Duduks

The duduk is an ancient Armenian double reed woodwind instrument made of aged apricot wood. Its warm, soft and slightly nasal timbre is not unlike the English Horn or a softly played tenor saxophone, but given the ability to shape the sound with air pressure, vibrato and embellishments it’s the wind instrument that most resembles the human voice.

UNESCO proclaimed the Armenian duduk and its music as a “Masterpiece of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity”. The instrument was made known to a broader audience through film music with movies and shows such as Gladiator, Avatar, Syriana, Game of Thrones, and many more.

This Synchron World Winds Pack includes a duduk in the key of Bb and a bass duduk in D. The typical vibrato that’s created with the cheeks and ornaments such as grace notes contribute to the distinct and expressive sound of the instrument.

Both duduks included in this Pack were played by multi-instrumentalist, folk instruments expert, and member of the Synchron Stage Orchestra, Veronika Vitazkova. She played in many orchestras, among them the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, and Tonkünstler Orchestra, toured Europe as a solo flutist with the late Ennio Morricone, and played at esteemed festivals from Salzburger Festspiele to Hollywood in Vienna. Having performed on countless film scores at Synchron Stage Vienna, Veronika feels very much at home on the large Stage A and marvels at the exceptional acoustics of this scoring stage that contribute substantially to the overall sound of each instrument.

To capture the spectacular ambience of “Stage A” of Synchron Stage, our engineers employed seven phase-coherent microphone configurations to provide a broad range of room options. All signals are available as separate channels in the mixer section of the Vienna Synchron Player. A wide variety of presets offer perfect mixer settings and serve as great starting points for your own sound creations.

Under the Content tab you’ll find a list of each duduk’s natural sampled tones, which are diatonic as opposed to chromatic. Nonetheless, this software instrument provides chromatic keyboard mappings for every instrument. In addition, legatos were sampled chromatically, except for the portamento intervals of the bass duduk. If you want your composition to be played by a duduk player, please bear in mind that not everything you write and play on the keyboard may be possible to perform for a musician.