Over the weekend, Fracture Sounds have released the fifth instrument in their free Kontakt Player series, Blueprint.
The latest VST plugin giveaway is a 4-articulation-based solo violin patch, that has a variety of effects and playing techniques to offer – from “freestyle” tremolo and unique sounding shorts, to emotive and dynamically expressive modes like evolving string risers and bowed string bends.
Blueprint Presents: Cinematic Violin Textures
Blueprint Textural Violin is a texture-based sample library that serves as a soundscape generator (or a soundscape creator assistant, if you will), aimed at cinematic type of works and ambient music genres.
It offers exactly four modes and articulations, which are as follows:
- Free Trem – dynamic-tempo based tremolo effect that starts off slow and builds up relatively faster as the sound progresses
- Col Legno (aka Col Legno Battuto in symphonic notation terms) – percussive string shorts similar to pizzicato, only that instead of the strings being plucked with the violinist’s fingertip, they are struck with the other side of the bow (the wood part of the haired stick)
- Spikes – a “riser” type of mode featuring random, short string strikes
- Bends – bowed string pitch bends, stretched about a quarter of a note upwards (in a slow, repeating loop)
All of the presets that this free Kontakt instrument provides are usable and of good quality. However, despite having a positive opinion and a more-than-decent experience with it overall, this is also the place to admit I didn’t quite like the higher end of the instrument as much as I wanted to.
There seems to be a significant difference (quality wise) between the lower notes and the higher range notes. While the left side of the virtual keyboard is able to provide quality-satisfying sounds, the right side, or the top octave of this violin, is far too thin sounding, synthetic and not much realistic. A reasonable explanation for that is that the higher notes appear to utilize the same set of samples from the lower/mid register of the instrument – and unfortunately, it shows.
It’s one of those cases where I’d rather get a tonal-range-limited instrument than an artificially stretched one that is not aurally convincing in certain parts of it, to say the least.
Ethereal Ambience
Now, the Atmosphere layer – or the supporting ambient layer – is very nicely put together. It has this genuinely beautiful, warm and almost mesmerizing vocal undertone to it, with this very deep and lush sounding kind of pad that I actually happen to like a lot. It blends perfectly with all of the provided articulations and you also have the option to isolate it by triggering a dedicated Solo (“S”) button.
The Scatter feature is effectively an Auto Pan parameter. When set to the maximum value, it seems to be distributing the sound unevenly in various directions rather randomly in the stereo field. The more you apply it, the more it pushes the sound to the sides rather than leaving it static in the center. It is a nice addition, but I wouldn’t use it myself as I don’t find it much necessary from a sheer sound design perspective. More relevant, usable features are the stock reverb and especially the delay * – that has a particularly cool sounding saturation module incorporated into it.
* In order to access each effect’s properties and settings, the user needs to click the relevant cog icon that’s next to it.
** There is also an isolated cog icon that is on the left side of the GUI, which opens up some additional customization options that are more global – like a Sample Start feature and velocity sensitivity.
Download
Blueprint Textural Violin is available for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt as well as the free Kontakt Player. As always, serial numbers are provided through the Fracture Sounds website (via mail) and are redeemable through Native Access. Supported formats are VST3, AU, AAX and stand-alone (for Windows/Mac 64-bit systems).
Previous editions of Blueprint include the Electric Keys e-piano, Greenhead Chimes tubular bells, Gentle Winds and the Festive Bells sample collection.
