The Crow Hill Company Announces POCKET STRINGS Plug-in for Free

The Best Strings Plugin Money CAN'T Buy??? video upload by CROW HILL

Press release follows:

The Crow Hill Company announces availability of popular POCKET STRINGS plug-in for free, bringing broadcast-grade string possibilities to everyone

EDINBURGH, UK: around a year after its initial launch, not long after the Edinburgh-based enterprise effectively rebranded itself with an aesthetic that truly realises company co-founder and composer Christian Henson’s heartfelt dream of encouraging people to make music and help them on their journey, regardless of whatever point they were at and wherever their journey began, The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce that it has made its popular POCKET STRINGS — styled as a never-tried-before strings plug-in that aims to bring broadcast-grade string possibilities to everyone by combining live cinematic orchestral recordings of some of the best musicians working in the UK with some rarefied vintage synth classics made to measure for added body, depth, and character — available for free with no strings attached (but pun intended), as of August 6…

As an introduction to POCKET STRINGS, The Crow Hill Company co-founder and composer Christian Henson has this to say: “A string library that’s accessible to all without compromise — a distillation of the last 25, nearly 30, years that I’ve been working as a media composer, which means that I write music for film, TV, and computer games, giving you the very basic necessities to write pro-end string arrangements. Whether that be adding to productions, songs, collaborating with others, or, indeed, creating professional film scores — whether that be to demo for an orchestra to play, or, indeed, to go to broadcast, there’s been no compromises here. Accessibility is the key — with usability.”

And accessibility now knows no bounds since The Crow Hill Company has made what it collectively considers to be the pinnacle of orchestral sampling, honed over nearly three decades, available for free; usability is important, too, with POCKET STRINGS’ creator claiming anyone can conceivably get comfortable within a couple of minutes of firing it up for the first time. The three refined articulations performed by a 17-piece classical string section recorded in Glasgow — labelled LONG, where the string gradually comes to life and is sustained; SHORT, where the strings are struck with a bow and muted with the left hand to produce short rhythmic shapes; and PLUCK, providing a different-sounding instrument altogether — need not necessarily have their modulation of dynamic and timbral forms of expression controlled via a fader system of some sort whilst playing, something that The Crow Hill Company collectively considers to be one of the greatest blockers to using orchestral samples and plug-ins. An auto-expression system takes care of this ingeniously — in realtime, according to playing styles observed while watching countless different string bands in action over the years.

As an example, it had been noted that if a violinist was given, say, a single long note to play without any directions on loudness or how to express the note then most players would start playing quietly and build into the note before returning to the quieter level prior to moving on to the next note. Thankfully, The Crow Hill Company took those shapes and developed automatic controllers that move the dials for the user according to some simple settings — three such shapes are provided, in fact, subdivided by halves and triplets, which, when combined with the BARS PER SHAPE function, provide a whole host of expression forms without POCKET STRINGS users having to worry about fader devices, pedals, or wheels. “Ostensibly, there are some oscillators moving underneath, but what I love about it, as a veteran, is that it enables me to be able to write stuff using both my hands without having to worry about controllers, whilst keeping things expressive and moving along,” affirms Christian Henson, his heartfelt dream of encouraging people to make music and help them on their journey being made more real than ever before as POCKET STRINGS really represents a perfect tool to protect, inspire, support, and provide opportunities for music-makers the world over.

On the face of it, The Crow Hill Company has not stopped there, though. Those easily controllable ORCHESTRAL players can quickly be supplemented by two more, as indicated by the EPIC ANALOGUE and VINTAGE SYNTH wording also adorning POCKET STRINGS’ gorgeous GUI (Graphical User Interface). Indeed, this journey to bring professional-grade string possibilities to everyone encompassed taking a road trip to Pisa in Italy to acquire a couple of the most rarefied and sought-after analogue instruments in a perfectly restored vintage Yamaha® CS-80 — ultimately acting as a virtual Vangelis soundalike homage to an iconic Seventies-vintage synth classic that the Academy Award-winning Greek musician, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music made into his signature sound, thanks to its exceptionally complete performer expression features — and ARP® Solina String Ensemble — effectively defining the late-Seventies disco era with its silky-smooth, shimmering sounds ending up on countless hit records recognisable by the ensemble/chorus effect to which it lends its name. Needless to say, those iconic instruments can be seamlessly added to POCKET STRINGS’ acoustic signal either by selecting their respective names or manually moving the ‘puck’ around the signal grid. GLASS, meanwhile, attenuates how the fundamentals and harmonic series behaves for each and every note played — something of a life-saver if dealing with four-part harmony and adding the bass in for good measure, which would be drawing upon the sound of 68 musicians, 60 microphones, and five halls!

It is clear, then, that no corners have been cut in ensuring that the POCKET STRINGS library will be right for everyone, regardless of age, success, background, or, indeed, where and how people will be hearing the music created with it. Concludes Christian Henson: “POCKET STRINGS just opens up the world of possibilities of sharing in our musical journeys. All of these different components — the amount of REVERB, GLISS, GLASS, everything — will be controllable by MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], so we can simply exchange bytes-sized MIDI files, which are DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] agnostic, meaning that there’s a real breaking down of barriers here to enable us to share, to collaborate, and to learn from one another. And I just think that in this day and age — where music and the future of music is concerned — it’s all about humanity. So this is our effort to create something that totally breaks down the barriers to entry, because — while not compromising on the quality — anyone at this stage of technological development should be able to create film scores in their edit suites or bedrooms and not rely on some horrific algorithm that has scraped some other people’s music. There’s no excuse when you’ve got tools like this, which is just the beginning. This really is my go-to string library — the thing I start on when writing, also confident that — if I write and kind of sketch up string parts — I can collaborate and share with whomever I want, because there is no barrier to entry with this project.”


Featuring three refined techniques performed by a classical string section with independent double bass player control, fully blend-able and matched synth layers (featuring a perfectly restored Yamaha® CS-80 and ARP® Solina String Ensemble), tonal control over fundamental frequencies, curated algorithmic and granular reverbs, and composer modulation tools, POCKET STRINGS is now available for free — as an AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3-format-compatible plug-in comprising over 130 GB of meticulously crafted recording sessions (refined into a single 850 MB losslessly compressed instrument) that loads directly into a DAW — from The Crow Hill Company here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/shop/

For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated POCKET STRINGS webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/explore/pocket-strings/

POCKET STRINGS installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/