Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
With Rosette Mandolin, Impact Soundworks have brought a touch of American folk music to their Rosette engine. Compatible with the free Kontakt Player, the sound of the library is very pleasing. While it doesn’t offer multiple mic options, it is recorded in a neutral context and could easily fit into different mixes. The articulation range is solid, the pitched and unpitched releases and choke options are welcome and the legatos are well done. The harmonics are also very pleasing. I would have liked to have seen more tremolo options (particularly an unmeasured tremolo), though the tremolo provided sounds good and can be sync’ed to tempo (it is recorded at about 150bpm, so you just have to be careful how you use this as at extremes the time stretching is evident). The articulations page allows for quick customisation; I initially found the sound of the release samples a little too loud, but could easily nudge this back a little.
Each pair of strings has been recorded from the open position all the way up the neck, with upstrokes and downstrokes, and these samples can be triggered in a variety of ways. Being a polyphonic string instrument, the library takes a little more learning than, for example, a piano library, but Rosette Mandolin offers considerable playability and customisation options. The Performance Style presets do a good job of ‘mandolin‑ifying’ a keyboard player’s input. Selecting between the different neck positions using the Performance Style presets (or for more precision, the Hand Position knob) not only intelligently selects the way of playing particular notes (ie. which string), but the display helps to guide the user’s decisions, and the more I used the library the more I felt I was learning how to write idiomatically for the instrument. The workstation mode is brilliant for cheating something that sounds like a mandolin, but doesn’t conform to the instrument’s restrictions. This is likely the best place to start for keyboard players. The multitracking functionality creates a successful illusion of multiple mandolins playing together.
The strumming functionality works well. The library uses high range keys (unused by the samples) to trigger full and partial up and downstrokes. Varying the Strum Speed, Strum Volume and Strum Distance controls allow for more realistic programming (I found these parameters easier to control once mapped to a CC controller, which the library allows for).
There are a couple of odd quirks; the partial strums are silent at a low strum distance level, and releasing the sustain pedal creates an odd noise artefact. Impact Soundworks are looking at these, so hopefully these issues can be fixed in a future update.
Rosette Mandolin provides a good sound that could have many applications...
Rosette Mandolin provides a good sound that could have many applications, with versatile input options that cater to writing realistic mandolin lines, impossible 5+ note chords and everything in between.
$129
$129