Other renowned (though less heavily graffitied) UK studios include Trident, Olympic, Air, Brittania Row and Morgan, while over the water names such as Sun, Capitol, Chess, Muscle Shoals, Sunset Sound, Motown’s Hitsville USA and Electric Lady evoke the golden age of recording, when making an album involved rather more than downloading a few beats and vocal samples off the Internet.We can add one further iconic location to the US list: situated at 6000 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, the studio formerly known as United Western Recorders boasts a staggering tally of hits dating back to 1963, with a stellar client list including everyone from Frank Sinatra to REM. As a result, nearly half a century on there’s a roaring trade in replica street signs bearing its name, and the hapless Camden Council still have to regularly pay cleaners to remove fans’ scribble from a nearby wall. As the world and his wife knows, London’s Abbey Road Studios is famously synonymous with the Beatles’ last album. Hollywood Solo Instruments puts world-class violin, cello and harp sounds at your fingertips.Some buildings are steeped in musical history.
East West Quantum Leap Movie Soundtrack Production
However, subscribers to EastWest’s ComposerCloud service (which offers access to the company’s entire catalogue of 10,000 virtual instruments) can download them separately. The library works exclusively with EastWest’s proprietary Play sound engine, which runs stand-alone and as a plug-in on Mac and Windows systems.Hollywood Harp, Hollywood Solo Cello and Hollywood Solo Violin can’t be purchased outright as separate instruments: you can only buy them in Harp+Cello+Violin or Cello+Violin bundles, a tough break if you only want the harp. Like the rest of the Hollywood series, the solo instruments were recorded in EastWest Studio 1 by award-winning sound engineer Shawn Murphy, veteran of countless feature film soundtracks. At that stage the library lacked solo strings and harp, but that was recently remedied by the release of Hollywood Solo Instruments, containing harp, solo cello and solo violin. Over the next four years, the addition of brass, woodwind and orchestral percussion saw the completion of the main part of the symphonic collection. Now renamed EastWest Studios, the historic building serves as a recording location for the company’s home-grown sample libraries, as well as continuing to thrive as a facility for pop and movie soundtrack production.The jewel in EastWest Studios’ sample-library crown is Hollywood Orchestra, a four-volume, 663GB collection which made its debut in 2010 with Hollywood Strings.
Happily, the Play sound engine has large, hard-to-miss ADSR controls on its GUI for this purpose.I liked the full, mature, enveloping tone of the harp as heard in the low and middle register of ‘Pluck Long’, but felt its high B5 to G7 range was a little thin. If you prefer a more staccato delivery (perhaps for playing rhythmic figures), you can further reduce the default release time of three seconds down to one second. In order to avoid a pile-up of endlessly ringing strings, the main ‘Pluck Long’ patch uses an ADSR envelope to hasten notes’ natural fade time. Chromatically sampled at multiple dynamics over six and a half octaves from C1 to G7, this fine-sounding concert harp is presented in three folders: ‘Individual Articulations’, ‘Maestro’ (combo instruments made up of multiple articulations) and ‘FX’ (including glissandi).Unlike the piano, a harp has no damper pedal: notes ring on indefinitely until the player muffles them with his or her palm. Zing! Went the strings of my heart.” (Cue ecstatic, swooning harp glissando.) Perhaps no other orchestral instrument expresses feelings of love and blissful wellbeing better than the harp however, the instrument is capable of much more than slushy romantic outbursts, especially when used in dark, atonal music or to play bass lines.As is usual in the Hollywood series, the musician who performed the samples has not been credited, but their identify should be fairly easy to ascertain: simply attend a few orchestral recitals in the greater Los Angeles area and keep an eye open for a harpist with conspicuously red, swollen fingertips who occasionally winces and yelps with pain while performing a loud glissando, the aftermath of playing thousands of samples for this library. Hollywood HarpIn the words of the old Judy Garland song, “Something inside of me started a symphony.
Gliss LifeDo angels really play harps? Search me. This limits the bisbigliando samples’ flexibility, so I hope EastWest will get round to looping them. In a break with convention, the latter articulation’s samples are unlooped, which means the tremolo thrumming stops after five seconds or so. In a similar vein, the ‘Nail Pick’ articulation’s hard, precise attack will cut through even the densest of arrangements.Other ear-catching deliveries include flam-like double hits (which if used sparingly can add interest and expression to a harp melody), some pretty harmonics with a charming and distinctive soft attack, and a pleasant, murmuring bisbigliando tremolo style.
Music, Maestro, PleaseAs an alternative to the individual articulations, you can dial up Hollywood Harp’s Maestro patches, which combine different playing styles. Thankfully, help is at hand in the shape of the ‘Gliss Technique’ patch, which can be successfully used to manually create your own glissando sweeps.Also included in the harp ‘FX’ folder are string squeaks, scrapes and body hits, and some grinding, tambura-like buzzy bass-string noises which sound monstrous when drastically detuned. So, even bearing in mind that the major scale doubles as a relative minor and can also be used as the Lydian mode of its subdominant key (as we say in the trade), anyone seeking a specific glissando scale in a particular key is likely to be disappointed. All other above mentioned scales play in one key only.
It’s a shame Play doesn’t allow users to set their own velocity switch points.Other ‘Maestro’ patches use the mod wheel to switch between (for example) straight and tremolo notes. A nice idea, but in practice the idea fails because the harmonics only sound in the top 123-127 velocity range, which requires an excessively heavy touch. ‘Angels Harmonics’ (that word again — I can almost hear the beating of wings) also uses velocity to switch between the ‘Gliss Technique’ and harmonics performances. Though that sounds complicated, the musical effect is pleasantly natural and expressive.
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