Heavyocity NOVO: Modern Strings $549

US-based Heavyocity started as a sound-design and composition company, though it wasn’t long before they began creating their own virtual instruments geared primarily toward the tight deadlines of the TV, film, ad and game industries. A number of their products are included with Native Instruments’ Komplete bundle, and they garnered much praise for Gravity and its spin-off libraries. They now return with the - even bigger - Novo: Modern Strings.

This 38GB Kontakt-based instrument is presented in two forms: In its ‘Traditional’ guise, it’s aimed at being a straightforward section-based string library, with each section containing five or more articulations. These were are all recorded at the famed Eastwood Scoring Stage and sound as good as you would expect. The interface makes articulation selection, bowing and other performance/playback elements easy to control and tweak. Bass and cello sections bring clustered playing styles, whilst violins and violas get their own extra ‘High Ensemble Textures’ instrument of less common articulations.

The other side of Novo can be found in the Evolved folder, where String Designer facilitates a bunch of layering and step sequencing options - combined with additional processed samples - to create a powerful hybrid sound engine that can trigger, glitch, filter and distort things even further. This expands the Novo sound palette massively, and makes it useful across a wide range of genres.

Finally, Loop Designer takes a library of 400 full audio loops, covering conventional and processed string content, and combines them into a complex, tempo-locked, transposable, multi-layered instrument.

Novo isn’t cheap, though it could easily replace two or three existing combined Kontakt libraries to cover the same sonic territory. However, and particularly for those yet to take the plunge with an existing heigh-quality orchestral string library, Novo should keep you happy for a long time to come. Bruce Aisher www.heavyocity.com VERDICT 8.9