LCO Producer Strings, Deep Felt Piano and Augmented Choirs – Sounds and Presets
Plus some brilliant freebies from blecksaudio
This week’s Sounds and Presets features classical samples, including LCO Producer Strings, a felt piano from Soniccouture and a new choir package from UVI.
Sounds and Presets
LCO Producer Strings for Kontakt by Native Instruments
String libraries. Ten a penny these days, aren’t they? Every time I see a new one launch, it is usually met with some rolled eyes and disappointment when I see that it really is just more of the same. But just recently, it seems that library developers are increasingly looking to do things differently.
LCO Producer Strings is one such library that stands out for a number of reasons. Firstly, it samples the sounds of the enigmatic London Contemporary Orchestra. As their name suggests, this isn’t your traditional, classical ensemble. They are very much a forward-thinking, rule-breaking group of very talented musicians.
Their work is all over tracks by Taylor Swift, Radiohead, Justice and Foals, to name but a few. They’ve also featured on major film and TV productions, such as Deadpool & Wolverine, and video games like Call of Duty. They are a true 21st-century orchestra.
And it is this innovation and daring attitude that is captured in LCO Producer Strings. The instrument features a four-layer engine, allowing you to layer up violins, cellos and violas with synths to create a really new and interesting blend. And it isn’t just traditional articulations and styles either.
LCO Producer Strings captures the bold performance styles that the LCO are known for. There’s also a raft of effects and spaces to choose from, and a decent number of presets, filterable by instrument and character to enable ease of use.
LCO Producer Strings is available for Kontakt Free Player and the full version of Kontakt and is also fully optimised for NKS. You can buy it now for a mere €99/£88/$97!
Deep Felt for Kontakt by Soniccouture
Another sample library type that has been done to death is the dear old piano. It is rare for a piano library to come along and genuinely do something different. I mean, you can only prepare a piano so much, and all the big boys have been sampled within an inch of their lives.
Recent piano libraries have featured felt pianos quite a bit, almost certainly driven by their use in many dreamy pop songs. So you might think that Soniccouture’s Deep Felt is just another felt piano that you don’t need. And you’d be wrong.
What sets Deep Felt apart is the depth of sampling employed. It features 18 velocity layers, dual mic positions, mechanical adjustment layers and sympathetic resonance. I personally won’t entertain a piano sample library that doesn’t feature the sounds of the mechanics of the instrument, so this was very nice to see.
All of the mechanicals, including the felts, are completely user-adjustable, allowing the user to dial in the sound they want, quickly and easily. It comes with 36 built-in presets and occupies around 6.4GB of hard drive space. All samples were captured at 24/48 in stereo.
Deep Felt is a truly playable, authentic and inspiring library to play, and its beautiful user interface makes it very easy to adjust and tailor your sound perfectly. Deep Felt is currently available for just £83 until November 4th 2025, after which it rises to £119.
blecks.box for Kontakt by blecksaudio
Who doesn’t like a freebie? I know I do! So when the team at blecksaudio reached out to me with their new project I was all ears! Already well known for their ‘Distinction’ and ‘Motion’ libraries, blecksaudio have won awards for their innovative instruments.
Now they’ve turned their hand to providing musicians with some carefully crafted and curated instruments that are free to download and free to use. So far, the blecks.box contains six different instruments, but they tell me they plan to add to these going forward.
Two of the libraries are demo versions of ‘Motion’ and ‘Distinction’, so you can effectively try before you buy. The other four libraries cover pizzicato strings, claps, sine waves and a ‘sand guitar’. This guitar is not played by hand, but by pouring sand over the strings!
The Clap! instrument is a very fun pack that allows you to generate human clapping sounds in an easy-to-use interface. ‘Just Low Sine’ is, at its heart, a simple additive synth that uses four sine waves that can be mixed and shaped in realtime.
Pizzicato Strings is a very simple, yet effective collection of single cello and violin samples with built-in effects. I love these kinds of collections because they always offer something unique, simple and very effective. You can download any or all of the boxes directly from the blecksaudio website.
Augmented Choirs for UVI Falcon/Workstation by UVI
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twice already in this week’s edition of Sounds and Presets, but choir libraries can be a bit “samey’. I mean, there are some amazing choir sample libraries out there, with the ability to string formants and words together.
Others focus on gender and age, or combinations thereof. So it is nice to see UVI take choirs on with a nice twist that isn’t complicated but remains powerful and hugely evocative. Augmented Choirs is a brilliant new addition to their already vast catalogue of content for the Falcon and Workstation instruments.
Augmented Choirs gathers up choir samples from a large, mixed choir, captured with a wide range of intonations and styles, including classical, Georgian, folk, studio and solo voices. These are complemented with synth textures to bolster and enhance the human voices.
Up to four layers can be combined, each with its own octave and range settings and processed through UVI’s comprehensive FX section. You can also adjust modulation, filters and FX at a layer level too. There’s a sequencer that allows you to build evolving textures.
Samples can be filtered by type or style, and there’s a super useful harmoniser which allows you to select your key and scale to easily build your choirs more easily. UVI’s Augmented Choirs is a really powerful yet affordable choir library that delivers some stunning vocal textures at a super price.
You can buy Augmented Choirs now for just 50% off at €99 until October 12th, when it will rise to its full price of €199. Of course, if you’re a UVI SonicPass subscriber, you will find Augmented Choir already available to download from the UVI portal.
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