Dear friends and colleagues, 

 

Wow - It has been 5 years since the beginning of our sampling adventure and I could definitely say that time really does go fast! These five rather short years were filled with both commercial and custom sampling, lots of tests that never saw the light of day - projects like the so-called “Rain” choir, our solo “Harp" and the low “Braam” sampled orchestra back then when the market was not overflowing with amazing roaring orchestral samples. Each and every one of those projects taught us the tiny details of the craft and allowed us to establish the level of quality that we produce now - and I am extremely grateful to all our international collaborators and core team that continue to make this possible. And of course, a huge thanks to you - our customers - who never stopped keeping faith in our company and pushed us forth, trusting us to experiment and do things that we never though we could or might do. 

 

I remember how hard it was for all of us to completely scrap the Rhodope 1 release with its Syllabuilder. For that release we had countless fights over conference calls, worked night and day to create something that just didn’t work; and the judge of the end product was again our customers who liked this idea BUT told us plain and simple they wanted something much simpler. And if this hadn’t happen — if people didn’t send us emails with feature requests and suggestions — we might have never released Wotan with the new Syllabuilder engine which pushed our company in a completely new direction. I believe that great results come after… just talking. 

 

Just plain conversation that could turn the tides of a product and make something work better than initially thought of. The weirdest periods in our company have always been our releases. I could say that they come really close to the feeling I personally get when showing a director what I’ve written for their film; it’s as if I’m standing there naked in front of an audience, I’m showing an inner part of myself and putting it out there for people to see and comment. This could very well be said about our sample libraries as well. Often we work months (if not years!) on a specific product with four or five people playing on the instrument every day, trying it out in different genres. It comes to a point where we know ALL defects of a library by heart and sometimes we just want to completely remove certain instruments or articulations. Legato usually is painfully redone at least three or four times before alpha versions. And then again during the beta period. And sometimes again before release. And this is why seeing people love (or hate) a library is special - because EVERY time (without exception) people manage to find ways to use the library that we couldn’t have imagined! It’s a thrill. And seeing people feel inspired by our sounds is the most rewarding thing for an artist; it’s literally the same as seeing someone enjoy your piece of music. Yes, I’d say that for us sampling is also art - the art of creating inspiration in this, sometimes, grey world. 

 

But enough talking of the past. Let’s talk about the future! We now have a dedicated team of wonderful editors and can focus on doing slightly more advanced products; our latest ‘child' BALKAN shows how much effort we can now put into a product. We have a few products coming up the pipeline and I’d say that for me ALL of those are really, really inspiring. We will continue to focus on acoustic music, on capturing things that have not been captured with the desired attention. Our company has also made a big collaborative project that we’ll be announcing really soon - something that I personally NEVER thought I’d participate in creating. It’s again something that we tried to make in a different and unheard before way and we went through many lengths to make it happen. This will be out there in Q1 of 2018. 

Hopefully in the period between April and June we’ll be releasing our biggest yet sampling venture, something that I am really, really, really excited about (really!!!). This seriously has been something that we worked on since the beginning of this year and with it we’ll try to push the boundaries even further. Similar to what our polyphonic legato script in Freyja did — which we now try to put wherever we can in our libraries cause we love it so much! 

 

In the beginning of 2018 we will also release two small sample libraries with interesting content. Also, from January on we will begin developing a new line of products based mostly on unique performances. This will not take our focus away from deeply sampled libraries, but we’ll try to again provide things that are just never to be seen in a collection online. 2018 sure sounds like a busy year, right? We’ll do our best to make waiting worth it! 

 

Happy fifth birthday to Strezov Sampling. On behalf of our team - thank you! Huge thanks to all our partners, to the WONDERFUL musicians who always put their souls into those tiny .wav samples and most importantly - to ALL of you for putting your faith in us. We hope we won’t disappoint in the years to come! 

 

 

Cheers,

George Strezov

CEO

 

PS: Yes, we could have released StormChoir 3 today - like many of you speculated, but since Christmas is around the corner we thought a christmas present for all of you is a way more fitting idea. So from today Dec 17 2017 19:00 CET on all of you can enjoy a Duduk from our latest collection Balkan for free. Already own Balkan? Send us an email and we have a special surprise for you as well.