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Fiddle Shootout!

bfreepro

Infinite Musical Possibilities
Fiddle Shootout 2020! Which one is your favorite?



Featuring Red Room Audio, Bolder Sounds, Insanity Samples, and Cinesamples Taylor Davis Violin as an honorable mention.

In reality, we all know there is never one library that is perfect at everything 😅...

For those who would rather read than watch:
-The most versatile is Bolder Sounds.
-For Bluegrass I feel it’s basically a draw between RRA and Bolder Sounds (one bright, one more warm) depending on preference and how much you want to spend.
-For Celtic, Red Room Audio Celtic Fiddle.
-For folk/indie and even cinematic/ambient, Insanity Samples Folk Fiddle

RRA absolutely have the best legato as well as the most articulations/content, but will take more programming.

I think Taylor Davis could pull off any of this if you already own it, but it won't really shine and you'll struggle to really nail that authentic sound. It does have a fiddle-like tone so that's why I included it (also on sale still), but I think it's best for orchestral and pop music and it starts to really fall short with certain lines in the video.
 
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Hello Brian,

Thank you for taking the time to do this thoughtful review of these libraries. I realize these take quite a bit of time to produce them and reviews such as yours are invaluable to users deciding what to put their hard earned dollars into.

I’d like to mention 2 things that come to mind that were not brought up in the review about the Bolder fiddle! library which I think are pretty important - (I’m assuming this was because of time constraints).

1. On the settings page the user can control the legato setting with Attack, Sample start and Curve. The settings we chose as a default can of course be changed by the user for a faster attack sound with legato phrasing.

2. In fiddle! V2 - 19 Ornaments in 9 Categories were added including Mordents, Trills, Hammer Ons, Pull Offs, Rolls, Waterfalls, Wiggles, Flicks and Irish Triplets.

Thanks and keep up the great job on reviewing sample libraries!
Dennis @ Bolder
 
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