SOLOS OF THE SEA – SOLO VIOLIN A
Solo strings recorded in motion. Featuring expressive pitch-memory legato.
Solos of the Sea – Solo Violin A is a very simple solo legato instrument. The library continues along the lines of the unfolding Con Moto series with ‘active-bow’ sustains and legatos recorded con moto (with motion). The latter is here expanded upon with a ‘pitch-memory’ adaptation, which helps minimize a musician’s susceptibility to timbral variation between sustain and shorter legato assets.
- Solo violinist
- One dynamic layer (in the territory of mf-f)
- Bow-change pitch-memory legato, recorded con moto (with movement in the bowing and vibrato)
- “Active-bow” sustains (non-static longs that move and evolve while simultaneously maintaining the dynamic/timbre)
- Short, responsive release samples
- One mic position – recorded at a moderately close distance in a hall with a stereo pair
- 48kHz / 24bit
- NCW-compressed, ~175 MB total
- Built for Kontakt 5.5.1 and above – full, retail version of Kontakt required
- Download via Continuata
NOTE ON DELAY: this library has a moderately delayed response (140 ms) when playing, to further the musicality of the legatos. The library is heavily optimized for this delay amount. All the elements of the library (legatos, sustains, attacks, releases, etc) are on the same delay, which allow you to play in your parts, quantize them, set the track delay to -140 ms and have everything be on the beat.
Repeating Notes
You can repeat notes without hearing the attack again. Simple hold down the sustain pedal and repeat a note.
Delay
This library has a delay of 140 ms – not just the legatos, but also the sustains. Set your MIDI track to -140 ms, quantize, and you will be on-time.
Patch List
Solos of the Sea – Solo Violin A.nki
Library Limitations
- This library is quite raw and exposed, insofar as tuning, timbre, and musician/noise anomalies.
- Being bow-change legato, it is more accented – less smooth – than its slurred counterpart would be, particularly on the lower register.
- While pitch-memory legato helps to balance out timbral variation overall, there are still timbral shifts when the interval fades to the sustain. In many cases it’s a fairly ‘musical’ sounding shift, but there are more obvious timbral shifts on some intervals as well. There are also timbral shifts within the sustains at times.
- Extremely fast passages bug (as of release) – extremely fast playing will sometimes yield ‘dropped notes.’ Testing so far points to this issue being related to the legato group’s volume envelope not keeping up with the notes and ‘choking.’ Something which sometimes appears to fix this issue (in the context of a DAW) is quantizing all the notes in the problematic area to the same MIDI note length.
- This library has a moderately delayed response (140 ms) when playing, to further the musicality of the legatos. The library is heavily optimized for this delay amount. All the elements of the library (legatos, sustains, attacks, releases, etc) are on the same delay, which allow you to play in your parts, quantize them, set the track delay to -140 ms and have everything be on the beat.