Working with award-winning composers collective Bleeding Fingers, Edinburgh-based enterprise The Crow Hill Company is proud to present PREHISTORIC STRINGS as a truly unique string library — literally built from one-of-a-kind bespoke instruments incorporating horns and teeth with a few ancient bones thrown in for good measure, making for hybrid monstrosities to create tones that are haunting, primordial, and staggeringly beautiful in their truly primitive nature — as of September 25…
Putting PREHISTORIC STRINGS into its rightful perspective involves delving deep into the past in more ways than one — not least The Crow Hill Company’s ongoing relationship with its collective friends at Bleeding Fingers. For it all started when the latter’s talented Anže Rozman and Kara Talve worked with Hollywood hotshot Hans Zimmer — arguably one of the greatest, certainly one of the most prolific film composers of our time, noted for his innovative integration of electronic sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements — on the primetime television series Prehistoric Planet (2022-2025).
As always with both Bleeding Fingers’ and Hans Zimmer’s approach to composition, the creation of truly unique sound-worlds played a fundamental role in the development of said score. An audacious project, indeed, it involved the construction of a selection of string instruments built with bones, horns, skulls, and cannibalised classical instruments, including a cello, frame drum, resonating dulcimer, and many more besides. But credit where credit’s due to the killer composing team involved in instinctively understanding that the resulting score’s success merely represented the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential of their unique inventions and agreeing to share them with the rest of the composing community.
Cue The Crow Hill Company, duly dispatching a talented team of its own over to Bleeding Fingers’ studios in sunny Santa Monica, California to create a totally new set of recordings for a tailor-made plug-in with a simple brief: by approaching this like any of the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s existing string libraries that have proven so successful, surely it would be possible to provide composers with the tools of the trade to incorporate those incredible instruments into their standard workflow while expanding their palette with horns, teeth, and ancient fossilised bones.
By working to that brief, The Crow Hill Company applied its AAA-grade sampling techniques and attention to detail to create a truly unique library that perfectly fits and integrates with its others. On the face of it, its broad selection of articulations, dynamic layers, round robins, and onboard processing are all aimed at providing users with the shallowest possible learning curve while offering instant transformation of their compositional work.
With all that in mind, PREHISTORIC STRINGS’ gorgeous GUI (Graphical User Interface) is as easy to use as it is on the eye, effectively offering access to five custom-built solo string instruments created for Prehistoric Planet, each of which can be independently selected and played while a blended ‘ensemble mix’ makes for an otherworldly quintet. Carefully crafted effects signals add motion and texture to the sound: switching on the TRANSFORM function, for example, enables access to an appropriately named selection of controls like CAVERNOUS — It’s not a reverb, it’s not a delay, what is it? (to quote the user manual); FOSSILISED — Epic transformations that echo the sands of time; and DIRT — Or “Dad”, a whole mid-life crisis on one simple dial.
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.
