Soaring Strings by Musical Sampling Review

Today we’ll be looking at a simple and effective string library for emotive melodies and soaring legato – Soaring Strings from Musical Sampling.

Musical Sampling is a relatively newer sample provider specializing in cinematic orchestral libraries for quick composition and a great sound out of the box, producing libraries like Adventure Brass and Trailer Strings.

Soaring Strings is focused solely on emotive legato and sustains, providing a simple and easy way to create great sounding melodies and string beds in no time. We’re given standard size Violin, Viola, Cello and Bass sections.

Installation

Installing and downloading is handled quickly via the Connect downloader, which downloads and installs the library to your folder of choice. No registration is required as it is a Kontakt full library.

Sound

Out of the box, the strings have an elegant and focused sound with a tasteful amount of vibrato, and can fit in a variety of applications – cinematic, classical, dark and romantic are genres that come to mind immediately. The strings are recorded close but have just the right amount of room and air that provides a good middle-ground between a small studio sound and a scoring studio sound.

The legatos are silky smooth, and although there’s no wide portamento on lower velocities like many other string libraries, the transitions strike a perfect balance between slurred, bowed and quick portamento when played across the range – much like real string players would perform live, varying between positions during melodies.

This makes the strings sound totally natural and life-like, and there aren’t any bumps between notes. The polyphonic sustains are also focused and are one of the better examples of great sounding, playable pad sustains in a string library, offering a mildly commanding tone and wonderful soft dynamics with a sul tasto sound. You can hear the library in action in the video below:

User interface & Usability

The library was designed to be played quickly, efficiently and smoothly, so the interface provides only what the composer needs to get the job done – a ‘to silence’ button lets the composer fade to silence with the mod wheel all the way down, or just to the softest dynamic if left off.

The real star though is the bow repetition option – when turned on, pressing the same key twice in a short amount of time activates a re-bow sample – which is something hardly any string library offers and is crucial for accented/repeated notes during melodies.

Having this function makes Soaring Strings a unique offering in terms of the kinds of melodies you can play, and it’s a great thing to have. The library is also a great portable composing tool to have on a laptop due to its simple structure and relatively small content size.

Rating:  Four out of five stars

Overall Soaring Strings is a beautifully simple and utterly effective library that deserves a solid place in your string collection because it just sounds so good straight out of the box. The price might be a little high for some, considering the library’s content, but it gives a great mileage in the long run.