Hideaway Studio - The String Collection II

THE STRING COLLECTION ETHOS

As with all of my Kontakt instruments, the ethos behind them is not so much an attempt to capture and recreate the past but an opportunity to present the original source material as textures, elements and building blocks in order to create something new. At the same time, hopefully some the original beauty and character of these rare and vintage instruments and equipment is retained.

A long time in the making, I have been wanting to release for some time now a sequel to one of my most popular Kontakt instruments to date which has been a personal favourite of mine since the beginning.

As I’m sure many are aware, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for evocative cinematic synth strings, and especially pseudo realistic string ensembles. It has been very exciting for me that some of these string ensembles and textures have found their way into a number of major music productions around the world.

UNIQUE PROCESSING METHODS

I have also tried to introduce a number of unique processing methods to add tonal colour, character and movement to various sounds. This included a rather bizarre idea I had to play raw material through a speaker and record it using an old carbon granule GPO telephone mic. This imparted a wonderful crunchy antique character which when layered with the original source produced a rather beautiful effect. Other methods involved recording on and off of rather worn ¼" tape on a wonderful 1969 Revox G36 tube reel to reel.

An original 1969 Dolby A-301 (the world’s first Dolby dynamic noise reduction system) and a DBX II 128 compander along with a gorgeous Binson tube Pre-Mixer were also used to good effect. A number of triple ensembles were used to process single string timbres from various synths into something much more akin to the original Solina strings.

This included the often overlooked Korg SDD-3300 triple modulated delay and retasking the triple BBD chorus ensemble in the little Böhm Dynamic 12/24 as well as the wonderful “Orbitone” generator in the Eminent 310U. Truly uniquely, I used the latter to process some of the string timbres from the Novachord to produce some very special ensembles!

A number of layers and blends were brought together to form the basic 36 instruments loaded into the layering engine to form String Collection II.