FI-02

Jasno

Name: Jasno
Brand: Felt Instruments
SKU: FI-02
Price: 59 GBP
Availability: InStock

A rare 1960s Guitaret, plucked, struck and granulated.

VST3, AU, AAX plugin

A 1960s Hohner Guitaret, the rare tine instrument sampled for the Jasno plugin.

The plucked tines of a 1960s Hohner Guitaret, sampled for the Jasno instrument plugin.

story

It's called a Guitaret. It sounds nothing like a guitar.

A small electric oddity, designed by Ernst Zacharias in 1963. You pluck the little metal tines that stick out of the body, and a pickup turns them into something between a kalimba and a celeste. Hohner built the Guitaret for about two years. It wasn't exactly a commercial success, and it slipped out of memory.

I first heard it on Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's score for The Assassination of Jesse James: a gentle, ringing sound I could neither place nor forget. Years later my wife found one, restored to near-mint by the seller. After six months of hard work, it became Jasno, a plugin.

Kept as played

Multiple takes of every note, deeply sampled down to the mechanical noises - nothing cleaned up or evened out afterwards.

No microphones

Recorded straight from the Guitaret's own pickup, into a hand-made valve preamp built on the 1950s REDD circuit.

Two instruments in one

The Guitaret as it stands, and a second one granulated until the Guitaret is gone.

every update is free

Buy it once, and you get all future versions and improvements.

in the room

see how it was recorded

“Between intimacy and vast spaces!”

Ben Lukas Boysen

“Ethereal and magical.”

Sample Library Review

Electro-acoustic

This is the Guitaret played straight: quirky and a little fragile, with every mechanical tick of the tines left in. Felted mallets on the tines, struck instead of plucked. Loose tremolos, unsynced, performed like a banjo. Nobody asked for that one. I sampled it anyway.

Plucks

Mallets

Unsynced Tremolos

Random Cloud

Afterglow

A whole studio's worth of sound swells up around a single note, granulated into cinematic clouds that thicken, drift and come apart. Ghostly bells coaxed out of modulated tape noise. A patch that rolls like the ocean, the swell running longer the harder you lean on a key.

Most of the Afterglow patches are MPE-ready*, so the whole mass bends and breathes under your fingers, every note moving on its own.

* all but Echoes, which is velocity-controlled

Echoes

Becoming Ocean

Piano Drop

Disperse

pricing

Jasno
A rare 1960s Guitaret, plucked, struck and granulated.
Alternatives Bundle
Jasno bundled with Helenko, a 1930s tabletop celeste with all its quirks left in and Blisko Viola, a dark, rich sound - beautiful at the extremes of its range. Four microphone positions.

There are no sales at Felt. This is the price today and the price in December, for everyone.

try it free

Pluck it, strike it, and see which one you keep going back to. There's no time limit on the trial, though the sound mutes now and then.

details

formats: VST3, AU, AAX · macOS 10.13+, Windows 10+ (64-bit). No Kontakt required: the plugin loads in your DAW like other plugins.
electro-acoustic articulations: Plucks, felt and rubber mallets, loose tremolos, and a tape-loop Random Cloud.
range: C3–C6, five round-robins. Some extended techniques run narrower due to mechanical constraints.
Afterglow articulations: Cinematic textures from tape, vintage gear and musique concrète techniques. MPE-ready, except Echoes, which is velocity-controlled.
manual: The Jasno manual covers every control.
size: 1.47 GB
licence: One licence per user, install on as many machines as you personally use. All future updates are free.

Hohner and Guitaret are trademarks of their respective owners. Felt Instruments is not affiliated with Hohner.

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