VBrass French Horns

The horn is one of the most versatile instruments in the world, capable of producing everything from the most beautiful pianissimos to the most powerful fortissimos, easily heard over an entire symphony orchestra.

Our primary aim with this collection was to offer 6 individually recorded instruments with their own characteristics, whilst still being able to gel together in a variety of ensemble set-ups.

On top of the instruments' natural characteristics, we implemented many features to help offer an limitless variety of sounds within each instrument itself.

Even though we have the French Horns listed as Horns 1-4, you will find that in all 6 instruments, some offer a brassier tone, some more mellow, some instruments sing best in particular registers, some combinations of instruments produce a completely different sound to others and so on. So a Horn Quartet set-up of Triple Horn, Wagner Tuba, Horn 3 and Horn 1 is just as valid here as a quartet with Horns 1 to 4.

We hope that you enjoy exploring these instruments as much as we enjoyed designing and producing them.

When you play a legato on the keyboard (when you overlap two notes), our engine will automatically transition the first played note into the second played note.

This is exactly what happens on a real brass instrument when the air flow is continuous while the player changes the note. Our legatos can be enhanced even further by careful use of CC1 to anticipate upcoming notes, but we also added several new controls to allow you to automate this process, either with or without any delay.

Legato playing is most expressive when the sound changes before a mechanical transition - most often this is a slight decrescendo, accompanied with timbral and pitch changes, but it can also include a slight 'push' (crescendo) even before this.

At the bottom of the TRANSITIONS section are a set of controls for 'Expressive Legatos'. These control the activity of the sound before and after the legato transition is heard ('Pre-' and 'Post-'). Beneath the sliders is a graphic matrix indicating exactly what is happening to the dynamics before and after a transition.

1- Pre-Transition Duration : this dictates how long the pre-transition activity lasts.

2- Pre-Transition Modulation : this dictates the direction of the dynamics of the pre-transition sound. We recommend that this is set to a negative value.

3- Post-Transition Duration : this dictates how long the post-transition activity lasts.

4- Post-Transition Modulation : this dictates the depth from which dynamics return to the base level - the higher this value, the lower the dynamic level after the transition is heard.

5- Velocity Threshold : The threshold at which point expressive legato is applied. Set to 0 to switch off, and set to 127 to make all legatos expressive. We recommend using a low value here, e.g. 20.
 

Above the Expressive Legatos settings are a series of 'Modulations' controls to enhance the legato sound even further:

1- Transitions Volume : The volume of the recorded transitions - note that this only affects the recorded transition itself, and not the pre- and post- expression controls.

2- Transitions Speed Modulation : This controls the speed of the legatos. When at 100%, the higher the velocity, the faster the legato transition. When at 0%, velocity has no effect on the speed.

3- Flutter on Attacks : This creates a short flutter at the beginning of new notes where silence precedes them. We recommend that this is randomized for a more realistic sound.

4- Flutter on Legatos : This creates a short flutter at the beginning of new legato notes, blended as part of the transitions. We recommend that this is kept to a low value, and randomized for a more realistic sound.

And finally, at the top of the TRANSITIONS section are controls for the Attacks:

1- Velocity to attack / sustain : This controls the relationship between Airflow (CC1 by default) and velocity: if CC1 is 75 and a note is played at velocity 20, our engine will ramp the air flow from 20 to 75 and thus create a quick volume raise. And vice versa - if the velocity is above the air flow value, it will create a quick attack and come down to the air flow value. The duration of this ramp is controlled by the velocity to attack time value.

2- Velocity to attack / legatos : This controls how legato notes are played, and the procedure is identical to that for sustains, but for legatos it covers the joins between different notes rather than sustained notes on their own. This feature is very useful on woodwind instruments as many players play legato notes with a slight crescendo between notes, so to replicate this, all you need to do is play every new legato note at a low velocity.

3- Velocity to attack time : The speed at which a note changes from the velocity value to the airflow value

4- Velocity to attack sharpness : The sharpness of the attacks, or, in more detail, control over the shape of the curve joining the velocity value to the value of the airflow. At its lowest value, the curve will emphasize the velocity, and at its highest value, the airflow.

On the main interface is the Bee dial, in between the break at the base of the Airflow dial.

It can be set to a specific amount before playing, or it can be controlled while playing live - to assign a controller to it, right click and either select from a list of controllers or simple move the controller you wish to use, and our engine will recognise and assign it automatically.

We recommend applying different values for different instruments, according to your taste; Horn 1 and Triple Horn have a powerful brassy tone at their highest dynamics, whereas the Wagner Tuba and Horn 2 are much more mellow in timbre.

Virtual Space tab

Simply using panning to place elements in the stereo field does not sound as realistic as possible, because lots of information is left out, so we recreated a whole room placement simulation based on impulse responses, where you can set the position of the instrument in the recorded room itself.

Since there are so many ways to set up an ensemble recording, in terms of both musician placement and microphone pair selection, we decided to include as many customizable possibilities as we could.

With VSeries Virtual Space, you have access to dozens and dozens of different seats in three different halls, with the response from each seat recorded individually. You can select which microphone configuration you want to use (ORTF, AB, XY, or AB Wide), and you can select four options for the stereo source pattern, for even more variety of sound. You can finetune the sound by adjusting the stereo width for a narrow or wide section, as well as controlling the room size and the high and low frequencies of the reverb.

Vibrato is controlled with the left dial on the front panel of the interface.

Immediately below the dial is a small menu with 3 options:

1- Auto: this enables automatic vibrato and the dial will simply control how much vibrato is added to the sound.

2- Auto time: This is similar to Auto mode, but a time envelope will control the amount of vibrato. You can edit this envelope in the preferences by clicking on "edit auto vib". This opens a small panel that displays a table to let you control the duration and intensity of the vibrato. 

3- Manual: This is for advanced use and conrol over vibrato. In reality, a trumpet player changes the shape or position of their mouth on the mouthpiece to change the pitch up and down. In this mode, the neutral position (with no pitch change) is the middle value of the dial and a value of 0.5 (and CC at value 64). Values below 0.5 will result in a lower pitch and values above 0.5 will result in a higher pitch. This is very useful for creating vibrato that doesn't have a fixed speed.

There is a fourth way to simulate vibrato, using only the air flow control. The "allow vibrato with air flow" setting has to be set to ‘yes' in the preferences and you a fast up and down variation is needed in whichever controller you use for the air flow.

In the preferences, you have options to customize the vibrato even further to control vibrato (these options affect all 4 modes above).

1- There is a small dial that controls the overall amount of vibrato. This can be set to some very high values that will sound very unnatural to some, but that is necessary for using some dedicated wind controllers that have a narrow CC range.

2- You can change the amount of volume modulation: vibrato isn't just a change in pitch, it's also timbre and volume changes; you can control how much of this you want here.

3- You can change the amount of timbre modulation to add even more realism

4- You can of course change the amount of pitch modulation as well.

5- And you can change the vibrato speed - this goes up all the way to 115%.

In the bottom right corner of the vibrato section is a dial to adjust the humanization/randomization of the undulations. The higher this dial, the more uneven the vibrato will be.

Some controllers like the EWI use the pitch bend as the vibrato source, so we added the P. Bend option to the bottom of the CC list in case you want to use it for the vibrato and not bends.

At the top, you will see a tuning button which opens a panel allowing you to tune each note to your liking. This is very useful for performing music not written for standard tuning systems, or for music that doesn’t use traditional Western classical scales.

1- The max glide interval controls the maximum interval that you are able to create a continuous glide between. On a trombone for example, the maximum possible glide is from position 7 to position 1, so 6 semitones. We allow for more than 6, but to play something natural, it's better to lower that value as in reality most players will glide a maximum of 3 or 4 semitones and "cheat" the rest. Above that value, our engine will "cheat" as well and skip some notes while still ending up on the target note.

2- The note pitch imprecision is exactly what it says - it will make the notes sound very slightly out of tune, completely at random, between 0 and the value you set. A value of 100% will randomize +/-1 semitone.

3- The attack pitch variation is slightly different, it is essentially a fast but subtle bend ramp that can almost always be heard in live performances. It is more or less super-human to play every single note perfectly in tune from the first attack, so in order to create a more realistic sound, this is set slightly above 0 by default. Increasing the value will control how much bend you want (in other words; how far away the sound will be from the note you’re playing) and the attack pitch variation time will decide how quick that ramp is.

The direction of the variation can be controlled by selecting the option from the menu next to the dial (Natural, Up, Down), and the small button immediately next to this enables a velocity-controlled attack, meaning that the higher the velocity, the more the effect will be heard.

Use Advanced Pitch Bend activates our APB engine, allowing for more realism in the pitch bends. This can be disabled to save on CPU, and we recommend this for French Horns.

Max Pitch Bend controls the possible range of the pitch bends.

Pitch with Air Variation controls the amount the pitch changes in relation to the Airflow level - if the Airflow is raipidly increased, the pitch will rise accordingly, and vice versa. We recommend keeping this setting to a very low value for French Horns.

And if you need pitch bends for the full range of the instrument, we included the option to Use MPE as well, but this comes at the expense of realism.