Spitfire Audio’s Appassionata Strings Has “Impulse Legato” Tech

Very smooth transitions between dynamic layers, using the modwheel (or other MIDI CC)

Spitfire keeps digging up new ways to raise the level of sampled strings. Recently they released Frozen Strings. And now you just have to watch the video walkthrough to get a sense of what their latest, Appassionata Strings, sounds like. Spoiler: not the least bit bad.

This is how Spitfire puts it (the only change is that the font is normal-sized here, so we’re taking the liberty of inserting some paragraphs to break it up):

“…to tunnel down into what inspired Spitfire Audio to make SPITFIRE APPASSIONATA STRINGS as inspirational as it is. Readily referencing the aesthetic of classic melodies from the scores of celebrated composers like John Williams and fellow American Thomas Newman, this medium-sized (8,6,6,6,4) string band duly delivers a much-sought-after performance style that is now anyone’s for the taking — to the point where the sound-specialising British music technology company collectively considers this to be simply the best sounding and most alive, passionate string legato sound captured thus far. For SPITFIRE APPASSIONATA STRINGS allows those who work with it to compose with emotion, intention, inspiration, and, of course, passion.

“Delving deeper still, Spitfire Audio’s so-called Impulse Legato recording technique has resulted in a wide variety of detailed legato types being offered in SPITFIRE APPASSIONATA STRINGS, such that the main ‘combi’ patch features a combination of slurred, bowed, and intense Sul I intervals — albeit available only in Violins 1, Violins 2, and Cellos — with repetition-based alt-attacks.

“These techniques offer five dynamic layers, delivering incredibly smooth and expressive performances, four round robin attacks, vibrato, and velocity-switching between legato types.

“There’s a huge amount of clever stuff going on under the hood here,” Paul Thomson concedes, continuing: “We’ve captured these five dynamic layers in such a way as to really maximise the potential for these kind of singing, passionate lines, and that extends from the whisper-quiet pp level all the way up to the full-throated, absolute fortissimo, with all the detail in between.

“You can ride the mod wheel to get through the different dynamic layers, and that works really well just on the basic setting, but we’ve got some new tech in here on the dynamic front, which is called dynamics smoothing [DYN SMOOTHING]; if set to RELAXED, travel through the dynamics is much smoother, and so if you’re playing something where you really want to be able to ride the mod wheel — without worrying too much about those layers — then the dynamics smoothing will help you to not have to worry quite so much about where you’re crossing over the transitions, and it does a really clever job of smoothing all of that stuff out.”

Price: £199.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/$249.00 USD/€249.00 EUR (inc. VAT), but there’s a discount running for the next couple of weeks

Product page, click here