Review: Solo Winds Untamed by Westwood Instruments
Westwood Instruments complete their innovative performance-based trilogy with Solo Winds Untamed. The five very different-sounding solo instruments take us from whispering beauty to powerful fury with everything in between. Inspirational surprises abound on each key and every velocity – you might never quite think of woodwinds the same way again.
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Review: Solo Winds Untamed by Westwood Instruments
This library marks the end of an odyssey for Rob Hill of Westwood Instruments. His unique approach in capturing long same-note performances and mapping them on three velocity layers per key has proven to be a real hit with composers looking for the feel and personality of recording a live soloist. Having deep-sampled solo strings and brass it is finally the turn of the woodwinds and Westwood have selected the four obvious instruments – flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon – but also given us a fifth curve ball in the shape of a baritone saxophone. There’s a plethora of content on offer, as in addition to the numerous performances (over 2300 unique improvisations!) there are some very useful bread-and-butter articulations, plus other unusual techniques.
Solo Winds Untamed normally sells for £175 from Westwood Instruments
Thoughts
The interface is a classy affair and everything is all on a single page. It is basically divided into two sections; user customisation options at the top and the articulation selector in the bottom half. This is the same for all five nki patches, albeit not all instruments share precisely the same articulations.
Main Interface
The concept of the Untamed series is unchanged and centres on long single pitch notes with varying amounts of more avant-garde playing than you might normally expect from a solo woodwind library. It is an intuitive and playable approach, using velocity to trigger the improvisations. Low is relatively calm and textural, medium with more liveliness, and the highest velocities will give you wild, frantic, and often outright crazy performances. There are four sets of these, which gives you some idea of the vastness of the library and the feeling that you are tapping into the many options that a live player would give you in a real session. Shift clicking enables you to select multiple articulations, though like the brass, the improvisations always seem lower in volume compared to the regular articulations. This is not a major issue, but means the improvisations can be overshadowed somewhat if articulation stacking, or can be a fiddle to volume ride later if sequencing the performance samples with the more conventional playing styles in a longer passage.
Should you want to play the same velocity and pitch repeatedly, but not keep triggering the same sample they have cleverly included an Improv RR which cycles through sets A-D on each finger press. For the ultimate crescendo the Storms articulation is a real winner, as it blends all four improvisations and employs the mod wheel to take you through the three intensities. Now I think of it, it would be quite cool to have the option for CC1, as opposed to velocity, mapped to the main improvisations.
I believe the early versions of Untamed Violin and Cello only had the improvisations and in doing so this did limit the library somewhat. However, since then Westwood have chosen to supplement these unique phrases with both standard and not so standard articulations. These have the velocity now triggering the more familiar dynamics for shorts and the mod wheel doing the same on longs.
Flute Articulations
Like the brass, one of my favourites here are the Surges. These are sustained notes that randomly pulse with sudden crescendos to create undulating and unpredictable patterns. Soft and loud versions of these are available for all five instruments, however that is not the case for every extra articulation. For example, the baritone sax has growls, percussive slap tongues and even two Improv Ext options that get really extreme and push the sound to truly experimental realms. The clarinet alone has some excitable semitone flicks, both soft and loud; like most of the articulations here something that is near impossible to replicate merely using normal sustain samples. There is so much to get your teeth into and if you select the Keyswitches option it opens up the door to writing very individual longer passages that connect say, Improv A at medium velocity to Vib Fast and then to Swells Long and finally back to Improvs A at the lowest velocity. In doing so you can craft what appears to be an evolving, unique live performance and the permutations are near endless. At this point it would be remiss for me not to mention the wonderfully creative playing from the five performers, who gladly also get ample credit and some recording session visuals on the product page.
Like everything Westwood have done to date the recordings are exquisite and really capture the beauty of the instrument and the player. A Brauner VMA spot mic gives us a super tight, almost forensically detailed sound, with a pair of close Neumann KM184s adding some width, whilst still being intimate. The natural and controlled space of the Nave Studio in Yorkshire is well captured by the other mic options; AKG414s for a balanced room sound, with a pair of Octave MK-012s up in the gallery for a nice sense of depth. Although the studio is a converted church the ambience never gets that big, nor swamps the focus on detailed soloists.
Mic Mixer
There are also a handful of workhorse user controls to tweak. The interface provides attack controls for longs, attack, tightness and release for shorts, 3-band EQ, reverb with custom IRs and performance controls for dynamics, expression and vibrato. You can also switch between monophonic and polyphonic playing to suit your particular workflow.
User Controls
One thing that not all developers utilise enough in my opinion is creating multis. For Solo Winds Untamed they essentially can be seen as presets and work very well as inspirational cue starting points. Some stack the same instrument while others showcase all five as a maverick ensemble. They are well worth exploring and got me started making my own bespoke multis too!
Multis Folder
There is little room for improvement in this library, but having used this engine for a while now one suggestion for a future update would be to introduce some visual feedback on what velocity and therefore what articulation you are triggering for the improvisations. Secondly, an adjustable velocity curve would be a welcome addition to cater for keyboards with differing sensitivities.
The Untamed series is sublimely completed with the addition of the woodwinds and in terms of sound and playability it’s quite a unique library in the wider market. Even the more standard longs and shorts echo the improvisations in the character of the timbre. Westwood should be commended for having such great consistency across all three Untamed libraries, not just in terms of the sonics, but also in the distinct aesthetic intention.
I will repeat what I said about the Solo Brass Untamed as it is equally appropriate for the woodwinds – the strength here lies in how it bridges the gap beautifully between a phrase library and conventional sample playback. The particular performances are baked-in of course, but each is at a singular pitch only, therefore giving the freedom to create any melody or harmony. In addition, the decent amount of user variance (articulation stacking, mics, EQ, reverb etc.), means you can shape the end result to your desire. This all amounts to about as close as you will get to the individuality of a real live recording. I can see it being attractive for dramatic and documentary TV and film underscore, and for certain commercial artists too. It is far from conventional though, so less the sort of thing for scoring Downton Abbey type period dramas, or more epic Hollywood-esque cues. By contrast, Solo Winds Untamed is proudly poetic, unleashed, tender and surprising all in a single package. Above all, it’s a library that forces us to think differently about how, as composers, we can use woodwinds in new ways and for that we should applaud Westwood wholeheartedly.
Facts
Solo Winds Untamed consists of over 29,500 samples making up 38.5GB of data. It downloads via the Pulse download manager and it is watermarked for each customer. There are 5 instruments sampled with over 2300 improvisations, nearly 80 standard(ish) articulations, 4 mics and 30 multis. The library requires a full version of Kontakt.
Solo Winds Untamed normally sells for £175 from Westwood Instruments
Demos of Solo Winds Untamed by Westwood Instruments
Videos of Solo Winds Untamed by Westwood Instruments
Contributor Sam Burt reviews Solo Winds Untamed by Westwood Instruments
“Westwood Instruments complete their innovative performance-based trilogy with Solo Winds Untamed. The five very different-sounding solo instruments take us from whispering beauty to powerful fury with everything in between. Inspirational surprises abound on each key and every velocity – you might never quite think of woodwinds the same way again.”
