Fracture Sounds Zen Meditations

About Zen Meditations

Containing a range of meditative instruments and sounds from around the world, Zen: Meditations is the perfect addition to your scoring palette, evoking calming tones in your music, or conjuring other-worldly atmospheres using the new Layer Blends engine.

About The Collection

For this library, we focused on sounds that evoke meditation and otherworldly ambiences, aiming to capture feelings of spiritual calm and serenity. Zen features a diverse range of tuned and untuned percussion, instruments from Indian classical music, and 24 inspiring sound-design layers, offering a rich mix of contemporary and traditional sounds.

Building on years of sampling expertise from previous Fracture Sounds libraries, Zen introduces nine new instruments to our catalogue. This experience has enabled us to create realistic interpretations of these instruments and develop unique tools like Dynamic Performance and our new Layer Blends engine. This engine allows you to seamlessly blend Atmosphere Layers and sustain articulations through an intuitive interface, enhancing your creative possibilities.

14 inspiring instruments

The library features 14 inspiring instruments from diverse families, all captured and programmed with meticulous attention to detail.

Although some instruments might seem straightforward, we’ve implemented advanced performance scripts to ensure responsive and expressive play. For instance, the performance engine for our bowed metal instruments emulates the subtle dynamic changes characteristic of the real instruments.

In addition to the acoustic instruments, the library includes 24 specially curated Atmosphere Layers—pads and textures designed to blend seamlessly with the available instruments. Each tuned instrument comes with three default layers that complement its sound, but these can be easily swapped with any other Atmosphere Layer in the library, allowing you to create a personalized and unique sound palette.

A new way to blend sounds

Building on the sound design and sampling of Zen, we’ve introduced the Layer Blends engine, which lets you effortlessly combine the full range of Atmosphere Layers and sustained articulations through an intuitive interface. You can load up to three sound sources simultaneously and blend between them using the mod wheel.

For quick inspiration, use the Shuffle button to randomly swap sounds from the 28 available sources in the dropdown menu. Further refine your combinations with octave shifts and global ADSR and Reverb controls to tailor the sound to your needs.

The included instruments

The library contains the following acoustic instruments:

• Handpan – A large, inverted steel pan drum that produces a resonant metallic tone. Played with hands and soft mallets.
• Tank Drum – A smaller rounded steel drum that produces a brighter tone. Played with hands and soft mallets, in both muted and unmuted variants. This instrument has been intricately sampled with an advanced sympathetic resonance engine, which allows the tonal centre of the instrument to be set to any key.
• Sitar – An Indian plucked string instrument with resonating strings, containing normal sustained notes, ornamentations (bends), and glissandi.
• Tanpura – Resembling the shape of a Sitar, the Tanpura is a 4 stringed instrument used to create drones that have a deep and dark resonance.
• Tabla – Two traditional Indian drums. The ‘bhaya’ drum is larger and deeper in pitch, whilst the ‘tabla’ drum is higher pitched and has a distinctive resonance. Both drums were sampled with different hand techniques and programmed with an intuitive performance engine.
• Wine Glasses – By rubbing the rims of crystal glasses with water, this patch produces a sustained sound similar to a Glass Harmonica. Finger and mallet hits add short variants to the articulation options.
• Tibetan Bowl – A traditional, large Signing Bowl that has a dark metallic timbre played with options for soft and hard hits, sustains, and a rust layer to add more scraping noises for added realism.
• Tuned Gongs – An array of Tibetan gongs, suspended horizontally with a distinctive spiritual tonality, sampled with soft and hard mallet hits.
• Bowed Vibes – An orchestral vibraphone bowed with a cello bow to create ambient and mellow, sustained metallic textures.
• Bowed Crotales – Similar to the timbre of Bowed Vibraphone, the Crotales offer a brighter and higher-pitched metallic sound.
• Meditation Chimes – A set of cylindrical bells performed with a hard mallet.
• Tingsha Bells – A small set of bells used in ritual meditation that have a clear, metallic timbre.
• Tuning Forks – Metallic resonators that produce a clear fundamental frequency are combined into one sample instrument that produces a very pure Celeste-like tone.
• Bamboo Chimes – Wooden windchimes. With a variety of performed phrases and multisampled 1-shots included, these chimes can be used as a percussion instrument, or as a textural tool to create the effect of flowing water.