🖥System : KONTAKT 6 or KONTAKT 6 PLAYER
📥Size : 21GB ( KONTAKT )
NI’s new instrument makes owning and playing a Stradivarius easier than ever before!
Playable, expressive solo violins are one of the holy grails of the sampling world. It’s a similar problem to producing a convincing solo sax or electric guitar: how the heck to cover the sheer range of articulation and tone colours a good player continually utilises, along with the subtle but crucial transitions between the notes. And then to make it all available in a DAW, most likely driven from a standard MIDI master keyboard.
Stradivari Violin is Native Instruments’ response to the challenge, developed in conjunction with Hamburg‑based e‑instruments. They’ve recorded a single violin, the silvery‑sounding 1727 ‘Vesuvius’ made towards the end of Stradivari’s life, which is currently in the collection of the Museo del Violino in Cremona, Italy. The capture took place in the auditorium there, apparently involving no fewer than 32 microphones, multiple virtuosi sharing the playing duties, and security guards manning the exits (I’m not kidding).
It’s worth noting too that Stradivari Violin is also a component of a larger library, Cremona Quartet, that adds a Guarneri violin, an Amati viola and a Stradivari cello, all enjoying most of the same sampling features. The entire quartet library is twice the cost of the solo violin reviewed here, and there’s an upgrade path for violin owners who’d like to explore some four‑way action later on down the line.
Tuning Up
First, a quick rundown of the basics. Stradivari Violin runs in NI’s Kontakt or the free Kontakt Player, on version 6.2.2 or higher. It’s a 23.5GB download (equating to about 39GB of uncompressed sample content) that gives you two NKI patches: a 17GB multi‑mic version (occupying towards 4GB of RAM, with typical disk streaming settings), and a resource‑saving fixed‑mix alternative using 6GB of samples and just over 1GB of RAM.
NKS controller integration extends to the usual coloured keyrange prompts and various control mappings, but the library works well with standard five‑octave MIDI controllers too. Either way, all the important parameters have MIDI CCs ready‑mapped, with straightforward facilities to both learn new CC mappings and also to reconfigure the keys used for selecting different articulations. I found all aspects of presentation, technically speaking, to be completely intuitive and helpful: unlike a real violin there’s a very shallow learning curve.
First Position
Putting Stradivari Violin to use immediately reveals that NI’s approach has not been to reinvent the wheel, but — like so many premium‑quality libraries these days — just to make a very fully-featured wheel.
If the automatic, adaptive Virtuoso mode doesn’t give you what you need then 20 separate articulations are on hand to fulfil almost all musical requirements.
If the automatic, adaptive Virtuoso mode doesn’t give you what you need then 20 separate articulations are on hand to fulfil almost all musical requirements.
There are no less than 20 articulations on offer, all covering a G2 to F6 pitch range, beginning with a broad range of long and short bow strokes that will probably see the most use, for many projects. These are supplemented with a fine pizzicato, tremolos and trills (with variable speed), combination/repetition strokes (again variable in speed, and tempo‑sync’able), along with some nice and occasionally ghostly Special effects including Col Legno, where the wood of the bow makes contact with the string, rather than the hair. The interface lets you load any combination of eight of these articulations at a time, and a Con Sordino (bridge mute) option can be enabled per‑articulation rather than globally. The mute effect is applied using a DSP filter rather than by accessing alternative sample sets, and although subtle (compared to some violinists’ mutes I’ve heard over the years, when they’ve remembered to bring them on stage...) it’s plausible enough.
It’s possible that some users may never get round to exploring all the articulations, though, because by default both NKIs load up using an adaptive articulation scheme called Virtuoso. This selects either a sustain or marcato bow stroke depending on key velocity, while a push or pull of your pitch‑bend wheel immediately accesses the short, agile spiccatissimo and staccato. That’s not all: legato pitch transitions change with velocity, with a more impassioned portamento swooping in (by default) when you play harder. And the volume of the whole lot of it is subject to the position of your mod wheel.
An awful lot can be achieved with Virtuoso which, if you don’t require any really unusual techniques, and for a lot of ‘normal’ musical material, can sound realistic and expressively to the point where I think the vast majority of listeners would think they were hearing a real violinist. This is quite an achievement, already. The basic tone of the ‘Vesuvius’ and character of the playing is extremely likeable: it’s light, bright, airy, somewhat genteel and has a nice acoustic ‘bloom’ to it, and plenty of naturalistic movement and tone development through the
KONTAKT PLAYER 6 COMPATIBLE
This is a Kontakt Player instrument. This means that you do not need to own the full version of NI Kontakt to use it. It will run as a plug-in instrument in any VST/AU/RTAS/AAX/WASAPI,compatible host program or DAW eg: Cubase, Logic, Ableton Live, DP, Reaper, Pro-Tools. No extra purchase necessary.
Requires KONTAKT 6 or KONTAKT 6 PLAYER version 6.6 or later
File Size 23GB