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Sunset Strings - A Truly Unique Approach to String Libraries

szurcio said:
It would be great to have a similar library but focusing on first chair/solo strings that could blend well with Sunset Strings - any plans for that?
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That would be cool, but solo strings is a whole different animal, and I'm not sure I want to go down that path.

The problem with Realitone is that although I'm trying to treat it more like a business, it's still fundamentally a hobby. Composing and records already paid off the house and this studio, and my son finished college (and got a job!), so I don't have to stress out over how financially successful Realitone is.

This is why our instruments are so varied and each release seems to be out of left field, because what I like most about doing this is coming up with an idea and seeing if I can make it work. Realivox Blue was a challenge to see how believable I can make a wordbuilder. RealiBanjo was about making a pattern player that could follow whatever chords you play, and then Fingerpick was an advancement on the technique. Hip Hop Creator was my attempt at AI.

Solo strings would be a great thing to have in our catalog, but that would be a lot of work, not to mention high risk, depending on whether people like the timbre of whoever I hire to do the playing. And more to the point I'm making here, not so interesting on the coding side of things. (Maybe if I animated a hillbilly in a tux, but I'm not so sure people would appreciate the humor. :grin: )

I did come up with a phase alignment technique and wrote a Python app that is working well (at least in the preliminary stages) for our next Realivox solo singer. (With phase aligned samples, you can seamlessly transition between articulations. I can make a singer go from oo to ee to ah with the mod wheel with no phase issues. It's pretty cool!) It might be tempting to see if that ports well to solo orchestral instruments, but I have my doubts on that, because solo strings rely so heavily on vibrato or other techniques that don't lend themselves to phase alignment.
 
Mike Greene said:
Solo strings would be a great thing to have in our catalog, but that would be a lot of work, not to mention high risk, depending on whether people like the timbre of whoever I hire to do the playing. And more to the point I'm making here, not so interesting on the coding side of things.
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How about a collab with @Ben Osterhouse ? A talented strings player and coder indeed
 
Would like to hear more demos (or basically, just ready tracks) of Sunset Strings, theres only 2 tracks on the home page. In this 18 pages thread, same 2 tracks, and 1 other short + a review or two. Maybe more people (like me) are "on the edge of the will to resist" but a lack of demos is still having us resisting to buy it. Lets say like this, planning to buy this at some point, but still curious.

I want this library for its potential for sublime chaos in compositions. Rather than have to pitch shift myself. Will get it for Christmas, but the will may break earlier, with a few more demos.
 
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We have more demos, but I haven't gotten around to posting them. SoundCloud is kind of a PIA for me. I don't use it enough to remember all the things I need to do when I upload demos. I agree, though, that I do need to do that.

I'm kinda leaning away from audio demos lately, though, since the walkthroughs give more accurate demonstrations of what the instruments sound like and what they can do. A demo is a sexy car commercial with cool camera angles on a beautiful road through the redwoods or the central coast. A walkthrough is riding with you buddy as he drives the car to the grocery store.

Especially with Sunset Strings, where it doesn't lend itself to traditional composition needs. You can create a very pretty bed using just the Sul Tasto sustains, of course, but it wouldn't be compositionally impressive, so demo composers never go that way. And the lack of a straight Sul Tasto demo is not something I'm overly concerned about, since you already can hear the timbre (without processing, which is another demo danger) in the walkthrough.

All that, combined with the 30 day refund policy, has made it so I haven't put as much priority on demos. I don't disagree that maybe I should, but I've got a long list here. :grin:
 
Agree with @Mike Greene here. Sunset Strings doesn't lend itself well to traditional demos. I use the library frequently, but rarely in a featured role, or even in a way that is easy to excerpt. But it is so useful for creating textures or adding movement and splashes of textural color.
 
Counter point: I love Sunset for, sure, the occasional extra-sparkly texture, but also very much as it's own sonic topos. Which I've been having great fun exploring. But more demos would also be welcome.

In some sense it's a victim of it's own brilliance. When I first heard David (breathtaking) demo, I was surprises that it uses all those swoopy articulations. And this is all very cool, and a very hollywood sound. And not at all something I'd imagined in library, nor something I'll ever use this library for (I'll probably never use any of the swoops). It's a whole dimension of the library that, oh, is maybe kind of obvious in retrospect but that I'd missed entirely for focusing on other dimension.

I mean it kind of says "hollywood" on the box, so maybe it's kind of surprising how surprised I was at just how hollywood it could sound in that hands of someone from Hollwood. But I was so enamoured with it's other potentialities that I guess it just never occurred to my that it would probably be able to sound kind of hollywood too.

So I don't think it's about having a pedestrian sul tasto demo. But there's a lot of "ode to a glacier'-esque topos here also, which isn't very hollywood at all.

But it isn't necessarily very Scandi noir either, in that the sound is very, very different. I guess more "hollywood", you could say. But a more helpful way to put it is to say that it hits a real sweet spot of all the texture of Scandi noir, but with it's own quality of ... clarity ... or something. Not necessarily a sound meant for moping about solving crime on a Sweedish Glacier. But a sound that can certainly sound great and bring whole new emotional textures to anyone who does happen to be moping about and/or solving crime on a sweedish glacier, if that's your thing.

Not that I'm any more interesting, in my own writing, in the Scandi-crime-drama-noir sound any more than the high-Hollywood elegance" sound (my latest composition, for which I've been experimenting with both Sunset and some of the conventional Scandi-noir libs, involves a (magic) cow named Penelope, who's not at all interesting is solving crime, Scandinavian or otherwise, nor is she the type of (magic) cow partial to High-Hollywood elegance ).

But my point here is that there's so much going within the musical possibilities of these supposedly "texture" libraries, so much still largely uncharted expressive space that goes entirely, entirely beyond that disproportionally represented (but still beautiful) ambient mush that an averagely talented cat could make just walking across a keyboard with any random patch from Sunset to Tundra or OACE selected, or the breathtaking high Hollywood Hollywood elegance of the official Sunset demos (each of which would require and *extremely* talented cat to pull off) or the "This glacier is a metaphor for the inter torment of man's existential dilemma" implicit in the Scandi noir marketing of certain other libraries, that ... well, I guess all I'm saying is that more demos would be great!
 
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ism said:
So I don't think it's about having a pedestrian sul tasto demo. But there's a lot of "ode to a glacier'-esque topos here also, which isn't very hollywood at all.


But my point here is that there's so much going within the musical possibilities of these supposedly "texture" libraries, so much still largely uncharted expressive space that goes entirely, entirely beyond that disproportionally represented (but still beautiful) ambient mush that an averagely talented cat could make just walking across a keyboard with any random patch from Sunset to Tundra or OACE selected, or the breathtaking high Hollywood Hollywood elegance of the official Sunset demos (each of which would require and *extremely* talented cat to pull off) or the "This glacier is a metaphor for the inter torment of man's existential dilemma" implicit in the Scandi noir marketing of certain other libraries, that ... well, I guess all I'm saying is that more demos would be great!
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Thats right - the Sul Tasto has no interest. Even if its the best Sul Tasto made, even hearing the word is irritating (after Spitfire destroyed the word - heh, TIC). Im curious if it can be used to create stuff beyond nice textures, bcs it appears to have this potential. Not only about shifting pitches, but maybe throwing a discord plugin on the changing string sound. Or something. Anyways, ... the decision is already done, ie to buy it, question is only when.
 
Just cataloguing some experiments of Sunset Strings (in advance of actually doing some writing).

And I though that maybe this very simple, almost accidental, noodle (with some semi-random Midnight piano notes plonked in for context - not a composition, literally a single take for the strings and another for the piano) might be worth sharing:





The discovery here being very specifically that the sheer sonority of the flautando with, very specifically, the short crescendo and long decrescendo is to die for. A thing of unique and powerful beauty in the sample library world in and of itself.

Edit - ignore that little bit of Vista mocking up King Kong at the end (the overlap was off screen in Logic when I rendered!)
 
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I bought Sunset Strings recently and enjoyed it a lot. Been able to paint articulations not possible with other string libraries.

This may sound annoying, but being a fan of those pitch bends, I hope theres some (pay) update in some distant future, where the pitch bend focus is take further. Not as attack or release, but the main articulation, like in arabic strings. And then theres half up and whole up, but it could be taken to 1.5 up and 2 up.

Anyway, I can see how much hard work must have gone into this, so a well deserved break must be deserved. Hope this didnt sound annoying, just a fan of the pitch bends on strings.

Great library!

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Edit, like in this Bond theme at 1.35. Strings main articulation down, without. sounding too arabic.

 
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ism said:
Just cataloguing some experiments of Sunset Strings (in advance of actually doing some writing).

And I though that maybe this very simple, almost accidental, noodle (with some semi-random Midnight piano notes plonked in for context - not a composition, literally a single take for the strings and another for the piano) might be worth sharing:





The discovery here being very specifically that the sheer sonority of the flautando with, very specifically, the short crescendo and long decrescendo is to die for. A thing of unique and powerful beauty in the sample library world in and of itself.

Edit - ignore that little bit of Vista mocking up King Kong at the end (the overlap was off screen in Logic when I rendered!)
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New noodle, this time experimenting with three Sunset Strings tracks, with long/med, short/med and short/long crescendo/decrescendos (plus a little bit of textural cross fade, but trying to reign it in for subtly ...

 
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This is getting to be a long list, but from the above noodle, add to my very favorite things about sunset Strings:

- the random harmonics when you only use them on a pedal note, and you use them subtly enough that they almost aren't perceptible as random harmonics, but rather, almost a kind of textural shimmery quality.

- A low C played on the Celli with the medium decrescendo at the end of a track. Just the sheer visceral sonority of it.

- how well they blend with Tallin, Genesis, Vista, EWC (so far)
 
ism said:
I'm not sure if you're referring here to Sunset Strings vol. 2, or Sunset Woodwinds ... but I feel the same way.
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I was refering to you to please give us more Sunset Strings 'noodles'! And thank you very much, that was wonderful :)
 
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