As some of you probably already know, last week Westwood Instruments have launched their new series of instruments, presenting the musician community with ROOTS.
According to the announcement, ROOTS is a Native Instruments Kontakt Player dedicated line of free sample libraries, and the first release is now known to be Untold Strings.
Westwood Instruments present: Deep, emotive violas
Roots Untold Strings provides a (quite) feature-heavy string based virtual instrument that relies on both acoustic recordings and digital audio manipulations.
At the core, this free Kontakt Player library utilizes viola samples taken from the Westwood Instruments commercial library Novella Origin – yet with additional sound processing and instrument optimization it is able to provide wider tonal possibilities and more flexible musical options.
The “Depth” parameter is your main control for dynamics. It is assigned to your MIDI controller’s modwheel by default and functions as a crossfade between the natural sound of the sampled violas and this alternative, deeper bass sound which is a couple of octaves below the violas’ standard tonal range.
This pitch-altered, effect-based manipulation that we hear in the higher end of the dynamics turns the viola into more of a cello – and with all of the supporting (effect-generated) harmonics and intervals it is easy to make everything sound more like an actual orchestral string ensemble that is playing in unison.
Thanks to an efficient sound processing work done on Westwood Instrument’s part, Untold Strings is able to provide the user with the power to produce very rich and harmonious sounds and textures that are far above and beyond the viola’s known capability – and to achieve very aurally convincing results quite effortlessly.
The instrument plays in this never-ending loop, so essentially you could hold a certain note and it will keep playing to infinity. I really like the fact that you can just push a key and it flows the way it does with no duration boundaries. It gives you that true sense of musical freedom and it is also very useful from a practical standpoint – like, for example, when working on compositions that require continuity such as atmospheric soundscapes for movies or video games.
Untold Strings: The Features
Roots Untold Strings has several sound design modules to offer the player with. It has a gate-sequencer (labeled “Flutter”), modulation (“Snag”), saturation (“Grit”) and “Transpitch” (MIDI transpose function).
Last but not least is “Crystal” which acts as a one-knob multi-effect parameter. It applies this long-tail type of reverb as well as some prominent sounding echoing reflections and delays, a bunch of auto-pan effects and also some bit reduction.
Download
To download ROOTS Untold Strings by Westwood Instruments, please refer to the developers’ official website. The library is compatible with the latest version of Native Instruments Kontakt 7 as well as the free edition, Kontakt Player. Supported formats are VST, VST2 and VST3, AU, AAX and NKS (Windows, macOS 64-bit). Kontakt is also available in stand-alone mode.
