Review: Vertigo Strings by Cinematique Instruments
Vertigo Strings is a multi-timbral instrument containing 16 instruments that goes far beyond the organic string sound. It is important to note that this is not an ordinary string library in the sense that it does not contain articulation changes, short samples like spiccato or pizzicato or sampled phrases. This library is probably best thought of as a synth which draws its source material from the string section. Vertigo Strings excels at suspenseful swells and sustained brooding textures.
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Review: Vertigo Strings by Cinematique Instruments
Vertigo Strings is a string-centric sound design library perfectly suited to creating eerie pads and suspenseful textures.
Vertigo Strings sells for €120.00 from Cinematique instruments
Thoughts
Vertigo Strings is a multi-timbral instrument containing 16 instruments that goes far beyond the organic string sound. It is important to note that this is not an ordinary string library in the sense that it does not contain articulation changes, short samples like spiccato or pizzicato or sampled phrases. This library is probably best thought of as a synth which draws its source material from the string section. Vertigo Strings excels at suspenseful swells and sustained brooding textures.
Everything is housed in a single interface window, which lets you combine elements in varying amounts. There are 15 presets available from the drop-down menu or you can adjust the levels of each layer to create a custom texture. There is also a button in the bottom of the UI labeled “dice” which will generate a random texture. Starting from the left it contains several layers performed by different instruments: 4 violin layers (“fragile”ponticello, arco, raw and harmonics), 1 viola arco layer, 2 cello layers (“fragile” celli ponticello and harmonics), 2 bass layers (raw and arco), and 2 bowed layers (bowed acoustic guitar and bowed psaltery). It also contains a bank of 4 ensemble layers; JX (warm synth patch from a Roland JX 3P); ZICH (resampled ensemble from Cinematique’s Zilhouette Strings library); TAPE (strings patch re-recorded via an analog tape machine); and HIUM (vintage harmonium). Finally, on the far right is the FX layer which is an airy sound of the bow noise as it travels across the strings.
Below each layer’s fader is a “—” by default. In the above image you can see some of these are 12 or -12. These are semitone shifts, and you can shift each layer individually. This makes the library very good for tense “peeling” and clusters.
The UI also contains settings for attack, decay, tone, fog, retro, reverb and a selection of reverbs. I particularly enjoy the presets Vertigo and Orion (they are dissonant) and adding infinite reverb to them is pretty fun.
As mentioned, this library isn’t particularly well suited for fast playing, and I find the default attack setting to be a little slow even for playing sustained notes. I don’t find that the sound is convincing as a real string section, (even after trying many different settings), but the library is very effective as a supporting texture. As it tends to sound like a very interesting synth, I mostly treat it like one and use it to build pads.
This library is an effective augmentation of the string section which pushes the instruments into the realm of interesting sound design. I find this library is best suited in intimate, melancholy settings.
Facts
The library requires the FULL VERSION of Kontakt (5.6.8+).
Vertigo Strings sells for €120.00 from Cinematique instruments
