I have on my bookshelf a copy of Slonimsky’s Thesaurus Of Scales & Melodic Patterns. It’s great read for anyone with an enquiring musical mind — by applying pure musical logic and avoiding the usual clichés of classical and jazz harmony, the author creates a huge number of interesting melodic shapes that constitute a great resource for any composer seeking fresh avenues. The book also poses several musical brain‑teasers, such as: what interval do you get when you divide five octaves into 12 equal steps? (Answer at end of article.)
While this sort of thing is of interest to students of music theory, Orchestral Tools’ new sample library, Orchestral String Runs, is likely to be of far more practical use to media composers and orchestral mock‑up artists trying to earn a crust. Building on the established orchestral library tradition of providing played octave runs in different scales and keys, OSR also contains a set of melodic modules allowing you to create your own string runs and figures in real time.
The library is the brainchild of German composer Hendrik Schwarzer, a precocious young fellow who wrote his first full‑scale orchestra and choir piece at the age of 16. Feeling that the string runs in existing orchestral libraries lacked flexibility, Mr Schwarzer and his business partner had a word with the bank manager, booked 50 string players from the Belarus Philharmonic (with whom Schwarzer had previous positive dealings), flew to the former Soviet city of Minsk and spent three days recording a large collection of runs, figures, mini‑phrases, straight notes and legato intervals.
Size‑wise, the Belarus string orchestra comprises a very respectable 14 first violins, 12 second violins, 10 violas, eight cellos and six basses, a much larger group than you’ll find on most pop tracks, but falling a little short of the section numbers used in blockbuster movie scores. Around 25,500 samples were captured from three mic positions in Minsk’s National Broadcast Centre scoring stage, creating a 6.68GB sample database; an imminent update (free to registered users) more than doubles that figure. Although unavailable at the time of writing, this major expansion should be available by the time you read this.
OSR (sold only as a download) is formatted for Kontakt 4.2 and also runs on the free Kontakt Player 4.2, which can be downloaded from Native Instruments’ web site. The sample data is presented as 10 compressed .RAR files of roughly 700MB in size; having downloaded them to your hard drive (which takes a while), you extract the contents of the first file and the other nine will automatically follow suit. Bear in mind that you obviously can’t return the samples after you’ve bought them, so to avoid any misconceptions, check out the online demos at Orchestral Tools’ site before buying.
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