Findasound has released Petra Strings Legato for Native instruments' Kontakt.
Petra Strings Legato is an Arabic - middle eastern strings section. This unique library is designed to suit both studio and live performance musicians who are looking for realistic legato section. With random round robin option for both sustains and legato groups the player can achieve sounds as realistic as possible.
One of the characteristics of Arabic strings is the delay between sounds, in studio environment that can be achieved with delaying notes on the piano roll for example, while in real time live performance it is hard to achieve and that is why an option for random delay time is provided, it basically delays the attack groups randomly starting from 1 and ending with 3.5 millisecond which will result in natural time difference between sections in real time. This option can be enabled or disabled for all sections, once disabled; delay knobs for all section will be set to off and can be adjusted manually for each if needed. The natural detune between sections is preserved to give that taste of middle eastern section.
The sections sampled are C-basses, Cellos 1, Cellos 2, violins 1, and violins 2 where violins sections includes violas with respect to each instrument key range. Cellos sections first octave only are copied to widen the section key range and that is ascribed to the fact that this is how Arabic cellos are played, according to Dr Raid Marji who supervised the production of this library. Articulations (Key switches) included are: Normal, Tremolo, Trills Half "looped", Trills Whole "looped", Trills Half Short, Trills Whole Short, and Pizzicato.
The library is designed to play both mono and poly yet for more flexibility. There is a button to enable/disable legato. Each section has its own separate volume, pan, and EQ controllers with MIDI automation capability; just right click on any knob or button on the interface and use MIDI learn option to control it via midi. Round robins for attack groups or staccato will play bows "down - up - down - up" by default, an option to randomize bowing for each section separately is added. Transpose of each section is added as well, whether is octave or semi each section can be transposed separately without affecting the other or the legato playing or even the quarter tone. The quarter tone option has tuning amount knob where user can adjust tuning for the selected note "+50 -50" cents.
Portamento is achieved through velocity and touch of the player where very low velocities will play glissando and mid velocities will play slower portamento and high velocities will play faster - to almost no portamento; besides all that one touch portamento settings a knob to select total portamento speed / time is added to provide 10 global portamento speed 4 slow, 4 fast and 2 mid, setting speed knob to zero will turn off portamento. Release and attack samples volume can be controlled through their knobs. Reverb with real room impulses is added as well and can be turned on / off. Presets can be saved and recalled via snapshots within Kontakt 5.4 which is a great feature that will allow users to save their own presets "snapshots" and recall them. The library interface is not limited for snapshot, meaning any knob or controller on the interface can be saved and recalled with snapshots like tuning for example. Sections can be turned on / off and that is very useful for making multis, for example user can make a multi that consists of C-basses on channel 1 and cellos on channel 2 and so on.
Features:
- 24-bit / 48kHz mono compressed ncw Kontakt format.
- 7 Articulations: normal, Tremolo, Trills H, Trills W, Trills H Short, Trills W Short, and Pizzicato.
- Section on/off option with separate volume, pan, and EQ control.
- Release, Attack samples volume control.
- Legato on/off trigger option.
- Separate transpose of each section (Semi, Octave).
- Quarter tone scale with tune amount control +- 50 cents.
- Reverb room simulation effects with 40 reverb presets.
- Fully automated controllers.
- Random bowing and random RR option.
- Random attack delay time option.
- Separate delay time option for each section.
- Global portamento speed controller with 10 speeds.
​Price: $169.
Other Related News