String Contours

PRODUCED BY

Henri Vartio, Robin Birner and George Strezov

WHAT IS A CONTOUR?

A contour is a recorded performance with a fixed length and dynamic shape. For example a swell with 1 bar of crescendo leading into 1 bar of diminuendo with a bow change in the middle of it.

String Contours allows you to play these performances and seamlessly change notes without triggering a new performance. You always stay within the initial performance's dynamic shape and phrasing. This leads to a realistic and fitting vibrato, as well as dynamic flow without any Midi CC programming, allowing high quality results as well as a more minimalistic approach to composing due to the expressiveness of the recordings themselves.

AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD VIA NATIVE ACCESS 
Powered by Native Instruments' Kontakt Player v6.7.1 or higher

DIFFERENT RECORDINGS FOR DIFFERENT TEMPI

As the performance of a musical phrase is heavily dependent on its context, especially in length and tempo, we wanted to introduce this contextuality into the world of virtual instruments.

Every contour was recorded at multiple speeds (3 different tempi) and shapes (4 different dynamic shapes)  to retain the contextuality of a live performance across the sections along with cosistency across the entire collection. Kontakt automatically picks the correct sample pool based on the tempo of the host sequencer and seamlessly adjusts in case of tempo changes. Timestreching is kept to an absolute minimum, so it's barely audible. A lot of time was spent on finding the right amount of tempi, which needed to be recorded in order to achieve the best results possible.

One exception are the "Normale Espressivo" patches within the library, which were recorded only in very fast tempo - 140, but still - those are also synced to the DAW's host tempo.

ADAPTABILITY

With String Contours you can change the notes of the performance across the contour of the selected shape. The scripting intelligently adds releases and contextually recorded attacks between the notes based on where and how the note change happens during the bow, leading to smooth transitions along the recorded shapes.

The recordings were all done to a consistent performance style within the range of the instrument and between the sections, so that when combined, you reach a feeling of singular intent of performance and united phrasing across the lines of your arrangement.

TRANSPARENT AND NATURAL RECORDINGS

The recordings were done using only handpicked musicians best fit for the required aesthetic in tone and vibrato, as well as custom microphone arrays summed down to 3 different mic positions and a fully produced out of the box mixed signal. The hall is of ambient medium size to get a cinematic sound, but still retain as much details as possible.

Due to the fact that this library doesn't use any dynamic layers or Round Robins, you always get the sound of a real live recording without the usual stacked ensemble pad sound. Play a three-voiced chord with a solo cello and it will sound like three celli playing together.

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