Hello Guys!
Thank you so much for your kind words!
This library was a really a fun project to work with, but maybe the longest project that we'd worked on, because it was like more than 20 days in a recording studio with lots of different musicians, and an almost endless quantity of articulations and sounds to edit.
Here's my long reply I've finished writing on vi-control:
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Hello guys!
Thank you for your awesome comments on Cartoon Maestro!
Yes, we've realized the lack of more information about the library when it was too late!
In the meantime:
Here's the Manual
https://www.fluffyaudio.com/wp-content/ ... Manual.pdf
Then: we are working on two Walkthroughs: one for the Ensemble Patches and the other for the Solo Instrument Patches. They should be ready in a few days.
Basically, the point of this library was to explore all the crazy and funny sounds that have become iconic in many of our childhood shows. After all the work on these solo instruments - no legato articulations (sad trombone sound), but like 25+ different articulations per instrument for many instruments - we've created a solid and diverse palette of sounds to score animation music.
I know about the few other animation libraries and I love them all. With Cartoon Maestro we tried to give more refined and granular control and versatility, by not forcing the user to a certain instrument combination, thus enabling the composer to paint the most diverse musical solutions.
While working with the library we've realized that the fun of old Cartoon music derives from the combination and juxtaposition of very different and contrasting sounds. Different instruments, different dynamics, different musical moments. That's why a single Tuba sound can be funny, but only up to a certain point. And that's why we thought about creating the Ensemble patches: they can be used in very different ways, as an inspirational tool to score a scene, as a complement to more refined parts built with the Solo Instruments, or they can be effectively "played" because they feature multiple velocities and round robins as the articulations that they are using.
Every Ensemble articulation loads up to 5 different instruments/articulations. They are internally driven by a little MIDI composition done by us and thus they can be tempo synced to your DAW.
So they behave a little differently than a single sample with embedded orchestration (we'll show you better in the video).
This is the list of the instruments contained in the library:
Bass Drum (2 articulations)
Bassoon (23 articulations)
Clarinet (29 articulations)
Cymbals (2 articulations)
Doublebass (Arco/Pizzicato) (27 + 6 articulations)
Flute (26 articulations)
Glockenspiel (4 articulations)
Harp (9 articulations)
Lapsteel Guitar (1 articulation)
Marimba (4 articulations)
Percussion (2 articulations)
Piccolo (20 articulations)
Snare Drum (2 articulations)
Timpani (5 articulations)
Trombone (Normal and Muted) (29 + 6 articulations)
Trumpet (Normal and Muted) (24 + 13 articulations)
Tuba (25 articulations)
Vibraphone (5 articulations)
Violin (Arco/Pizzicato) (29 + 3 articulations)
Xylophone (4 articulations)
This is the list of the Ensemble Patches:
Accordion Effect 150
Anger 120
Cartoon Staccato
Chromatic 142
Danger 104
Diminished 80
Dizzy Stars 150
Dreaming 121
Ending 124
Falls 120
Fatigue 120
Head Bump 134
Idea 120
Laughter 120
Leaping Out 120
Little Pal 120
Little Runs 132
Multi - High
Multi - Low
Opening 125
Peeping Out 134
Slipping 120
Stretch 120
Suspense 120
The Chase 143
The Giant 80
Victory 120
Wink 120
(the number is the "ideal" BPM of the Patch).
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There's more: we are planning for a quick update to introduce a feature that's missing at the moment in the Solo Instruments: the ability to change the speed (and assign it to any CC) of all the "timed" articulations, like Ornaments, Runs, Grace Notes and Descriptions. This is a fairly essential feature but we've just recently figured it out how to implement it in a way that it doesn't tax the RAM too much.
Descriptions are a super nice articulation, available in most of the melodic instrument that is basically us asking the performer to interpret a scene like: "Imagine a cat falling down the stairs", "imagine a big Elephant walking", "Imagine and a 16T Weight falling down the sky". There are hundreds of these moments and they are also featured as WAVs that anyone can drag & drop around.
So if you can't find a specific absurd instrument sound in the normal articulations, it is likely that you can find it in the Descriptions.
Also in the Description there are little tunes that have been historically featured in the genre, like:
Brahms Lullaby, Shave and a Haircut, Seven Note Vaudeville Fanfare, Spring Song, Morning of Peer Gynt, Over the Waves... These pieces have been performed by the performer, so they've interpreted them according to their taste.
We'll have a few walkthroughs in a few days. Thank you!
One note: while the library can be certainly used alone to score an animation project, I believe that it could do wonders in combination with any tool you currently own. Since it's made of solo instruments and feature a quite versatile sound (thanks to the 3 mic positions and a not-to-wet base sound), it should be easy to embed with any other orchestral libraries that you currently own.
Our demos feature only sounds from Cartoon Maestro, but we're eager to hear your works with it!
