Spitifire Audio's London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO) Strings are a fantastic addition to a contemporary composer's box of tricks. Open tuning, raw and sincere bowing, an exploration of the strings from bridge to touch (and back).

However, they lack true legato. You can try to fake it with the Release control. An Attack Offset control would have been a nice touch, but it is not there.

So, I did some tests with combining LCO Vivid Violins with some legato patches from other libraries. "Vivid" are the (nearly) ordinary articulation of this library. These are the LCO Vivid Violins alone:



Together with the six violins of the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) Chamber Strings, they resulted in a too big ensemble (despite the much lower volume I mixed the VSLs in):



On the contrary, only two of the VSL Dimension Violins worked fine, with the right ensemble size and the LCO timbre prevailing in the mix:



The VSL Dimension Violins alone, with the performance trill patch selected; there is some apparent phasing, but this is typical of this particular library, exhibiting its full beauty only when everybody is playing together:



All of them placed in the Teldex wide via MIR. No patch changes, only the raw ones.

Tags: strings, virtual instruments