Whispering Winds is the latest addition to Scorehub, a valuable source of free instruments, interviews, and advice for composers.
It’s not long since we covered the last Scorehub freebie, Delicate Strings, and if Sonixinema continues at this rate, it’ll be a complete composers toolkit soon enough.
Whispering Winds shares many things with Delicate Strings: the sound quality and presets are remarkable, it takes elements from a premium product (in this case, Wind Shades), and it utilizes the same user interface.
Whispering Winds features a twelve-piece chamber woodwind ensemble and the same undulating character we got from Delicate Strings.
The library is 1.3 GB installed and requires the free Kontakt Play 8.
You get the master patch plus four presets, each offering slightly different variations of the general undulating character.
The Global section on the left of the GUI is where you might do most of the tweaking on the fly with the Proximity, Expression, and Dynamics sliders. These controls can humanize the performance further for a more realistic sound. You also have Blur and Gloss knobs, functioning as lowpass and highpass filters.
The next tab, Mix, allows you to blend the microphone groups (close, mid, far, and ambient) to fine-tune the sound.
On the right side of the GUI, we have three more tabs: FX, EQ, and Envelope. The FX tab features the same Degrade function as Delicate Strings, offering something slightly different.
But, in keeping with the traditional woodwind sound for now, this library does it amazingly well. As a young student, I never understood the importance of woodwinds in scoring; like many others, I was more concerned about arranging strings (with terrible VSTs of the time), and sometimes, that’s enough.
However, woodwinds are often the heart-melting element of a great score and the thing that elevates it beyond average. What I love about this library is it has the traditional heartwarming nature, but the performance is modern and suitable for cutting-edge TV, games, etc.
If you want to be more cutting-edge, you can open the Gater page (upper part of the interface) and create anything from slow pulsing textures to glitchy, rhymic pads. I believe the Gater is a great way to use woodwinds in less obvious genres and morph between traditional and non-traditional composition styles.
I’m a sucker for orchestral libraries anyway, but these recent Sonixinema freebies are raising the bar.
Download: Whispering Woodwinds (FREE – Kontakt Play 8 required)
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