Hopkin Instrumentarium: The U Black Friday Deal 2026: $19.50, 50% off

Hopkin Instrumentarium: The U Black Friday pricing is 50% off, which puts this Soundiron Kontakt library at $19.50 until Dec 6, 2026.

The U is a steel lamellophone made by instrument inventor Bart Hopkin, and this library is Soundiron's sampled version of it.

What is The U?

Most lamellophones give you one tine per note. The U gives you 14 closely spaced tines per note, tuned in octaves and fifths across three or four octaves.

You play it by drawing a thin stick-like plectrum across the tines of a chosen note. Twelve of these groups make up a chromatic scale.

Because each group spans several octaves, you can shape a melody by accenting particular tines inside the gliss.

The tines are narrow stainless steel machine screws, tuned by changing their length with hex nuts at the base. Most are also overtone-tuned with extra hex nuts acting as adjustable weights. The maker describes the result as a liquid, metallic timbre.

How was it recorded?

Soundiron captured the instrument up close in wide stereo. A second mic position used a tetrahedral binaural microphone, which the maker says gives a first-person, enveloping view of playing it.

The library has tuned and untuned articulations: plucks, bowed shorts, bowed sustains, glisses, percussion and FX. Soundiron also added sound-designed textures, pads and tones that move beyond the acoustic source. You can play, layer, modulate and blend them with the natural articulations.

What's inside the Kontakt interface?

• Sound-shaping controls for swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, coarse and fine pitch, articulation switching and cross-fading
• An LFO with selectable shape, target, speed, intensity, tempo-sync and fade-in
• 12 lowpass, high-pass and FX filters with assignable modulation sources
• An arpeggiator with velocity table, direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration controls
• Key and scale lock for staying inside common scales
• A modular FX rack with 18 DSP modules across 10 slots, plus factory chain presets

The reverb draws on 99 convolution impulse responses of rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor spaces, plus 40 custom FX impulses for heavier transformation. There are also 2 master presets and 20 custom FX and ambient presets.

Format and requirements

The library is licensed for the free Kontakt Player, and also runs in full Kontakt 6 or later as a VST, AU or AAX instrument. It shows up in the Kontakt Libraries browser and works with Komplete Kontrol and NI S-Series keyboards.

The content is 7,694 stereo samples in 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless NCW format, 5.04 GB installed. You need Kontakt Player 6.1 or later, Windows 7 or higher or macOS 10.12 or higher, a dual-core CPU and 3+ GB of RAM. Soundiron recommends a SATA or SSD drive.