I love the sound of a marimba. I've always wanted to own one, but the size and price makes that dream pretty unreasonable. Luckily, I came across one in the high school band room and recorded a few samples of it. Carrying around a marimba in my laptop is much more practical, and I can skip the years of practice it takes to master playing it. Plus, I've added a few features impossible on a real world instrument!

The ADM Marimba Free Ableton Live Pack is made up of two Ableton Live Instruments.

The first, is a traditional marimba sound. You can play the notes on your keyboard in a percussive manner and the sample plays until the end, creating a pretty convincing marimba sound. I've also looped the sample, so if you hold down the notes, it will sustain in a pad sound. You can adjust the Attack of the instrument to remove the initial transient of the mallet hitting the keys. Many of the parameters are velocity sensitive, so it can be quite expressive. One of the more useful ones was modulating Sample Offset by velocity. As you decrease the note velocity, the sample starts to playback a little bit later in the sample. This reduces the impact of the initial transient (which you can hear at full velocity) and gives a softer, more mellow sound.

The second instrument is nearly identical to the first except the samples play in reverse. I love the atmospheric feeling this instrument creates!

Check out the video below to see it in action and then download the instrument and use it in your own music!