Review: CASE Woodwinds by 8Dio
Uses less common woodwind instruments for more unusual sounds (for example, Alto flute).
Full range of sounds from high and low woodwind instruments.
Sounds are far more limited than strings and brass, due to the nature of winds.
Solo Winds is the 3rd release in 8Dio’s CASE series. This library contains a surprisingly vast collection of sampled woodwind aleatoric effects, including textures, pulses, and “chaos”. For those of us looking for a new way to present the under-represented woodwind instruments, CASE Solo Winds provides a lot of inspiring (in a dark, chilling way) sounds that you rarely hear from this family of instruments.
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Review: CASE Woodwinds by 8Dio
CASE Woodwinds sells for $199 from by 8Dio
CASE Solo Strings, Brass, and Woodwinds bundled together for $599.
Thoughts
CASE Solo Woodwinds sports the same interface as its Strings and Brass counterparts in the series, only in a dark blue highlight. Both the main panel and the FX rack are packed full of controls to discover and tweak, and with a little work, they’ll pump out a ton of different sounds to fill your music with reedy oddities.
Inside of each instrument patch, there are several variations of the articulations lined up along the top. Simply click one of the buttons and your sounds are instantly assigned to the keyboard. You can also adjust the volume of different articulations with a small fader inside of each space. Below this is a row of knobs for quick and dirty effects, including stereo width, envelopes for pitch, amp, and filter, EQ/Tone, and distortion drive. The pitch knob is especially interesting, because woodwinds don’t have a natural way to bend their pitch to extremes, whereas trombones and string instruments can easily do glissandos.
If you need to add some rhythmic motion to your textures, the Filter LFO is extremely useful for that purpose. Setup like a typical step sequencer, this control will vary the cutoff of a filter in time with your DAW’s tempo. It’s worth noting that this particular feature benefits a lot from the randomize button, which takes the form of a question mark. This button is available on most of the controls in these products, and it’s a lot of fun to mash it and see what kinds of crazy sounds the universe comes up with.
The main panel continues with its 6 mic position mixer and a few more effect knobs. The mixer comes with the standard faders and solo/mute buttons. Each patch is recorded with 2 instruments, and you can use the different microphones to separate them out into single instruments. It could also be useful to take out the room sound and get really up close and personal with these dirty sounds. The extra effects knobs include filter, gate, pitch bend, delay, compression, and form.
As if the effects in the main panel weren’t enough, the CASE series also provides an entire FX rack in the secondary panel. Here you can play with a Phaser, EQ, Degrader, Delay, Transform (convolution), and Reverb. The “Transform” effect is the standout here with its variety of creative impulse responses that can give your sounds some very unique reverb tails. Stacking these effects on top of what’s already in the main panel can open up a whole new world of options.
Aleatoric effects is an odd category to choose woodwinds for. Due to the reed and key nature of woodwind instruments, it’s difficult to find ways to play them outside of their intended purpose. Lack of polyphonic capabilities and true glissando limits the aleatoric options. However despite those limitations, 8Dio has pulled a surprising amount of content from these instruments.
It was a good move on the developer’s part to use the more uncommon instruments, including alto flutes, bass clarinets, contrabassoons, and piccolo flutes. This instantly sets the library apart from what you’re using to hearing by leaving out flutes, oboes, and clarinets. Unfortunately, the weakness in the concept of the library starts to show when you spend a lot of time playing through all of the included articulations. When it comes down to it, there just aren’t many aleatoric effects you can make with woodwinds instruments – most of them are some variation of overblowing and flailing fingers to create runs and flutters with no tonal center. If that is the sound you are looking for though, this library provides a seemingly bottomless well of it. The samples are well recorded and programmed, and the sonic pallette is certainly unique, which is a big plus to this package. For those looking to stand out from the usual strings and brass based textures, CASE Solo Winds would be an excellent choice.
Facts
CASE Solo Winds weighs in at 11.32 GB installed. This space is taken by over 5,100 samples from 6 mic positions and 8 instruments, with 52 total articulations. The full retail version of Kontakt 5.5 or later is required to run this product.
CASE Woodwinds sells for $199 from by 8Dio
CASE Solo Strings, Brass, and Woodwinds bundled together for $599.
Whether it was an over-sight by 8DIO or not, when the Black Friday sales started,, this was still listed at the into price of 99 USD…and, at 40% off that, well, this was a no brainer…at face value, this can appear as a library that is a bit limited however, with a little imagination and utilizing the on-board effects (or 3rd party effects), the sonic well of sound becomes so much deeper…if you love to make electronic or psychedelic sounds, a whole new world opens up with some of the textured / stacked layers that can be produced by utilizing 8DIOs new GUI…I especially love the contra-bassoon articulations and the “out there” underscoring it can produce that will enhance any electronic piece of music.