Audio Plugin Deals are offering 70% off Celestial Celesta by Chocolate Audio for a limited time, now available for only $14.99, (usually $49.00). The offer ends February 20th.
This celesta is a very old Mustel made in Paris and properly maintained and restored by skilled technicians in Milano.
Chocolate Audio carefully made sure the tuning was the best possible and spent quite a bit of time experimenting with mic choice and positioning.
Chocolate Audio ended up using a pair of AKG C414EB from the 70s for their silky and smooth sound as Spot mics and another trio of AKG 451E with CK22 omni 451E capsules for the Decca perspective.
Then, Chocolate Audio chose to record the Celesta with its cover removed in order to obtain a less boxy sound, something that is very often done when recording such instruments.
Nonetheless Chocolate Audio emulates the effect of the cover inside our User Interface in case you’re looking for that boxier sound.
The recording techniques we chose allowed us for a very close and up-front sound as a Spot sound. Plenty of low end in the attack is available due to proximity effect in our mic placement.
The orchestral placement is easily achieved (in most presets) by cutting some low end with the on board EQ and adding the Decca channel.
One might think that having four different choices and combinations of source channels plus the reverb would make finding the perfect balance impossible.
It is not.
This Instrument, we believe, easily opens up many different sonic worlds by using its on-board mixer. This tool is focused on easy-to-get results with a few tailored controls:
- Volume
- Panpot, places the sound in a specific direction
- Mute and solo
- Width, controls the width of the stereo signals
- Reverb Send, amount of signal for each microphone that gets processed by the on-board IR Reverb
- Master effects are a 3-band EQ with cherry-picked frequency centers, a Preset Compressor & Tape Emulation and the IR Reverb
- On each single channel you might use a simple but very effective 3-band EQ
Dealing with an Instrument featuring four sources layered at the same time can bring an heavier than usual load on system resources. The amount of playback voices for the CPU and Disk Streaming, preload in RAM and load times could suffer.
Features include:
- 0.5 GB (lossless compressed) library size, 449 samples
- 4 layered channels: Spot mics with AKG C414EB, Decca mics with AKG C451E-CK22 and 2 additional sound-designed options, Hyped and Diffuse
- Sustaining sounds, chromatically sampled
- Release trails, chromatically sampled
- Independently controllable sustain-pedal noise
- Sampled with Millennia preamps fed direct into Apogee converters
- All of the details of the celesta recreated through the use of our custom advanced scripting
- Recorded at 24 bit / 96 KHz, released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz
- Easy-to-use mixer for extreme sound-mangling
- Custom User Interface
- Velocity curve management
- Fine-tuned three-band EQ for each channel
- Many under the hood techniques to make the instrument true to the original (release trails attenuation, intelligent release and pedal action…)
- Master realism control and specific control over release trails, key off, resonances and pedal noise levels
- Envelope controls
- 101 custom, high quality IR reverbs
- 22 (+ 22) compressor + tape presets
- 17 factory presets + user-savable presets
Celestial Celesta requires a full version of Kontakt 5.5.2 or later.
For more information on Celestial Celesta, click here:
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