The Fracture Sounds Blueprint series continues – and the 8th free VST instrument has been revealed. After April’s release of Gentle Strings, the follow-up library is yet another string-based Kontakt Player instrument, named Short Strings.
Short Strings: Crisp sounding staccatos
The sound of Blueprint Short Strings is very much on the dry side. It has this very bright, “in your face” staccato sound to it – so for those of you looking for some short articulated strings that will cut through a mix nicely, it’s already seems like one of the better free choices out there.
As far as the technical aspects, Fracture Sounds provide you with four-and-a-half playable octaves which are accompanied by 3 Round Robin sample variations and a single dynamic layer that is velocity sensitive. This, on its own, seems sufficient enough and covers most of your day-to-day production needs.
But there are also a bunch of mic signals that you can tweak. The Close microphone which is obviously very sharp sounding, and also this more balanced Mid signal that sounds good even when isolated from the others (this applies to all of the signals really). The Far signal, which is the third and last mic position available, is of course your most wet and reverberated setting – but it’s only relative, as the natural reverb captured is not as big and spacious as that of a full-on concert hall for example.
Similar to the previous Blueprint Gentle Strings, aside from the manual setting of the different mics there is also this more advanced and dynamic mic processing functionality (“Perspective”) that you can manipulate by adjusting the horizontal slider control on the bottom right corner.
How versatile is Blueprint Short Strings?
Despite a dry and crisp sound characteristic, this modest chamber-sized string ensemble which consists of violins, violas and cellos can actually output as quite intimate and warm. Using the low-pass qualities of the Colour filter parameter in conjunction with the farther placed microphones can bring you to a much milder sounding string patch.
Overall, I tend to consider this Short Strings Blueprint VST library as a decently flexible string section, and that is mainly thanks to the three microphone perspectives they provide you with and the dedicated feature that’s provided along with it. The extra mics and especially the Perspective feature all give a sense of dynamic versatility and aural depth and these effectively allow for much extensively broader tonal options.
According to Fracture Sounds, Blueprint Short Strings was created as a continuation to the previous string library (Gentle Strings) and it serves as a complementary resource to the long-articulated edition.
Feature-wise, the Colour module is provided with an additional Stereo Width functionality, a Release envelope and also reverb. There are some hidden features as well which can be accessed through these left-positioned cog icons – such as a Sample Start function and Velocity Response (dynamic compressor).
Blueprint Short Strings is available as a free Native Instruments Kontakt Player 7 library. The Kontakt sampler player is supported in 64-bit Windows and macOS operating systems. Available PC and DAW compatible formats are stand-alone, VST (VST3), AU, AAX and also NKS. Library activation is done via Native Access. Please refer to the developer’s website for additional information and download instructions.
