Spiritoso is a sampled cello instrument that offers thousands of live recorded phrases, rhythms, chords and arpeggios, and has been produced by Dan Graham, who recently brought us the superb Animato String & Flute FX.
The library actually contains 5,000 individual WAV files which have been compressed down using Kontakt 4’s lossless compression. Also included are 57 Kontakt instruments, so you’ll need the latest full version of Kontakt installed on your system to be able to use Spiritoso. You can choose separate instrument patches for arpeggios, chords, rhythms and up/down patterns in different note divisions, then have control over the chord shape using keyswitching and three levels of dynamics that are smoothly blended using the mod wheel.
On top of this, you can also mix and blend between close and room mics, and choose the ensemble size between one and 12 players using the simple custom GUI.
This all adds up to a large amount of samples loaded into memory (in some patches, up to about 800MB) and holding more than two notes can result in over 100 voices playing at once. Also, Kontakt’s Time Machine 2 algorithm is used to keep all phrases in time with your project, meaning everything must play from memory, so the developers recommend running in 64-bit mode.
We found that Spiritoso ran fine by itself, but could cause problems if used in an arrangement with other large orchestral libraries. As well as the 176 live-sounding patches, you get the same patches with a synthlike filter set to the mod wheel, and 21 highly evocative and cinematic Kontakt instruments that have been tweaked and heavily sound designed with effects.
The most useful patches however, are actually the simple rhythm and up/down phrases that would sit well underneath your main musical lines, and that can be given extra expression by automating the mod wheel dynamics. We found it a little tricky to play riffs live on the keyboard, but with a little patience and programming you can get some very good results.
Verdict: A highly flexible library of riffs that could be used to add extra realism to your main string sounds.
Rating: 8/10 and Music Tech Innovation award |
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