After Westwood Instruments’ launch of ROOTS and the reveal of Untold Strings, it’s now Fracture Sounds’ turn to present their own free string-based library.
Gentle Strings: An intimate, expressive chamber
Following a special YouTube Premiere announcement made on Thursday, it is now known that the latest free Kontakt Player instrument in the Fracture Sounds Blueprint series is Gentle Strings – and it comes after 6 freeware sample libraries: Electric Keys, Greenhead Chimes, Gentle Winds, Festive Bells, Textural Violin and last month’s Toy Piano instrument.
Blueprint Gentle Strings presents a small chamber-sized string ensemble featuring a muted sustain (con sordino) articulated patch. It has a variety of sound design modules, audio shaping parameters, expressive dynamic controls and more.
3 Dynamically Controlled Microphone Signals
If you follow the blog, back in February I got to cover ProjectSAM’s free Lineage Percussion Kit – a Native Instruments Kontakt Player library which is also part of another dedicated, ongoing series – known as The Free Orchestra.
While reviewing it, one of the more interesting features that caught my eye almost instantly was this unique mic-processing mechanism they incorporated in it – called XY Stage.
Broadly explained, the idea of XY Stage and similar functioning features is to provide a sort of an alternative, more advanced way or a more smart/efficient way to handle different microphone outputs simultaneously. Instead of the classic, old, orthodox approach in which a producer would go and manually adjust every signal’s volume, what ProjectSAM did is they basically simplified the process by giving the music producer a multi-dimensional, dynamic virtual stage – and the ability to mix and balance the multiple mic signals at once, all by moving just a single control.
In the case of Blueprint Gentle Strings, you can actually see in real time how each signal – whether it’s the Close, Mid and/or the Far microphone(s) – is being used, as every single gain level changes accordingly with the intended, set spatial position. The feature has a distance range that is between Close and Far – and the idea is to use the two polar edges (and the space between them) to determine how the sound will be perceived by the listener.
Differing from the standard Dynamics control that will add depth by crossfading two (or more) evolved sounds, the Perspective dedicated slider control in Gentle Strings (which can be MIDI mapped and can be automated, by the way) gives one the option to apply a bit more sophisticated, more psychoacoustic and possibly more aurally intriguing stereo imaging than usual. If used right, it can act as another flexible dynamic parameter.
(Note to the developers: It would be more handy to be able to individually pan each signal in the manual setup/standard mic configuration)
Other Features
Atmosphere, a recurring motif in the Fracture Sounds free series, seems to add a synthetic, generative higher octave – not just an harmonic 12-semitone interval, but one that also involves some effect-based manipulations like delays and other ambient related sound design modifications and applications.
Colour, another incorporated feature, is effectively a single-knob equalizer/frequency filter that works both ways. By turning it to the left, it will reduce the resonance amplitudes and the high frequencies in the spectrum, and by turning it to the right it will soften the lows and make the highs more pronounced.
(Tip: You can MIDI CC map both the Dynamics and the Colour parameters to your keyboard controller mod wheel for a more expressive and cohesive sound, as showcased in my YouTube demo)
Additional parameters – such as Attack & Release envelopes, Tightness (sample offset) and Dynamic Range (compressor/expander) – can all be accessed by clicking the relevant cog icons next to each module as well as the ones which are on the left side of the GUI.
Download
As per usual, to get Gentle Strings or any other previously released free Blueprint Kontakt instrument it is required to sign up on the Fracture Sounds website. If you are already registered and subscribed to the developers’ newsletter, then check out your mailbox for download instructions.
Blueprint Gentle Strings, as a free Kontakt Player 7 instrument, is compatible with 64-bit Windows and macOS machines. Supported formats are stand-alone as well as VST (VST3), AU, AAX and NKS.
