Phoenix Scream

[Phoenix Scream].

——Chinese Suona Virtual Instruments.

Suona is the Chinese variant of Surnay that originates from central Asia. It has a characteristic reed made of bulrush trunk, resulting in its featured metallic sound rich in high-frequency. Suona is highly expressive, especially for extreme delight or grief-stricken emotions. Thus, it is commonly used in both weddings and burials in Chinese tradition. Nowadays, it appears in maestoso or heroic topics in contemporary works more often. Also, Suona's expressiveness is reflected in its reproduction ability. It can mimic real-world sound with highly flexible performances, such as birds sing, monkey cry, and frog croak, and these are all included in our virtual instrument.

To ease creating harmonic parts, we make two virtual instruments for Suona: Phoenix Scream with the most commonly-used pitch range, and Phoenix Growl that is a bass. Phoenix Growl is gifted to you when you purchase Phoenix Scream.

Samples: 3617.

Samples parameter: 44100 Hz / 24-bit.

Sample size: 5.2GB:

• Adjustable Sound Field.

When samples were recorded, 5 different microphones were used with different positions to capture the spatial and reverb characteristics of Suona. All these channels were mixed down to four channels: Yin, Yang and far stereo. The volumes of these four channels were adjustable in software, making it possible to obtain most various tone:

• Performances.

By controlling airflow and finger, Suona has a very rich set of performances such as mordent, finger pole popping, trill, flutter, vibrato, staccato and gliss. All these performances can be triggered in Phoenix Scream software, making it most adjustable Suona virtual instrument:

• Realistic Expressions.

Phoenix Scream has real-recorded expressions that are freely controllable. With the control of MIDI CC, it can express tone changes like a real Suona performance:

• Gliss.

With three different speeds of real-recorded gliss samples and sample synthesis technique, Phoenix Scream can perform gliss at freely adjustable speed:

• Self-developed Vibrato Engine.

Real-sample-based LFO engine making Phoenix Scream performs vibrato that is both realistic and adjustable:

• Sampling Engine.

Self-developed sampling engine with better sound quality, more powerful disk buffer streaming/sampling compression technology, and brand-new sound fusion technology:

• Legato.

We recorded the sound between legato notes in three speeds, and apply them according to playing speed in software. In addition, we recorded "popping legato" and "flutter legato" that are specific in Chinese Suona:

• Self-developed spectrum fusion legato technology.

Real-recorded legato samples can enhance the realism of legato instruments, but the conjugate part by naive cross-fade algorithm of two samples would induce phase-cancellation problems. In order to better cohesive legato performance, we developed the "spectrum fusion legato" technology. When necessary, frequency domain fusion is used instead of time domain cross-fade to create transition part between samples, which improves the smoothness of the connection:

• Abundant sound effects.

We summarized and screened 29 techniques of Suona, including traditional performance techniques, film and television soundtracks, and special techniques commonly used in Chinese ancient style songs, just to preserve the natural talent of Suona to the greatest extent:

• Convolution reverb.

At the beginning of Chinese Traditional series development, we started to record the convolution reverb samples from spectacular places, famous natural and historical heritages in China. Thus you can simulate Phoenix Scream being played at the Great Wall or Terracotta Army site:

• Effect Rack.

From the Heavier7Strings' effect rack: Compressor, EQ, Chorus and Ping-Pong delay are included, allowing to create more flexible sounds:

• Pattern Library.

Complete pattern library, allowing to your works and ideas easily, with rich preset of patterns that can be updated in the future. And you could create your own pattern by dragging MIDI clips inside.