Beauty and Mystery, from Ancient China

Three-Body Technology presents its 3rd product: Raindrop & Blade. A traditional Chinese instrument called Yangqin, based on Chinese hammered dulcimer. With the concept “not only capture the sound of the instrument, but also present the feeling of ancient China”, Raindrop & Blade will bring you the beauty and mystery right into your studio, rather than experiencing it from some books or TV shows about ancient China.

A completely self-developed, high-performance sample engine ensures better sound quality, with effects from H7S and 108 MIDI patterns made by professional Chinese Yangqi musicians, make it easy to create the sound like raindrop, without losing its intense feeling.

Features Overview

Sample Engine:

  • Completely self-developed, high performance sample engine: better sound quality, faster DFD (direct from disk) Stream, optimized samples compression and new tone transition technology.
  • Through optimized samples compression, all 6,208 samples only require 2.9G disk space

Performance

  • 5 layers of velocity: The STBT (smooth transition between tones) technology brings more natural sound and captures perfect performance details. No matter how hard or soft you hit the keys, you can always get the sound effects that satisfy you.
  • Separately recorded left-hand right-hand samples: the tone is different. Three modes are provided for Hand Exchange on the software interface to make the instrument played in a natural way.
  • 3-5 RR (round robin) samples: the same pitch being played repeatedly is common in Yangqin. We recorded 3-5 RR for every velocity.
  • Tremolo: two velocity layers of tremolo samples are recorded. We also recorded samples for octave- and third-playing tremolo.
  • Clean Mode: inspired by the psychological sound model, we developed clean mode that decays differently for harmonic and non-harmonic tones. This allows sound to be cleaner than a real-world Yangqin.
  • Common performances: tremolo, flicking, hammer revert, muting, and noises, etc.
  • Two types of recorded release samples: by hand or by pedal
  • Yin-Yang Button: you can transit between polar contrast feelings by this button

Effects

  • From the Heavier7Strings’ effect rack: Compressor, EQ, Chorus and Ping-Pong delay are included, allowing to create more flexible sounds.

Convolution Reverb

  • About 2 years ago, we started to record the convolution reverb samples from spectacular places, famous natural and historical heritages in China. Thus you can simulate Raindrop & Blade being played at the Great Wall or Terracotta Army site.

Pattern Library

  • Complete pattern library, manage your works and ideas easily
  • Rich preset patterns with updates in the future
  • Drag MIDI patterns into the host
  • Create your own patterns

Preset

  • Various preset from traditional to experimental

Sound Field

  • Actual sample recording for near and mid-field. Simulated far-field via reverb.
  • Adjustable parameters (sound field ratio, width) provides diverse tones for different genres from traditional to pop.

Samples

  • 6,208 samples
  • 44100/24 bit recording

Minimum system requirements:

Mac:

  • Intel Core Duo, with SSE3 or higher
  • Mac OS X 10.9+(64bit)SSE3 or higher
  • SSE3 or higher
  • 4GB RAM
  • 4GB free hard drive space
  • VST 32bit, VST 64bit, AAX 64bit on Windows
  • VST 64bit, AudioUnit 64bit, AAX 64bit on Mac OSX
  • Logic Pro X or higher (9 not supported)
  • VST 32bit on Cakewalk Sonar 8.5
 PC:

  • Intel Core Duo / AMD Athlon 64, with SSE3 or higher
  • Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 ,32 or 64 bit