A solo violin option...

[AndyKotz]

http://www.icesamples.com/products/prod ... product=42

[remmet]

I wish I could get a better sense of what this library was capable of. It seems, at least to me, that many sample libraries spend a lot of time and effort creating a library, but they fall short in creating demos that properly showcase what the instruments can do. The demos for this solo violin featured a style of music that's 200 years old. How is that relevant to the needs of today's composers of music for media? If you need to write something sounding like Paganini, this is the perfect solo violin library for you! But what else can it do?

Hopefully more demos will be coming in the near future.

Richard

[mikeymike2000]

Hi Richard,

I have to disagree with you on this one. This is one of the best demos for a VST I have ever heard. If it sounds like that, the question is not what else can you do with it but what CAN'T you do with it.

If I had the full Knotakt I would prob have done an impulse buy tonight but it would not work in my system.

Classical music is the best display of any orchestral VST cause that gives us the real sound and with that real sound you can do anything. If I wanted a violin and heard something modern I would not even consider buying it. It has pissed me off many times that demos have all kinds of electronic crap in there and take away from the product that is for sale. What makes me even more mad is when they list all kinds of stuff in the demo that is not in the product you are gonna buy. That just makes me go somewhere else. - Check this out, I have a beautiful Bentley, but for sale today is the Gremlin. But just imagine what it is like to drive the Gremlin as you look at the Bentley.

Whoever did this demo gets a pat on the back from me.

Just my 2...

Andy, did you do the demo? heheh I remember you saying something a while back about a sponsorship from a VST place.

[remmet]

I agree, the demos demonstrate excellent programming skills and showcase a certain set a capabilities that the library does very, very well. I certainly wasn't suggesting adding any electronic crap to these demos or making it some sort of modern amalgam of Schoenberg, Webern, and Babbitt. I only wish that some of them would demonstrate styles of music that are more typical of film and television underscoring, because that is the market they ostensibly are serving.

For example, it would be nice to hear a slower piece with longer sustained and connected notes in order to evaluate how expressive and natural sounding the instrument could be. There was very little of that in the current demos.

Richard

[Len911]

The Love violin seems pretty pricey, 345 mb for $168. The demo revealed it's lack of round robin or alternate notes by a little of the machine gunning effect of using the same sample many times in a row.

For comparison, Kirk Hunter Solo Strings 1 is 6gb, for $99. It includes violin, viola, cello, bass, and a "romantic violin".
The romantic violin might be a similar articulation of the Love violin.
http://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/purchase_ss1.html

Romantic violin
http://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/GypsyViolin.mp3

Fiddlin' style articulation as well, another sound
http://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/Fiddlin.mp3

I think overall if it was $20, it would be a nice gypsy violin if you stayed away from repeating the same articulation of the same note too many times. I think it is strictly intended to be a one trick pony, gypsy violin, there's not enough sampled memory, 345mb, to contain much else.

[matto]

9 times out of 10 when I use a solo violin, I want it to play at least *some* emotional, dynamic legato phrases. These demos do not show whether the VI is capable of that. The long notes that are there do not connect well with the short ones, they sounds as if played by a different player, and they are dead and static...I'm definitely *not* in "Love" with them.

Mikey I agree that well chosen examples from the classical repertoire *could* showcase the entire range of the instrument, but what we have here is a fiddlin extravaganza mostly just suitable to inducing the "wow, impulse buy" factor you almost fell victim to. There is no variety here to showcase how well this VI lives up to a real violin's wide ranging expressive capabilities. Possibly because it doesn't...but I would "Love" to be proven wrong.

Len, I think judging a VI by it's mb/$ factor is not really particularly relevant in this day and age of advanced scripting and convolution, and technologies like harmonic sample alignment.
For example the Sample Modeling instruments are rather small in size but sound more realistic than libraries many times their size. LASS is also rather lean when compared to some of its competition, but ranks at/near the top when it comes to realism and expressiveness.

[pboss]

...harmonic sample alignment..

This is why I love hanging out around here. I get to hear talk like this. (And I am still shopping / waiting for the best string VI choice for myself). Even though Hollywood Strings has had a half-off sale, I still have an aversion to that choice for all of the reasons discussed on the forum here. I have EWSO, which will do for this moment, but I am excited to see what the next few years will bring when it comes to scripting and other strategies.

[slideboardouts]

The solo violin option that I've opted for is to actually learn how to play the violin

Obviously not an option for most people, but if you're a pretty good guitar play I'd recommend giving it a shot. You can get a decent student violin that is perfectly suitable for recording for less than $500 these days, and while it is a difficult instrument its really not too bad if you're a somewhat accomplished string player. I've just been goofing around with it for a few days and can already play scales, arpeggios, and green sleeves fairly well. In a few months I should be good enough to record basic violin parts for my compositions.

Just something to keep in mind for any guitar playing composers out there who want to learn violin but are deathly afraid of a bow like I was. Plus, I think chicks dig dudes who can play violin

-Steve

[slideboardouts]

After casually listening to the demo I'd say Matt hit it on the head. I only remember hearing a flurry of short staccato/marcato/spicato type notes which are the easiest to make sound convincing. Even the solo violin patch in EW Gold can do an adequate job of that. There really wasn't any sweet, expressive sounding legato stuff in there which is much harder to get sounding realistic.

-Steve

[remmet]

The solo violin option that I've opted for is to actually learn how to play the violin

Obviously not an option for most people, but if you're a pretty good guitar play I'd recommend giving it a shot. You can get a decent student violin that is perfectly suitable for recording for less than $500 these days, and while it is a difficult instrument its really not too bad if you're a somewhat accomplished string player. I've just been goofing around with it for a few days and can already play scales, arpeggios, and green sleeves fairly well. In a few months I should be good enough to record basic violin parts for my compositions.

Just something to keep in mind for any guitar playing composers out there who want to learn violin but are deathly afraid of a bow like I was. Plus, I think chicks dig dudes who can play violin

-Steve

It's funny - At one point I thought of learning to play the viola or cello for the exact same reasons. I asked a friend - an accomplished violist who is in the top tier of film score musicians - how long it might reasonably take for an experienced musician like myself to learn how to play viola well enough to record my own string parts. He said that, with diligent practice, it would take about 5 years to learn how to hold the bow correctly. I decided to leave well enough alone.

R