The Trombone

The Trombone package includes several instruments belonging to the same family:

• Two Tenor trombones characterized by slightly different timbre, timing, vibrato & portamento behaviour, suitable for ensemble playing.
• One Valve trombone.
• One Bass trombone, based on completely independent samples.

The playing range corresponds to that of a top professional player, which is E1 – F4 (Tenor & Valve), and Bb-1 – Bb3 (Bass), respectively. Each trombone may be played with several mutes, including Straight, Bucket, Cup, Harmon (with or without stem). A virtually moving plunger is also available for wah-wah effects.

The Trombone family expands Samplemodeling technologies beyond the original limits. Multi-microphone anechoic recording, coupled to a specially devised "early reflections" impulse response, allows to reproduce the full, rich timbre of the instrument including its radiation pattern, adding at same time a controllable virtual space to the anechoic sound.

The real trombone is one of the few wind instruments that can produce a true glissando up to six semitones. Though very difficult to obtain with a sample-based instrument, the effect of the slide has been perfectly reproduced by a novel application of the "Harmonic Alignment" technology.

Other features include velocity remapping and automatic compensation of the non-linear velocity response of the keyboard, pseudo-random detuning, based on real performance-derived trends, GUI monitoring and remapping of all controllers, optimized breath and wind controller modes. Performance keyswitches yielding modeled (rather than sampled) articulations and phrasing, greatly facilitate the task of the player. Sforzato, crescendo, slide effects, vibrato-like endings, different types of release, split portamento, falls & doits can be obtained by hitting one or more keyswitches.

The result is a user-friendly virtual instrument with few MIDI controllers, which can be played in real time or from a sequencer, in standalone mode or as a plug-in, for Windows or Mac OS X. The played phrases are now virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

{See video at top of page}