The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce availability of CELLO MOTORS — duly designed to provide fresh new propulsion for anyone’s scoring sensibilities while exploring the polyrhythmic possibilities of the propulsive, gritty, and rosin-rich cellos carefully captured in Scotland’s celebrated Castlesound Studios — as the latest library to draw upon the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s extensive experience of thinking outside the box when it comes to its expertise in sampling, as of October 21…
“Do you ever get a sound in your head, but it is a sound you know you don’t have, but you want it anyway?” So says Christian Henson — original founder of The Crow Hill Company and a professional film and television composer of some 28 years standing — in the lead up to introducing the latest library to bear said company’s notable name — namely, CELLO MOTORS: “The sound I had in my head was a raw, honest, biting, small section of cellos, providing a forward propulsion for my scores — something that was organic and real, and couldn’t be recreated with samples. So often I tell users to avoid, disregard, or make limited use of the close mics; this library is designed around them — that really upfront, close sound.”
So with that very idea in mind, three world-class cellists gathered in Scotland’s celebrated Castlesound Studios, a state-of-the-art digital and analogue recording, mixing, and mastering facility with a 40-plus-year history of working with leading artists in all fields of music from Scotland and beyond, as well as many clients from the worlds of film, TV, radio, and advertising, famed for its huge, day-lit recording areas and control room housed within a Victorian building outside of Edinburgh. Continues Christian Henson: “It is definitely one of the top five studios that I’ve ever recorded in. There’s just something about the sound there; it has an intimate quality, but without stuff sounding like it’s been recorded in an anechoic space. Those things are so difficult to position in a mix, because the image that is recorded is somewhat divorced from reality.”
Reality, in this instance, dictated that those three cellists were there to be effectively recorded as a dry, up-front, and raw set of ‘motors’ — multi-sampled, looped phrases of increasing complexity with dynamic crossfading around single pitch centres is what the resultant and appropriately named CELLO MOTORS is all about. Announces Christian Henson: “What we’re working with here is just a huge selection of rhythmic passages that are played on single notes, sampled across the keyboard, from the simple — with dynamic crossfades — to the more complex; they sync to your DAW tempo, and all of them are played with such a fantastic amount of attitude and — dare I say it — a degree of Celtic flair. One of the instructions we gave the cellists was, ‘Think of your cello like a fiddle.’ But what’s so totally addictive about using these is that by triggering them at different points you can create even more complex rhythmic passages yourself.”
Indeed, it is possible to employ keyswitches to create even more complexity in those rhythmic passages, and also choose between various diffusion levels in microphones that were specifically selected to provide an attitude-delivered set of recordings. Reasons Christian Henson: “I would use the WIDE and AMBIENT mics as merely something to increase the stereo width of the CLOSE mics; what you will find is that by diffusing this CLOSE image, reverbs will stick to it a lot better, so suddenly it becomes a lot more believable — that you’re in that new space.”
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.
