I think that ever since I heard “Hedwig’s Theme” for the first time I have been curious as to what instrument it really is that plays the melody. I’ve heard the instrument celeste mentioned numerous times, but most samples of a celeste don’t sound quite like the Harry Potter score. I stumbled across a fascinating analysis of the theme that also mentioned that the sound is electronically manipulated. Some further digging revealed that the sound used in the Harry Potter score is actually a mix of a sampled celeste and a Yamaha DX7 playing a sine wave. There even seems to be a commercial Kontakt instrument called “Randy’s Celeste” based on this sound. So, fascinated by this sound I wanted to try to recreate it and see what happens when different aspects and components of the sound are varied.
I found some free public domain celeste samples and made my own wave file containing a sine wave. I edited a few of the celeste samples to remove some clicks and adjusted the starting position, tuning and loudness of every sample according to the EBU R128 measurement method. I built the Kontakt instrument using Kontakt version 6.5.3 and learned the basics of KSP scripting along the way. The user interface I built using Canva.
The features of this instrument are now the following:
- Celeste samples
- The transition between the two velocity layers of the celeste samples can be adjusted using the normal/medium/soft buttons. Soft means that only the soft velocity layer is used.
- Volume
- High pass filter
- Low pass filter
- Stereo width
- ADSR including attack curve and hold
- Sine wave
- Volume
- LFO level and frequency
- ADSR including attack curve and hold
- Reverb
- Wet level
- Dry level
I wanted to use the snapshot feature of Kontakt to include a few different presets, but it seems that snapshot files would have to be manually placed in a separate folder, if I am not mistaken. So instead I made some copies of the nki file, each with different settings.
To download this Kontakt instrument, go to https://github.com/bustad/magical-celeste.
Enjoy! 
