Borsta

Borsta

Borsta is a new innovative percussion instrument specially designed for strokes and brushes. It emulates a single drum instrument at a time, but comes with 18 different instruments to choose between. The instruments included are:

• Rusty Bucket
• Guira
• Pancake Drum
• Tambourine
• Frame Drum
• Pizza Box
• Cardboard Pipe
• Cajon
• Pandeiro
• Bakestone
• Cymbal Chains
• Snare Drum 1
• Snare Drum 2
• Snare Drum 3
• LOFI Snare Drum
• Metal Spade
• Djembe
• Iron Sticks

Borsta comes with 230 pre-made factory sequences and 60 global presets covering different sounds and genres. The parallel envelope and events sequencers allow you to determine exactly when to start a stroke, how the stroke’s pressure/speed should evolve over time and when to end it. The instruments are all structured and MIDI-mapped in a uniform way, making it possible to use the same sequence on any instrument.

Borsta’s unique audio engine allows for an endless number of truly natural-sounding brushing phrases and rhythms. This makes it possible to create very life-like brushing phrases and patterns, something that can’t be achieved with traditional sample-based instruments. Each instrument is based on more than 400 high-quality samples, recorded for playing with different velocities and round robins. This allows for a traditional swing pattern to sound musically correct no matter whether you choose a Frame Drum, Tambourine, or Snare Drum – it will just sound like the musician changed instruments.

In addition to the 18 high-quality instruments with 6 multi-sampled one shots each, Borsta also offers separate volume and velocity curve control of each sound type, room simulation with 9 different rooms, reverb with adjustable decay time and 6 different algorithms, timbre adjustment control (harmonics), overall pitch, and a three band equalizer. The sequences are played one at a time, however switching between sequences can be done seamlessly via MIDI, and additional one-shot samples can be triggered using an ordinary MIDI track.

Borsta is compatible with macOS 10.10 or later (optimized for the M1-processor) and Windows 7 SP1 or later, and supports AU, VST-2, VST-3, AAX. Borsta is a Swedish verb meaning “to brush”.