The Vienna Symphonic Library has announced the release of Synchron Elite Strings, a collection of small string ensembles recorded in the large hall of Synchron Stage Vienna.
The library of six first violins, five second violins, four violas, four cellos and three basses is designed to be a versatile collection whose natural playability, vitality and flexibility lends itself well for a variety of genres.
Here's what they're saying:
For Synchron Elite Strings, the Vienna team hand-picked the best string players and the concertmaster of the Synchron Stage Orchestra, who themselves are among the best in Vienna, a city famous for its superior string players and their fine instruments. Their performances have shaped the sound of numerous scoring sessions during the last several years, and they've also honed their craft in countless sampling sessions.
As with Synchron Strings Pro, the team's main approach was to let the musicians play cleverly devised scores, very often for more than half an hour, to capture all their musicality and mastery of real-life performances as a coherent source of sampled articulations. The captured variants of expression derived from these authentic performances enable the user to seamlessly combine different playing techniques and nuances, such as various note beginnings, arcs and releases of notes, into one coherent piece of expressive music.
Synchron Elite Strings is intended for a myriad of genres and applications, from intimate to powerful expressive possibilities, from classical arrangements to film scores, and from small ensemble settings to adding depth, precision and vitality to larger string ensembles.
Synchron Elite Strings offers regular and short staccatos as well as spiccatos (very short notes sounded by throwing the bow onto the strings), in both bold and agile variants. What's more, the small string ensembles offer new variants of one-second détachés – including soft attacks leading into expressive vibrato, and normal attacks with a slight fade. The full potential of these détachés comes to fruition by combining both articulations according to the musical context. Other short playing techniques include pizzicato, snap pizzicato, and hitting the strings with the bow (col legno and battuto).
All long notes, legatos and portamentos offer three vibrato variants (regular, molto, sans), four different starts (soft, regular, fast, marcato/sfz) as well as regular and soft releases. With legatos and portamentos, the different note-start variants apply only to the first notes of the phrases, while the following notes feature a smooth legato or portamento connection.
A very special addition are the Performance Détaché articulations, a first for libraries recorded at Synchron Stage. As with legatos, intervals of up to an octave were recorded, but each target note was played with an extra bow stroke. These separate notes are still connected by the Synchron Player's algorithms, for very realistic phrases that differ from passages performed with single note détachés. What's more, tremolos, measured tremolos and trills also offer legato variants for fluid note transitions.
VSL's engineers employed nine separate phase-coherent microphone configurations to provide a broad range of room options. In addition to the mid, Decca tree and surround microphones, the first and second chair of each ensemble were mic'd separately and are available as "Solo 1" and "Solo 2" channels, respectively, in the mixer section of the Vienna Synchron Player.
The sections of six first violins, five second violins, four violas, four cellos and three double basses were recorded separately at their designated positions on stage. Pre-configured mixer presets provide a wide variety of tonal characteristics, from intimate to ambient, from lush to sparkling, from contemporary to the "golden fifties" sound. Divisi Presets focus on the solo channels of the first and second chair, with added ribbon or tube mid microphones. As with all Synchron Libraries, users can mix their string sound in stereo, 5.1 surround or even 9.1 Auro 3D, or any other immersive audio format, such as Dolby Atmos.
Pricing & Availability
Synchron Elite Strings is currently available at an introductory price of $354 (reg. $485) for the Standard Library and $588 (reg. $807) for the Full Library. The Standard Library and Full Library of Synchron Elite Strings both include the same articulations. The difference lies in the number of provided microphone positions.
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