Waterharp Black Friday Deal 2026: $29.50, 50% off

Waterharp Black Friday pricing takes 50% off this Soundiron library of deeply multi-sampled waterphone recordings for Kontakt, so it comes to $29.50 until Dec 6, 2026.

The waterphone is a brass vessel with a hollow water chamber and a long neck. Brass tines sit on top of the chamber, and you play them by strumming, striking or bowing. Richard Waters developed the concept in the late 1960s.

It works as both a tuned and un-tuned percussion instrument, though it is most often used for suspense and horror soundtracks and as a sound design effect.

What did Soundiron record for Waterharp?

The team played it with mallets, sticks, metal rods, fingers, palms, bows and even voices. They recorded it empty and full of water.

More unusual setups include recording from the inside out with hydrophones, playing it while it was cooked over open flame, and filling it with machine screws.

Soundiron then built ambient soundscapes, pads, drones, ambiences and atmospheres from those recordings with sound design techniques.

What's in the Waterharp feature list?

• Bowing in several forms: sustains, staccato, 2-note legato and slow, medium and fast sweeps, with and without water
• Bowing FX: tine buzz grinding, magnets, hydrophone, vocals and boiling at four temperature levels
• Rubber, metal and wooden mallet hits with 6 to 7 velocity layers and 6 round robin
• Hand-played "Metal Tabla" with 10 velocity layers and 10 round robin
• Hydro mallets, mallet sweeps and Hydro-Vocal drones and phrases
• Custom ambiences, including patches by Steven Tavaglione

Why does water matter? Adding water to the chamber and changing the instrument's position drastically shifts the pitch and harmonics. The water chamber can also be played as percussion.

Formats and system requirements

Waterharp 3.0 has an upgraded interface for Kontakt 6 (full version 6.2.2) and for the free Decent Sampler engine. Presets are optimised so each category sits at your fingertips, with easy articulation menu loading.

It ships as 8.9 GB installed, with 3,017 samples in 24 bit / 48kHz uncompressed PCM wav. You get 21 Kontakt.nki presets and 15 Decent Sampler presets, plus 100+ bonus pads, soundscapes and atmospheres and dozens of convolution reverb impulses.

The full retail version of Kontakt is required for the.nki presets. The free Kontakt Player does not support this open-format library, and the Libraries tab does not either, so load it through the File browser or import it into the Kontakt database.

The presets and wav samples are unlocked, so you can import and map them into other wav-compatible samplers and synths.

Soundiron recommends a multi-core CPU, 3 GB of RAM and a SATA or SSD drive. It runs on Windows 7 or higher and Mac OSX 10.12 or higher for Kontakt. Decent Sampler needs Mac OSX 10.9 or higher and also supports 64-bit Linux.