EDINBURGH, UK: The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce availability of its BROTHER TREE SOUND storytelling strings library plug-in — produced as a result of an extraordinary week of sessions between Brother Tree Sound, itself formed in 2017 out of a love for the powerful intimacy of the string quartet, and BAFTA Award-winning composer Christian Henson, himself the co-founder of the Edinburgh-based enterprise concerned, creating its first library using a so-called ‘fragmentary’ approach to sampling to produce a truly realistic multi-sampled virtual instrument not made from samples but rather fragments of performances to give the user as close an experience to working with a live band as humanly possible without actually picking up the phone and booking one — as of November 3…
After an intensive series of collaborative workshops with the aim of capturing not just the sound but also the spirit of the progressive group of musicians that constitute Brother Tree Sound, The Crow Hill Company is collectively convinced that the resultant storytelling strings library plug-in that is BROTHER TREE SOUND represents the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s proudest achievement in strings sampling so far. Arriving at that self-congratulatory accolade was far from a short journey to glory, however, head honcho Christian Henson having struggled to put a sense of performance into string samples for 20 years. It is unsurprising — perhaps predictable, even —that BROTHER TREE SOUND features his favourite string sound so far: “FRAGILE MOMENTS is my new favourite string sound of all time — courtesy of Anna de Bruin, the leader of the Brother Tree Sound quartet,” he confirms, gushing credit where credit is definitely due, duly adding: “This is going to be an important tool for my output as a composer for film, TV, and, occasionally, computer games.”
Guaranteeing some scintillating storytelling of his own, Christian Henson happily delves deeper into its making: “BROTHER TREE SOUND is a quartet recorded in London, realising a dream I’ve had for a strings plug-in for many years now. And I’ve had a few gos! What makes this so different is fundamentally the approach. And the fundamental problem with sampling is that in order to get a clean sample you have to start from silence and end in silence. So this means that you are starting from an inert state of the instrument, making it resonate and then returning that instrument to a static and silent position, which basically means that, when we’re playing samples, every single note we play is both the beginning of a performance and the end, but none of the middle. Some experiments that I’ve done up here in Scotland were quite interesting — extracting longs from sample sessions where we actually hadn’t sampled the longs suddenly were full of life. And it’s not just about the beginning of the note. You have to remember that with violins a tiny millimetre’s movement makes a huge amount of expressive and tonal difference. Surely there is going to be, even on a minute level, a response to the fact — an anticipation of another note.”
Arriving at BROTHER TREE SOUND was easier said than done, though. Continues Christian Henson: “What I went about doing — and this is what we did in the initial workshop as a test — was write an actual piece of music that was quite challenging to play. We never did retakes and kept everything. In post-production we set about removing everything that we needed for a sample library from that performance. The composition was designed to give us total diatonic range of a reasonable string quartet expectation, and then we set about recording notes starting from an inert position so that we, the composer, have control of that nature of the beginning of the note — whether it’s decisive or somewhat more uncertain.”
Ultimately, getting to grips with BROTHER TREE SOUND’s superficially similar-looking GUI (Graphical User Interface) is as easy as it is with many recent releases from The Crow Hill Company. Christian Henson helpfully provides a guided tour — complete with welcomed insider insight. “Where a lot of libraries — some of which we’ve made — have a mixer that controls different signals — close, wide, and ambient, we decided to use our hard drive space to store what I think is a more useful set of tools,” he begins, before continuing thusly: “What you get here is a stereo mix, but separated on a mixer with what we call Partials — parts of sound. We borrowed this term from the success of Roland’s D-series synths in the late-Eighties and Nineties. So the FEATHERS are these notes that start from an inert state. What I’ve noticed when listening to strings is that there is this feathery kind of crunch, and it’s basically laws of physics — getting something still to move or change direction creates friction before the resonance happens. The FEATHERS are controlled by velocity — how hard you hit your keyboard, or, indeed, if you want to do all this by automation then pull up the velocity lane on your DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] track. The LONGS are cut from performances. We recorded up to four dynamic layers, so something that’s really exciting about this library is that you have stuff like Sul Tasto — which tends to always be quiet in libraries — that goes through the full dynamic range; the DYN XFADE control is connected to the CC 1 MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface] control value, which is, on most keyboards, your modulation wheel. We’ve also allowed the player to control some of the volume of each note with velocity, but it’s not going through the different dynamic layers. And what this enables us to do is to dig out melodies within harmonic sequences — allows for all sorts of expressive nuance. EXPRESSION is CC 11 — basically just a trim control over volume as an additional form of expression; there’s a tiny bit of a filter on there, so as you wake it up it just gets that slightly bit brighter. I think it’s a more effective way of being able to carve out melodies than using these slightly awkward-to-use legato things, which I’m not a fan of. There’s something aggressively-put-musicians-out-of-work-y about legatos that I don’t enjoy. And, wherever possible, I’ll always use live musicians — even if it’s just a solitary player to really help with those in-between-y bits that really characterise a performance.”
Putting that observation into perspective with a brief diversion into BROTHER TREE SOUND’s NORMALE Longs patch, the ever-contemplative Christian Henson notes, “You’ll notice that some of those Gs are maybe a little bit fruitier than you’re used to, and this is where I’m so thankful to Brother Tree Sound for being so supportive of us recording, capturing, and celebrating the human nature of string playing. It’s an amazing fine line between creating something that’s a means of representing what musicians do — or could do, if you had the budget, and having an overtly obedient string library that just sounds like a posh synthesiser. I’m certain that this is not going to be to everyone’s taste, but in this day and age of the dreaded AI I think that along the full hierarchy of music production — television production, film, I know from personal experience that what everyone is asking for is human — definitely not slop. And this is Crow Hill’s answer to that.”
But back in GUI guide mode, Christian Henson has this to say: “The third [SHORTS] fader is a new thing I’m trying; I’m not a fan of the key switch thing when switching between articulation styles — namely, SHORTS and LONGS, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we just stick it on a fader, so you can bring it up and down.’ Because the dynamics [DYN XFADE] fader is controlling the dynamics of the LONGS, if you bring the SHORTS one up then you obviously have the freedom to then totally isolate the Shorts, which are operated with velocity — just like the FEATHERS. There are strings libraries with tighter shorts, but I was really strict with the production team — myself included as I was part of the editing team — about us really capturing the full length of the note, from the moment that the bow first meets the string and is really encouraging it to resonate into some semblance of a note, which just gives you something that’s so much more realistic.” Realism also dictated that those LONGS and SHORTS should each be blessed with their own dedicated reverb controls — namely, LONGS CHAMBER, LONGS HALL, SHORTS CHAMBER, and SHORTS HALL.
Having said all that, then, the end result surely speaks for itself — a plug-in with notable scope (courtesy of 22 unique articulations/playing styles with LONGS samples matched with a complement of SHORTS and FEATHERS), dynamic range (up to four layers for LONGS and SHORTS), and humanism (up to 15 round robins per articulation). As a group of composers, The Crow Hill Company collectively found the energy, inspiration, realism, soul, and surprises drawn from BROTHER TREE SOUND surpasses anything it has experienced using a strings virtual instrument thus far — including its own! Original, deeply multi-sampled, and never-before-heard articulations, born of a shared goal between players and producer to make something entirely new, wholly spirited, and full of human surprises, with a wide variety of storytelling possibilities perhaps best sums up BROTHER TREE SOUND.
Pricing and Availability:
BROTHER TREE SOUND is available to purchase — priced initially with a limited early-access offer of £125.00 GBP/€139.00 EUR/$169.00 USD until December 1, 2026 (rising thereafter to its regular price of £179.00 GBP/€199.00 EUR/$239.00 USD) — as a sample-based virtual instrument comprising 4.4 GB of uncompressed Audio supporting AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3 plug-in formats for macOS 12 through to 15 (Apple Silicon and Intel compatible) and Windows 10 through to 11 — from The Crow Hill Company’s online Shop here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/shop/
For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos from The Crow Hill Company co-founder Christian Henson himself, please visit the dedicated BROTHER TREE SOUND webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/explore/brother-tree-sound/
BROTHER TREE SOUND 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/
