Lyric Series String Quintet by Kirk Hunter Studios

Lyric Series String Quintet

Kirk Hunter Studios released its latest product – introducing Lyric Series String Quintet! With Lyric Series String Quintet, you can easily create musical melodies out of the box.

The main focus of the Lyric Series String Quintet is to provide musical, melody lines right out of the box. Further, it is Kirk Hunter Studios’ goal to shorten your workflow time as much as possible. It’s not a “do everything” library, but Kirk Hunter Studios feel that the attention to being able to create melodic lines makes this product a very valuable asset.

Legato Discussion – Valiant efforts have indeed been made over the years using all kinds of “legato” and “interval” tricks and whatnot. Some are very nice, but still fall short. Others do capture the right “sound”, but the resulting performance always, at least to me, sounds “clunky”, “bumpy” or only sounds good when played at certain tempos.

So in analyzing what string players do, it seems that a myriad variables came to play…so to speak. Bowing, slurring, vibrato (amount, speed and fade-in time), string crossing, left-hand-shifting, and more. With so many of these variables, it is hard to recognize a pattern so as to emulate this in a digital instrument. In fact, at this point in time, it’s impossible. However, certain occurrences take place often enough to tell the listener, “yes, I hear this as a professional stringed instrument performance.”, that one could, in essence, focus on those, and implement them judiciously. It’s like putting in a few “aha” features that make for realism.

So how has this been emulated so far? The best of them go to great lengths in using “legato” technology. That’s great, except that with string players, it’s never the same. Sometimes, there’s a string crossing, sometimes a hand shift, sometimes a bow change.. and on and on. The easy ones to mimmic are the “slurred” or “fingered” transitions. That’s because the player does not “bow” the interval, and does not shift the left hand during small intervals. So the “legato” transition is easy to capture. The trouble begins during the many transitions that happen during separate bowing or when a player shifts the left hand.

While there is no easy way to capture all of these details, the one thing that seems to be loudly apparent is the sound that happens when string players play larger intervals on the same string. (Especially cellos) It’s not really a true portamento and does not always happen. It seems to occur most when the players need to move their left hand up or down from its current position to achieve the note. Kirk Hunter Studios have calculated certain probabilities of this happening during certain types of playing styles, and have successfully, to a point, implemented them into the instruments of the Lyric Series String Quintet. And it’s all very dynamic depending on the way you play.

Pricing and Availability

Create Musical Melodies Out of the Box, Lyric Series String Quintet is now available at $179.99 (normally $399.99), Introductory Price for a Limited Time.