For those of you who follow new string library releases with a mix of “Do I really need more string choice” scepticism and “I just can’t help it, I love well made new string V.I’s”, your choices are about to get a little more confusing.

You may or may not have seen my previous review for the e-Instruments Stradivari Violin.

Well now, the clever lot at e-instruments have released the other three instruments that comprise the Cremona Quartet and there’s a lot to love. It’s made up of 4 separate, rare and beautiful instruments, each with the same GUI.

Firstly, housekeeping: It’s a Kontakt based instrument that works either in free or full players. I tested it within the new Kontakt 6.4.2 and have had no tech issues whatsoever. Although these instruments can be used as solo instruments, I feel that their biggest strength is the way they blend together. All recorded in the same hall, they each have their own sonic characteristics but it’s the fact that they blend so seamlessly that makes them so valuable in my opinion.

Before i describe my favourite features (and why I’ll be using this from now on), let’s have a quick listen to the sound. Here’s two separate pieces of audio…. One is a recap of a demo I made originally for the original Stradivari, but now played by each instrument) and the other is just a few chords played by the ensemble - no FX no tweaking… just straight out of the box.

Demo 1 (All 4 Instruments)

This was originally made after just a couple of hours of using the original instrument.

To translate it to the other instruments, it was as simple as loading them up and matching the articulations. A suggestion for e-instruments…. What about finding a way to create a snapshot of the articulations chosen so they can be copied from one instrument to another?

For a rundown on the articulation switching and how it’s actually done, see my original article, as all 4 instruments work identically in this regard. You can also see the patches used and the approach. The only difference between the four is that the key switches for the cello are one octave lower, to allow separation between the cello’s bottom notes and the switches.

Demo 2

This is something knocked together in under a minute. I threw together some chords, separately recorded the vibrato (per instrument) and panned the instruments to somewhere vaguely sensible. The idea of this is to show how quickly a scratchpad of quartet feel can be created with almost no work at all. Had I wanted to add to the realism, the rate (speed) of vibrato would need to be changed per instrument, rather than just the amount… but that’s as simple as moving another configured slider.

Thoughts

So how do the instruments perform?

Well I have to say I think that the cohesiveness of the collection as a whole is remarkable. Because they are recorded in the same space (an idea which is obviously a staple of many libraries these days), they work particularly well in conjunction with each other.

That said, although they blend well, each instrument has its own character. Listen to the Guarneri (Vln 2) which has more bite and cutting edge than it’s Stradivari counterpart.

The Amerti (Viola) is so warm and rich and the Stradivari Cello is less sumptuous than some libraries but will suit chamber music (with such a small ensemble feel) particularly well.

If you want to know how the controls work then a complete rundown of them is available in the Stradivari review, but let's just cover a couple of crucial ones once more.

There are four things that you need to know to make your playing experience worthwhile with these libraries.

1 - Clicking on the empty articulation slots allows you to simply select from the list. As with all things in these four instruments, the choices for all four are identical.

The fact that learning the GUI once allows access to all four instruments is its greatest asset.

2 - Dynamics are set by default to Cc1 - but are assignable (as with all the MIDI events). Learn to add a layer of dynamics and separately a layer of vibrato (see below) and you can achieve convincing results very quickly indeed.

3 - Vibrato is totally controllable.

I droned on about this first time around because it’s so refreshing to find a library that allows complete control over the rate, intensity and style of vibrato without adding phasing from one sample to another, but I’m going to do it again…. sorry!

For all four instruments there are options to change the speed, width and intensity of the vibrato (which is achieved as I understand it by taking recordings but then modelling the sound in between recordings) as well as offering a preset of different vibrato styles eg passionate, narrow, evolving. These are all hugely playable and unusual in comparison with their competition and are equally convincing on all of the instruments.

Make sure to set a CC for the vibrato amount BUT separately for the vibrato rate (found by pressing the 3 does next to the dynamics slot). Realism for this cello lies in moving from slower to faster vibrato musically, or it sounds slightly robotic.

4 - The virtuoso mode is where to spend most of your time on all the instruments - as it’s a blend of numerous articulations but without needing to keyswitch. There’s velocity control over legato and marcato articulations and you can use the pitch bend wheel to change between the shorter articulations. More pitch bend allows for shorter and shorter articulations. 90% of the demo I created used nothing more than this mode with some mod wheel changes.

Overall

As a collection this is making it straight into my orchestral template for use on smaller scale chamber music and for more intimate contemporary string stuff (for which I’d change the mic options (from the multi mic patch) to allow a closer sound. 

It’s SO easy to use, but deep enough in features that both a quick sketch and a deeper mock up are equally achievable but I don’t need a degree in GUI-nomics to understand what is expected.

The instruments are not panned for use as a quartet (making them usable as solo instruments), so don’t forget to pan them appropriately when using them as an ensemble.

Cremona Quartet is available from the e-instruments website and is 399 Euros.