jlearman / jsteeldrum1

C Steel Drum sampled instrument, sfz format

jSteelDrum

C Steel Drum sampled instrument, sfz format

NOTE: The improved version is much better: https://github.com/jlearman/jlearman.SteelDrum Also available at https://github.com/sfzinstruments/jlearman.SteelDrum.

• Hand-made oil-drum steel drum.
• 27 notes sampled, C4 (middle C) to B5, plus C#6, D#6, and F6
• 5 velocity layers
• 3 or 4 samples per zone
• Stereo 16 bit, 44.1 KHz samples
• Unlooped
• 44 MB in FLAC format

How-to

Click the green "Code" button above, and choose "Download ZIP". Unpack the .zip file into a folder of your choice, and load the result into your sample player. I use Sforzando, which supports FLAC. You only need the jSteelDrum-flac-sfz folder and its contents. The .sfz file in there is what you load into your player.

About the instrument

This is a sampling of a steel drum hand-made in Trinidad and sold by Hopetown Music of Long Beach CA, around 2005. (See photo & PDF.) The samples were recorded in September 2021.

Samples were recorded in mid-side stereo using an AT4033a as the mid mic and a Studio Projects B3 as the side mic. I am not a percussionist let alone a steel drum player, so the dynamics are less even than I would like. I hope to re-record the samples (I'd say 50% chance of this happening) so stay tuned.

Controls

Use the Mod wheel (CC1) to control stereo depth. With the mod wheel in the center (50%), the stereo depth is 100% (normal.) Pull the wheel all the way down to get pure mono, or push above 50% to get an extra wide image, or anything in between. When you load the sampleset, the depth will be 100% even if the mod wheel is not at zero, but if you move the mod wheel, the depth will change accordingly.

Enjoy!