Daniel James
o_0
Best solo cello out there, other than Tina Guo by Cinesamples???
-DJ
-DJ
i do not know what is "the best". for me the best sounding cello is the tina guo acoustic cello legato ...but as you know for sure, it is only very limited useable.
when i look at the market, i usually see solo cellos that are either easy to play, where you can quickly get "into the flow"...but they are not very flexible and are only suitable for a few situations (tempo, style, etc). or i see monster libraries with lots of articulations that require a lot of effort to program, so the cello sounds good in the composition (for example chris hein solo cello, nocturne cello, emotional cello ...).
i own chris hein solo cello. with the current update you get 4 different sounding cellos. the library is extremely flexible with tons of articulations and options for customizations and tweeks. chris did a very good job. theoretically everything i can wish for. but .... the operating concept deviates strongly from libraries i'm used to otherwise. it is very logical and ingenious, but difficult for me to get used to. i lose myself in programming, instead of playing.
so what is "the best"? you can play immediately out of box beautiful lines ... but only suitable for certain kind of music. or is "the best", you can almost do everything ... but you feel like a midi cc event juggler.
in addition, one must like the sound and that it must fit well into the mix. everything depends on the personal taste.
OT's Nocturne cello. Very agile legatos ( 14 types .....).
I'm waiting (and hoping) for a solo cello from Embertone of the same calibre as the Joshua Bell violin. It's always a special moment when I load that up.
I've recently decided that the low G on the Spitfire solo strings cello is absolutely my favourite sampled G, ever. Seriously, you put on the close with a bit of tree and start with a slight downward crescendo to give it a bit of attack that kind of blooms in the tree mic, let the lowest dynamic layer resonant a bit then follow with a slight crescendo, invoke the vibrato, nudge into the next dynamic layer, which gives you this incredibly satisfying crunchiness ... I could go on.
I think this may be as close to the spiritual experience of playing the cello in AIR you can get without actually playing the cello in AIR. Wow do I envy the musician who played this G.
This effect is surprising sensitive to the mix, so its taken me a while to get it. But man this is one of the truly great Gs.
I have lots of good things to say about the other notes as well, but the G is bringing me particular joy this week.
There's a series of sweet spots to this library that I would call "uncompromising sonority meets as much expressiveness as possible (without compromising the sonority)".
The above cello noodle is emblematic of this. Once you figure out how to craft the arcs (and wrangle the vibrato), there's a really lovely lyrical sweet spot - and one that absolutely hinges upon fine control over the dynamics layers and the vibrato.
For comparison, while the CSSS demos are beautiful in their own right (and reflect a sweet spot that that library was designed for) they fundamentally rely on baked in vibrato, and the dynamics are generally used at the phrase level, and not to craft arcs of individual notes in detail. So its worth contrasting the musicality of such phrases with the above noodle where the musicality is simply performed on different dimensions of dynamics and vibrato (and it's amazing to me that this can be done with only the mod wheel).
....
More impressionistically - when I play the cello with the close mics only, it almost feels like a different instrument, to the point that I feel I might compose different lines with only the close mic (+ an external reverb). There a "blooming" effect and a sense of presence or dimension ... or something ... that you get from the tree, and I that I really feel when I'm playing, on quite an emotional level when I'm trying to come up with a cello line. Probably this is heard most obviously in the little flourish-crescendos at the end of some notes. Partly this is the value of the multiple dynamic layers, a crunchiness that you need from the close mic for, but there's also something about the sound - a kind of "blooming" I've heard it called - that you would never get without the tree mic, and that isn't simply a reverb tail. To emphasize this effect I've brought the tree down to ~40%, which gives you the blooming without the reverb tail becoming overwhelming, and instead added a lot of Valhalla cathedral reverb with the early reflections turned off (I might have use the ambient mic instead, but I don't really have the system resources).
My point here is that there's something amazing in the sound, that involves whatever it is that's going on with the mics, that plays directly into the expressiveness in the way it interacts with the ability to control the dynamic layers and vibrato in the overall crafting of phrases. I don't really understand all the technical dimensional of what's going on here, except that you have these sweet spots of unparalleled sound interacting with the expressiveness of the phrases. ....
Throwing forward my own offering: https://www.waverunneraudio.com/shop/alder-cello/ (The Alder Cello), something a little different.
https://www.waverunneraudio.com/shop/alder-cello/
Also think it was the first if not only (correct me if I’m wrong) solo cello library offering the ‘seagull effect’ articulation ala George Crumb, much loved from my uni days.
We will update this library with legato one day. Spicc and Pizz to be added soon... Plus, for every sale, we plant a tree.
“The Low Tide violin and cello patches are just glorious - you could score a scene with these alone. I find myself wanting to play these patches not as a traditional stringed instrument at all and layering up loads of intervals, and the tone and expressiveness makes for a spectacular blend of real and unreal when played like that.” - Guy Rowland
I really like the Spitfire celli (Artisan/alternative) and the one in the Solo Strings. But then I have very little to compare them to.