Review: Realiwhistle by Realitone

by Steven McDonald

Lots of subtle detail and flexibility for the price.
3 voice mixer allows for solo or ensemble whistlers.
Easily add falls or ramps with keyswitches for added style and realism.

No built in FX rack
No short/staccato articulation sampled

We’re not just whistling Dixie here. Realiwhistle is a library that goes the distance on providing a convincing performance for solo or ensemble whistling in your compositions. Second only to pulling out a microphone and whistling yourself.

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Review: Realiwhistle by Realitone

Realiwhistle is Realitone‘s take on creating a realistic (could you tell by the name?) and very playable whistling sample library. At 108 MB, this library is lean, mean, and full of surprises within its scripting and interface. Second only to pulling out a microphone and whistling yourself, Realiwhistle is an easy way to create energetic, lyrical, and agile melodies, leveling the playing field for those of us who weren’t gifted with the innate ability to whistle.

Realiwhistle is available for $39.99 from Realitone
SLR Readers save 50% OFF RealiWhistle in September with code “SLR” at checkout at Realitone.

Thoughts

Realiwhistle packs a lot of detailed controls into a deceptively small one-panel interface.

Right off the bat at the top left of the interface is the whistle type mixer. Realitone sampled two types of whistles for this library – the “lips” style, and the airy and crispy “tongue” style. This area lets you pick either version or use a fader to create your own mix of both. Below that is a legend for the keyswitches – each keyswitch triggers either a ramp or fall on whatever note you’re playing. It might throw you off that these keyswitches don’t latch. You need to be holding the keyswitch key along with the notes you are playing higher up.

Over on the right side is the legato toggle and speed fader, the vibrato speed control, an extended range toggle, basic reverb controls, attack and release knobs, and the voice toggles. The legato speed ranges from near-instantaneous to long and slow glides – this is very important because of how common portamento is in real whistling. Attack gives you the option of slower and more lyrical whistling versus the default energetic and fast articulation. Extended range gives you some extra notes above and below the recorded range, which is a mixed bag. It might be useful for some sound design applications, but these extended notes are simply pitch shifted and don’t sound natural in normal use. The included reverb is very limited, and is probably best left turned off so you can use a reverb plugin with more flexibility.

By using the “click for mixer” you can open the voice mixer. This is my personal favorite feature in this library. You can enable 3 separately recorded whistle “voices” to create a small ensemble. Each voice has its own volume, panning, and tuning controls, allowing you to create realistically wide and imperfectly pitched trios for added realism. All of the other controls in the interface apply to all 3 voices simultaneously.

The only part of the interface that seems to come up short is the lack of any kind of built-in FX rack. This isn’t a major issue, as you can easily apply any effects via VST plugins, but having FX available directly in the user interface is always a good way to get more mileage out of a sample library when playing around in the Kontakt instance and looking for more inspiration.

Realiwhistle sounds great. The base recordings are very dry, allowing for a great deal of flexibility. After putting on some light reverb, building a trio of voices and enabling a fast legato, I found myself sitting there improvising melodies and occasionally wandering into the Andy Griffith theme music or Colonel Bogey. Fast and agile playing is where this library shines most, as its legato is very responsive with minimal latency. There is only one articulation available in this library, so it lacks staccato/shorts. But with the attack speed all the way up, it’s easy enough to fake short notes. Of course that’s not going to give you a detailed and life-like staccato, but it’s excusable at the low price point and RAM usage.

When you need to add some extra style points and more realistic quirks to your melodies, the keyswitch triggered falls and ramps are really fun and easy to use. Any notes played while holding one of the fall or ramp keys will will either start with a ramp up into the selected note, or instantly go into a fall. You can also trigger a fall in the middle of holding a note, and it will seamlessly trigger the fall as a way to end the note. There are three speeds for ramps, and two speeds for falls. Once you can start easily working these extra effects into your playing, this library really comes to life. It would have been easy to leave this feature out, but Realitone went the extra mile and found a simple and effective way to implement it.

As a whole package, Realiwhistle does a lot with minimal recorded samples, and is perfect for those who need a cost-effective and quick solution for their musical whistling needs.