Your Music motto-abiding Edinburgh-based enterprise’s paid-for releases, The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce availability of its VAULTS-LO-FI STRINGS virtual instrument — introduced with no strings attached, albeit actually, in this case, there are, but only of the lo-fi musical kind that are central to the tool in question seriously satisfying those who like the sound of their recorded strings to be unrefined by being fully adulterated through a knackered cassette tape with just a pinch of wobble in the process of doing what it easily does so well — as of August 14…
It is fair to say that The Crow Hill Company has history when it comes to recording strings and presenting them as useable — more often than not, unique — musical tools. Indeed, it has released a number of notable string libraries since its inception at the tail end of 2023 — not forgetting, of course, that Christian Henson himself has extensive experience in the field from almost 30 years spent working as a media composer, coincidentally founding Spitfire Audio along the way — with the previously released VAULTS-R+DSTRINGS — available again as part of VAULTS ARCHIVE N°01 (thecrowhillcompany.com) for a small donation to Love Music (lovemusic.org.uk), a Scottish dynamic music inclusion and education charity that strives to increase its participants’ confidence, musical skills, and well-being through an exciting range of open-access projects designed to remove all barriers to participation and increase diversity in music-making, an admirable cause close to The Crow Hill Company’s collective hearts — acting as a perfect embodiment of those traits, thanks, in no small part, to its lush, enveloping characteristic. Clearly, however, VAULTS-LO-FI STRINGS has a more nostalgic palette associated with its appropriate appellation, owing to the fact that those same clean string recordings have been processed through a vintage cassette deck.
“First introduced in the Sixties, the compact cassette revolutionised music accessibility, but came with its quirks.” So says The Crow Hill Company’s Theo Le Derf, duly keeping his history lesson subsequently succinct in its creative connection to the seriously satisfying tool that is VAULTS-LO-FI STRINGS: “The magnetic tape adds soft compression and saturation; ‘wow & flutter’, which causes pitch drift; occasional dropout, which is when the tape sometimes doesn’t reach the tape head, so the sounds mute and become a bit more warbled; and a subtle, omnipresent hiss. This all defined the sonic identity of a generation, and, over time, these idiosyncrasies shaped a sound that we now associate with nostalgia, warmth, and analogue realism. With …LO-FI STRINGS we’ve honoured these imperfections and brought them into the orchestral world.”
While walking through its easy operation, Theo Le Derf begins by explaining the intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface), identical in (almost) all aspects — bar its distinguishing background colour change — to all of The Crow Hill Company’s current …VAULTS releases: “The first large dial is TIMBRE, which is automatically assigned to MIDI CC 1; this is a subtle volume and filter, which allows for more levels of expression. Our second large dial is DROPOUT, which alters how the tape and the tape head interact, so you can control the amount of imperfections in the sound. Our small dials are more concentrated effects, the first one being FILTER, which is a high-pass filter, which means its shaves off the bottom end of the signal; DIRT is a preamp saturation, which is fed back into the circuit to make the sound really thick and fluffy; finally, we have ECHO and SPLOSH — ECHO is a stereo ping-pong delay, which ping-pongs from left to right in the stereo field, and SPLOSH is a very lush reverb.”
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.
