There is nothing quite as ubiquitous in popular music as the shaker and the tambourine.

From the Beatles to Britney Spears, multitudes of artists across generations have utilized these instruments for their ability to establish a groove, lift a chorus, or provide a needed rhythmic element to a song.  Despite the apparent necessity of these musical building blocks, many music creators have a difficult time finding consistent, high-quality, and usable shaker and tambourine material for use in their work. Noisefirm Complete Shaker & Tambourine is an unabridged collection of shakers, maracas, tambourines, and other ethnic and unique groove-building instruments.  Recorded using the highest quality microphones, preamps, and converters, Noisefirm CS&T features a vast array of different percussive textures in uncompromising sonic quality.  Every instrument is featured in several intensively sampled Kontakt and EXS instruments as well as a multitude of über-usable and meticulously organized loop-suites.

No More Shaker_09!!!

In researching Complete Shaker & Tambourine, we surveyed many of today’s most successful producers, composers, and artists to ask them about how they currently used shakers and tambourines in their creative process.  What we discovered was startling.  Although most of the music professionals we interviewed possessed multiple hard drives with gigabytes upon gigabytes of samples, nearly all of them resorted to using the same shaker sample for every song…  Shaker_09.  When we asked them why they would resort to using the same rhythm and sound on all of their projects, they simply replied that their other shaker and tambourine sounds were either stylistically unusable, poorly recorded, or just not well-organized.  With NoiseFirm Complete Shaker & Tambourine, music creators will have access to an abundance of pristinely recorded and scrupulously organized shaker and tambourine material, and we will never have to listen to Shaker_09 again.

OmniGrüv

NoiseFirm Complete Shaker & Tambourine was created using OmniGrüv technology.  Through an intensive editing process, we insure that all of the loops in this library can be used at a nearly limitless range of tempos without any artificial time-stretching or audio degradation.

Left and Right Hand Patterns

One of the other problems with many shaker and tambourine loops currently available is their use of completely unnatural rhythms.  Physically impossible-to-play rhythms nearly always have the effect of distracting the listener, while making the synthetic nature of the shaker instrument plainly obvious.  In researching CS&T, we interviewed many professional percussionists, and asked them how they would achieve these syncopated rhythms organically in a live performance.  Through the use of “right hand” and “left hand” patterns, percussionists are able to create rhythms too complex to perform with one hand.  The right hand will generally pulse a steady subdivision while the left hand plays complimentary accents.  These two rhythms combine to create a cohesive syncopated rhythm that adds interest and dynamics to any groove. With this in mind, all NoiseFirm Complete Shaker & Tambourine loops are designated as either “right hand” or “left hand” loops.  Not only does this mean that all of the loop material sounds completely natural on its own, but more importantly, all of the “left hand” and “right hand” patterns can be mixed and matched for a nearly infinite variety of groove-enhancing rhythms.