About
The history of Garritan products
MakeMusic, Inc. acquired the Garritan Corporation, the world’s leading provider of virtual software instruments, on December 30, 2011. Garritan products are a tremendous addition to MakeMusic’s growing portfolio of solutions. Garritan founder Gary Garritan is the Director of Instrumental Sciences at MakeMusic.
It all started with the harp
“The harp has held a special place in my heart since early childhood,” said Gary Garritan. “From early childhood I wanted to play the harp after seeing Harpo Marx play it in a movie. When a harp teacher moved to the area, I had the opportunity to begin lessons and thus began my love affair with the instrument which grew every day.”
“It was in developing an electronic MIDI harp that I first became acquainted with the world of sampling. In need of quality harp samples for my performing, I developed the GigaHarp one of the very first independent and detailed libraries for the then groundbreaking Gigasampler®. The ability of Gigasampler to stream megabytes of gigabytes of samples, play multiple dynamic levels in real-time was a revolution. Nothing like it had been done before and the GigaHarp set the standard for quality, expression, and performance; not only for harps but for all other sample libraries. The GigaHarp was an unqualified success and thus began my start as a sample developer.”
Over the years, many award-winning virtual instrument libraries continue to be developed. Garritan Personal Orchestra set the standard for sample libraries, has won several awards, and is used by top people in the industry. Other acclaimed sound libraries include Jazz & Big Band, World Instruments, Classic Pipe Organs, Concert & Marching Band, and the revolutionary Instant Orchestra. Garritan sounds are widely used in television, film, game audio, and on the world’s greatest concert stages.
Gary has revolutionized music creation by ensuring that professional-quality software instrument sounds are within every musician’s reach. Everything we do is aimed at helping musicians realize and maximize their creative potential. To that end, high-quality, expressive and affordable software instruments should be within the reach of every musician. We intentionally make products that work smarter and easier, simplifying music technology to foster, enhance and democratize musical creativity. Researchers at heart, we pioneer innovation, creating new standards that are consistently in the forefront of music technology… yet remain focused on the human elements of music and real performance. We believe education is crucial for musicians to reach their highest potential, demonstrated by our broad presence in colleges and universities, and by our free online music courses.
We truly want to spread the joy of creating music with these remarkable tools — high quality, affordable, authentic tools that educate, enable and inspire musicians toward achievement and excellence. Garritan sound libraries provide musicians with state-of-the-art virtual instruments with the playback quality of a live performance. Used in conjunction with music-writing software such as Finale, Garritan software libraries provide sounds so realistic they can be indistinguishable from a live performance.
