Sonuscore has announced the release of Sustained String Chords, a free orchestral sound library for Native Instruments Kontakt (full version required).
Sustained String Chords is the follow-up to the excellent Orchestra Chords sound library which Sonuscore released in November last year. The new release shares a similar theme with its predecessor, delivering an great sounding set of orchestral samples in a lightweight, easy to use package for NI Kontakt. Needless to say, the two libraries work very well in tandem.
See also: Free Orchestral Sample Library By Versilian Studios!The user interface could hardly be any simpler that this. It features only one knob which controls the amount of reverb that is applied on the output. The chords are triggered via MIDI notes, whereas note velocity determines whether the played chord will be major or minor. So, the A note at a low velocity will play the A minor chord, whereas the same note at a higher velocity will result in A major (UPDATE: Actually, it’s the other way around. Thanks to our reader Todd for the correction!). The note octave determines whether the chord will be played by low, mid, or high strings. The lowest octave will play all string sections at the same time. The modulation wheel controls the actual dynamics of the played chord.
Obviously, such a simple user interface is a double-edged sword. If you require any sort of advanced control over the playback, it will leave you empty-handed. On the other hand, if you just want to add some nice sounding orchestral chords to your project as quickly as possible, this is the way to go.
Unfortunately, unlike Orchestra Chords, the new Sustained String Chords library doesn’t contain uncompressed WAV samples. All sample content is provided in Kontakt’s proprietary NCW file format, meaning that you’ll need the full version of NI Kontakt 5 in order to use the library. It will only work for 15 minutes in the freeware Kontakt Player.
Sustained String Chords is available for free download via Sonuscore (296 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 NKI patch for NI Kontakt 5).
2 Comments
Todd
onI think you have the velocities reversed. The manual says low velocity will result in major chords being played and higher velocity will result in minor chords being played.
Tomislav Zlatic
onOops! Thanks for noticing. Fixed!