: 1860.6 MB

Pricing and Availability. Mallets by Soniccouture is available now via the Ableton store for $89 US.