Klevgrand Skaka

Create shaker patterns as played by a human being

Skaka is a sample-based sequencer plugin for shaker percussion instruments. It has 12 slots, each with its own instrument, parameters (lots of them!) and pattern. We've built both the sequencer and the sampler from the ground, to optimize this instrument for these types of sounds. Each pattern contains events, with individual parameters like pitch, velocity (as in how fast the instrument is shaken), and envelope.

With full control over shuffle/swing amount, an advanced humanizer function, internal awareness of in- and out shakes (yes, they sound different), using grids divided into triplets/quintuplets/septuplets, timing fine-tuning and variable sequence lengths, Skaka can get very close to how a human percussionist would sound in almost any tempo without any use of degrading time stretching or similar techniques.

To top it off, there's a nice reverb, a room simulator and a high shelf filter.

Skaka comes with nearly 200 ready-made patterns covering most genres and styles.

Enter Skaka v1.2 – an even better, grittier version.

While Skaka already pretty much covered the whole spectra, we were still missing dirtier, darker and overall grittier percussion sounds in the toolbox of Skaka. This made us look beyond the already recorded percussion laying on our shelves and engaged our invention mode. We started to craft our own instruments, experimenting with different containers, materials and contents of shakable stuff and didn’t stop until we achieved the ”darker” percussion set we were aiming for. All this experimenting resulted in 6 new premium sounding instruments for Skaka, all captured in top-tier stereo recordings.

Features

• 12 parallel slots, each with individual settings for instrument and pattern
• 18 different shaker instruments (Egg, Shaker, Tambourine, Caxixi, Single Shot, Ghungroos, Calabash & Seeds + much more)
• High quality reverb plus room simulation
• High-precision editing of each pattern, with a plethora of controls for getting the exact right timing, pitch and velocity
• Wide range of presets covering most genres and styles
• Advanced and customizable humanizer
• 8 (or 9) velocity layers with more than 30 round-robins per layer for each instrument (thousands of samples used)
• v1.2 6 new instruments (Pepper Puck, Tin Box, Nut Shells, Pocket Tamb, Match Box, Paper Roll)
• v1.2 Double/half time in relation to DAW tempo feature
• v1.2 Resizeable UI