Exactly three years ago, in April 1st 2021, Fracture Sounds presented the musician community with one of their biggest, most extensive sampling projects to date – the Emotional Recorder sample library, a work lasting more than 5 years of development.
Fast forward to 2024, and to celebrate April Fools’ Day once again, the United Kingdom-based company is now re-releasing the original Emotional Recorder library for the free Native Instruments Kontakt Player.
Emotional Recorder: The Uncrowned King of Expressive Winds
If there’s a consensus in the sampling world it is the Emotional Recorder library. A beloved deep sampled soprano recorder, this now Kontakt Player-compatible instrument is a true work of art, and an exemplary at dynamic and expressive sample library development.
With a true legato engine, natural ornaments and human-like artifacts, it makes for a “perfectly imperfect” virtual woodwind instrument that is sure to add some soulful expressiveness to almost any musical piece.
This emotional goodness comes in at only 75MB of download. It is compatible with the complete version of NI Kontakt as well as the free Kontakt Player 7 with full NKS support.
The Technical Aspects
Emotional Recorder comes as a single Kontakt patch with two-and-a-half playable octaves. The GUI is fairly minimalistic with two major dynamic parameters to highlight:
From left to right, you have the Emotion control that determines the amount of humanization and expressiveness. The higher the value is, the more it will affect the playing and the output sound, with more prominent recorder ornaments and less “clean” notes.
The second major dynamic category is labeled Breaths. Here, you basically have two modules, one for the volume of the generative human breath sounds and a second to control the probability of the breathiness.
