Westwood Instruments – Viola Untamed (KONTAKT)

VIOLA UNTAMED, often described as a stringed instrument that sounds closest to the human voice, speaks in your music. In the fourth part of our Untamed series, we have recorded 3 octaves and 333 unique, individual improvised performances.

From soulful and fragile murmurs to impassioned and feverish cries. Not for the traditionalist, and not for the faint of heart. This is for fans of alternative scores and inspired by composers like Johann Johannsson, Hildur Gu? Nadottir, Jed Kurzel and Jonny Greenwood.

With the same unique feature-set as the rest of the Untamed series, including Storms; a powerful articulation which can creates crescendos, from a solo performance to a frenetic ensemble. As well as all of the this, there are 9 other classic long and short note articulations which complement the other instruments in the series.

It’s here to inspire your writing and is really at home with minimalist compositions where tone and sound do more talking than melody.

USER INTERFACE
Everything to hand
As with all our custom designed interfaces, we want you to have a
logical and clear layout with everything to hand.

To help you easily understand the instrument, you can hover over
any control and instructions appear in the info panel of the
Kontakt wind

STORMS ARTICULATION
This isn’t a swarm,
it’s a storm.
Storms allows you to fade from single fragile notes to a frenzy
of Violas.

Great for creating tension before launching your score into a
chaotic crescendo.

Subwoofer not included
Included in the instrument is a trick weve been using for a
long time with strings; sine waves. Adding a simple sine wave
thickens up the natural sound of strings. We call this Glue as
it fills in the gaps and cements the mix.

To give this the Westwood edge, we sampled every pitch of a sine
wave across the 3 octaves of a viola through 1 * reel-to-reel tape.
This takes away the sterile nature of a pure sine wave and makes it
feel more organic. There’s two versions to use; one at the regular
pitch and an o8vbo version, which pitch shifts the wave an entire
octave down.

PULSE
To add movement to an otherwise static signal, the Pulse section
brings a sense of underlying motion.

You can control the intensity of the pulse and the rate which is
synced to the tempo to your composition.

EFFECTS
We’ve added a low pass filter which you can use to smooth off the
top end for a deeper and more subtle sound.

Use the Grit control if you need to roughen up the sound.

DYNAMICS
Control the dynamics independently or with the expression so the
level rides in tandem with the main performance.

There’s also a master volume control so you can precisely blend
in the amount you need.

What’s included
• Improvisations A1
• Improvisations A2 (Alternative start)
• Improvisations B1
• Improvisations B2 (Alternative start)
• Improvisations C1
• Improvisations C2 (Alternative start)

• Storms

• Glue
• Glue 8vb

• Normale
• Flautando
• Sul Pont
• Tremolo
• Circular Bowing

• Spiccato (6 round robins, 3 velocity layers)
• Pizzicato inc. Bartok (6 round robins, 4 velocity layers)

You can use the interface to easily combine any number of
articulations to create interesting textures and some unusual
combinations. We love the sound of several of the Improvisations
together, which feels like a small chamber sized section of Violas
all doing their own thing whilst flowing in and out of unison.

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