MegaMagic: Viola (O2|Unify)

For this library, I was fortunate enough to hire Mary Rowell to play her 2007 Sean Peak viola at a session I produced in December, 2017, The session was recorded at Dog Fish Studios in Portland Oregon by studio owner and engineering master, Drew Canullette. The sessions were eye openers for all 3 of us – while I had recorded Cello in 2016 for MegaMagic: Cello, the temperament, tonality and range of sounds you can produce from a viola is quite different than from a cello! Because of Mary’s skills we were able to end the session with some truly amazing sounds to work with from her viola.

We were able to come away with 11 variations/articulations for the viola:

Vibrato, no vibrato, crescendo, down/up stroke, pizzicato, spicatto up stroke, spicatto down stroke, marcato, motion slow, motion fast, motion harmonics, motion whisper and 4 composite sounds made by combining MegaMagic: Cello, MegaMagic: Pads, MegaMagic: Bells & Winds, Del Norte and Viola samples to create: Regalscape, Dreamscape, Flutterscape and Pizzicatoscape.

The 11 main articulations come in 3 different treatments: Dry, Ambient (AMB) and MegaMagic (MM). Dry is the original recordings. Ambient are processed to sound like a concert hall reverb is recorded into the samples. MegaMagic are processed with 3 unique reverbs to create a lush 12 second reverb that rings out with a “magical quality” that is a trademark of all 9 MegaMagic libraries we have produced to date.

Sound editing for this library included minimal noise reduction and even using Melodyne to control pitch on some of the more difficult to play samples. There are a total of 330 samples in this library and the download is 640MB in size (750MB uncompressed).

The final addition that makes this library truly special is the fact that – just like MegaMagic: Cello – I was able to include my customers in the voicing for the library. I created a $2 demo version of this library which contains 16 of the 330 samples in the full library. (still available HERE) that customers could purchase. They had 2+ weeks to create patches and get them back to me for possible inclusion in the library. Over 200 patches were submitted and in the end, over 25 programmers other than myself contributed to this beautiful library. The DEMO version is still available and contains everybody’s patches in their un-edited form. I then selected less than 1/2 of those, modified if necessary (many of my customers are VERY GOOD programmers so some patches needed very little editing) and added them to the library. Very happy with how this library turned out – useful for so many different genres!