Rating: 4.5/5 Stars
With Soft String Soloists, Fracture Sounds provide an intimate solo violin, viola and cello recorded at Nave Studios and inspired by the Scandinavian sound.
Presented in the free Kontakt Player, the primary feature of this library is a fantastic soft legato, which includes standard and portamento transitions. Where other bright, virtuosic solo strings libraries cannot convincingly produce soft melodies, Soft String Soloists fills that gap. The sound of this articulation is gorgeous, and it is also pretty agile. There is no round‑robin legato on the transitions, however there is a very realistic round‑robin same‑note re‑bow. The ability to trigger a naturally performed slow attack/release (using a keyswitch or the pitch‑bend wheel) is welcomed.
Each instrument also comes with sustains, harmonics, gestures (beautiful ‘placed’ short notes) and swells (not tempo‑sync’ed, but lovely). These fit nicely within the style, and as with the legato, the performances, recordings and editing are of a very high quality.
The close, mid and far mic positions provide great sculpting flexibility, and can quickly be mixed using the Perspective slider. The close mic is bitey, while the far gives a nice broad sound, but not extremely reverberant.
The library comes with a host of useful features, the most fun of which is the instrument placement option. In the vein of plug‑ins like VSL’s MIR, Samplicity’s Berlin Studio and Spitfire Audio’s AIR Studios Reverb, this virtual positioning tool (based on impulse responses recorded in the same room and with the same mic positions as the samples) allows the user to place the instrument in one of 11 positions ranging from front to back and left to right. I had a lot of fun creating bands of five violinists, four violas, three cellos and so on, all seated in different layouts. The Centre Stereo option provides an additional stereo mic position to centre the instrument, and I was happy to see the other microphone options automatically purging themselves when this was enabled. The global latency control keeps latency consistent even when switching between articulations — a function I wish was present in all sample libraries.
A couple of minor nitpicks; the vibrato is not controllable, however this limitation comes with the benefit of a beautiful natural onset of vibrato (crossfading vibrato in solo libraries is difficult without phasing issues or compromising natural vibrato in favour of an LFO‑based option). The instruments don’t reach super high, but the developer explained that this is because their experimentation showed going beyond the chosen ranges did not achieve the desired soft tone.
It fills a niche very well, and is housed in an easy‑to‑use interface with great quality‑of‑life features.
Alongside being useful for media composition, Soft String Soloists could easily find its way into neoclassical and pop/folk productions. It fills a niche very well, and is housed in an easy‑to‑use interface with great quality‑of‑life features.