Product Review - Native Instruments Session Horns
Article Preview :: Virtual Brass Instrument
Reviews : Sample / Sound / Song Library
NI’s Session Horns forsakes the cinematic to focus on a real-world brass section that’s well suited to pop and rock music.
If you need to virtually recreate large-scale orchestral and cinematic brass, you can pretty much pick and choose from a variety of sample libraries. Less well catered for, however, are small-scale brass ensembles suitable for pop and rock applications, where tight, finger-snapping cool and funkiness are more in keeping than Wagnerian bombast. Session Horns (SH), the third of Native Instruments’ Kontakt library collaborations with Hamburg company e-instruments (their first two being Session Strings and its larger Pro sibling) aims to fit that niche. It’s a 4.88GB library based around a four-piece brass section comprising a trombone, a tenor saxophone and two trumpets, the sort of line-up typically used in soul, funk, reggae, Latin and many other modern pop styles.
Sound-wise, if you’re after a tight, bright, controlled brass section, SH’s core samples provide the ideal raw material. Although recorded very dry, the sound is not entirely anechoic; there’s just enough subtle room reflection to give a sense of the recording space. The overall tone is bright and zippy, suggesting close miking with an AKG 414 or something similar, although the mics used are not listed. Most of the high-frequency ‘zip’ comes from the trumpets and trombone, while the tenor sax provides an element of warmth. As you’d expect from NI, the 44.1kHz, 24-bit samples are very clean and well recorded.
Brass Onesie
The Performance Patch main tab, showing the Animator’s control panel. Section Setup, velocity switched articulation, Voicing Assistant modes and Octave Drop options are all selected from here.
Rather than providing each section instrument as separate NKI (Native Kontakt Instrument) patches, the SH patch library consists of just two Kontakt NKIs: Performance and Single Articulation. The Performance patch is the most memory intensive, with all articulations for all four instruments loaded into this single patch. It’s up to the user to select which instruments will sound, and how the notes played are distributed amongst them. To this end, SH features a number of playing modes and arrangement tools for achieving this in a live performance. The majority of performance options are found on the Main screen tab, so we’ll begin our tour here.
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Fri 24 May 2013
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985