Soundprops released Jam Pack, a collection of free sound libraries for Native Instruments Kontakt.
One of the great things about Kontakt is the sheer breadth of content available for Native Instruments’ industry-standard sampler. Full-version owners are often spoiled for choice, being provided with a plethora of free and paid libraries.
Today’s focus is Jam Pack, a free Kontakt library bundle that requires the full version of Kontakt.
Jam Pack is a collection of six instruments, ones that reflect the energy and inspiration that comes from feeling a particularly good jam session. There is a good amount of variety between the instruments, with minimal overlap.
Alabama is your typical dreadnought acoustic guitar. The deep booming character of the guitar serves it well across various articulations. Users have the option to play chords, power chords, legato, and even emulate a 12-string guitar. It is a usable instrument, and Sound Props have taken care to give it some deep sampling for round purposes.
Alhambra is their take on a nylon-stringed flamenco guitar. There aren’t any flamenco-specific techniques to the instrument, but there is a similar depth to the sampling as was the case with Alabama. Alhambra. It is a good choice for the bright sonorous sound of a classical guitar.
Direct TELE Light rounds out the guitars and is a deeply sampled Fender Telecaster with the pickup set to the bridge. A similar selection of articulations is present for the TELE, and it provides a different sneering edge you only get from hot single coils and an amp.
Direct JAMBASS is a deeply sampled Fender J-Bass, with both single-coil pickups sampled simultaneously. There are various articulations for this one, and the slap and tapping benefit the wonderfully round tone of the bass.
All these instruments are useless without a nice percussion section to join them. Thankfully Garage Drums adds a drum kit with 12 velocity layers and round robins to the mix. The kit itself has a beautiful dry kit, and there is a bevy of percussion elements to tie it together.
The final instrument is Darbuka brings some world music flair to the selection. It is a deeply sampled drum with roots in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa. It is the most straightforward instrument of the collection, but able composers could coax some excellent percussion lines out of this instrument.
Jam Pack is available only for the full, paid version of Native Instrument’s Kontakt. The minimum version supported is 6.6.1. Jam Pack is a forever free collection and is available for all platforms that can run Kontakt 6.6.1.
Download: Jam Pack
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8 Comments
Darryl Lim
onHahaha, “…pretending to play guitar… for the last 20 year…” :’D
Forgive me if i am wrong, but are you a new/new-ish BPB contributor, William Frady? If yes, then i bid you a joyous welcome! Always glad to see BPB grow. :D
Tomislav Zlatic
onHey Darryl, yes, William is a new addition to the BPB team. It’s now me, James, William, and Steve.
Darryl Lim
onEnough for a merry Quartet-band right now! Awesome, haha! :P
William Frady
onI call dibs on bass
Numanoid
onEasy transaction, no hoop jumping or having to deal with download managers. Over 70 snapshots included. Very good!
My only complaint is that 300 MB of PDF and video files are included in the downloads.
Mark H
onThanks for the recommendation, I’m really enjoying these freebies! Professional instruments, easy to create with, lots of snapshots and a very easy download process, as mentioned above
Peter
onJust wow! Thanks for the tip and welcome to the team of the best, most useful and kind music blog I know of, William!
Just listen to their demo “Mediterranean”, this is the legendary Mediterranean Sundance from Friday night in San Francisco by John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Paco De Lucia.
I wonder, how difficult this was to prepare with MIDI.
William Frady
onThank you for your kind words Peter.
And that demo blew me away, that’s a difficult piece to play with a real guitar and a decade or more of practice, I can’t imagine preparing it for MIDI.