[8dio Studio Solo Violin Torrent Mega
Gildo Santiago
The same section sizes (minus the basses) are featured in 'Impressionist' patches, which automatically generate trills when you play two simultaneous notes. This works for up or down intervals of up to 12 semitones, and sounds pretty realistic. The trill doesn't sound until you superimpose a second note over an initial held note, which can be a shock if you're not expecting it!
Having six basses in your arsenal guarantees some serious low-end firepower. These guys whip out great spiccatos and pizzicatos, including a ferocious, slashing take on the Bartok 'snap pizzicato' style. This also crops up in the 'Warrior Basses' patch, a great combination of Bartok snaps, timpani, percussion and random, Tourette-style male shouts. The sound-designed 'Trailer Basses' is similarly mega, combining double basses with turbo-charged cellos and violas which have been respectively pitch-shifted one and two octaves down. Roll over Beethoven!
Each of the five sections has a 'First Chair' principal player singled out to perform legato, pizzicato and spiccato solo samples. These patches are musically fine, and while they're not capable of reproducing the expressive performance inflections of a real player, they'll do fine for demos.
An honorary mention should also go to Vienna Symphony Orchestra's Dimension Strings collection, which features live ensembles of eight violins, six violas, six cellos and four double basses recorded with individual microphones on each player, thus offering complete control of ensemble size down to solo instrument level.
The 'auto divisi' tag crops up again in this library, but the implementation is not as described above: in ACIS, some patches have a built-in half-size 'divisi' section which you can switch to on the fly via a button on the GUI. The 'half section only' option purges the unwanted samples, thereby halving RAM usage and saving computer resources. Alternatively, there's a 'divisi' switch which temporarily selects the half section without purging the full section 'tutti' samples.
If you fancy taking a crack at writing for the big screen (or even the small one), this library is an ideal tool. Featuring a wide range of string section sizes and solo instruments performing some knockout multisamples, its emotional range spans the cinematic gamut from Valentine's Day to Thor, with an emphasis on exciting spiccato chase and battle scene styles. It doesn't include phrases or licks, and won't automatically enable you to write music like Henry Mancini, Sergei Prokofiev, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams and Arvo Prt, but it will certainly give you some of the string sonorities used by those guys in an instantly playable and entertaining form.
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