Freesound.org has lots of fun Public Domain and Creative Commons sounds that have been uploaded by the community. As you can imagine this is right up my street. I've used some before to make instruments, but I thought I'd put them all in the same place.
There is something called the Pablo Project which I don't understand on Freesound. It seems to involve uploading both good and bad samples of various instruments. I assembled the better sounding Violin samples from
Kake85 into this little Kontakt instrument. It uses the WIPs script to add legato and vibrato.
This instrument is one velocity layer with about every other note sampled. It is Creative Commons Attribution, please give credit to Kake85.
TVerse put up a fun sample set called
Bubblesound Octature Bass Multi Samples. I shortened it to Bubbles. He was kind enough to place the samples in the Public Domain and the instrument is the same, use it for anything you like.
Francesco Da Pyjama suggested this Kayageum from samples created by
Spt3125. The samples were placed in the Public Domain as is this instrument, so you can use it for anything you like. Be warned that I recently updated Kontakt because none of the Komplete instruments would work, so you will need the latest version too.
According to
Wikipedia, This instrument is a Korean zither with 12 strings.
Another request was for the GMB Gamelan. Sampled by anamorphosi, the samples are Sampling+ which seems like an earlier CC license and requests attribution. So use for anything you like but please credit anamorphosi.
This Indonesian instrument features Gongs in Dark Blue on the bass end of the keyboard, Jegog in the middle in Green and Kantilan on the treble end in Light Blue. In general the Jegog and Kantilan have been put on the nearest white key. They don't conform to the western scale, so this is to give you a general idea of where the sounds are relative to each other and an approximation to the western scale. The lower two gongs are about correct, the upper two gongs are placed next to them for convenience.
Oddly I did another Gamelan about a year ago. You can find it
here.
This piano has a crunchy feel. Every note or every other note sampled in one velocity layer. Samples by
Goup_1. Creative Commons, please credit Goup_1.
As with most toy pianos, the tuning is a bit negotiable. Fun little instrument based on Creative Commons samples by
Poissonmort. Please credit him.
Another nice FreeSounds instrument is the
Ldk1609 Violin. I just put out a new and improved version... aka I fixed some mistakes.
The
Quartertone Guitar is yet another FreeSounds creation. Some have criticized it, but its also been downloaded a lot for the limited time its been up. As with most digital guitars, a good amp helps.
Guitars are hard to get right. I've spent actual money for some and never been entirely satisfied. You can check out this
list of free Guitars to see if you find something you like.
