With BOwTOWN Express™ – Pop Violins, Fable Sounds continues to revolutionize virtual instruments.

With the BOwTOWN series, we faithfully recreate the familiar sound of string sections in the most iconic albums of popular music of all time, in diverse genres, including pop, rock, R&B, folk, funk, disco, and beyond.

Recorded with top Los Angeles musicians through a pristine no-compromise signal flow, faithfully recreating the most iconic pop strings sound in music history, from the acoustically perfect room, through the right combination of microphones, preamplifiers and convertors, and with a flawlessly transparent noise reduction post processing, BOwTOWN Express – Pop Violins sounds like no other strings library or a virtual instrument. It sounds and plays like the real thing.

Utilizing Fable Sounds’ patented articulation switching system, as well as our new Virtual Concert Master, the many articulations are all accessible in real-time from a single patch, and can be switched fluidly, connecting them together like only live musicians can.

BOwTOWN Express is pop strings finally done right!

Utilizing a new method, we do not layer, blend and crossfade between dynamics like most strings libraries do. Instead, we morph dynamic layers smoothly into one another creating a virtually infinite amount of dynamics, from PP to FFF.

By default, you get the full dynamic range of the real instruments, but if that is too much (and in Pop, it sometimes might be), you can easily reduce the dynamic range of the instrument with the Dynamic Range knob on the interface.

For those of you, who like to ride levels (separately from dynamics) using MIDI CC 11, we’ve got you covered as well, using the Amplitude knob, which can shift the amplitude up or down by 15db. The knob is connected to MIDI CC 11 by default. That said, we don’t believe using that knob with this library is necessary, as the dynamics control via the modulation wheel is very effective. It’s there for you nevertheless.

The entire extended range of each string has been recorded, with the first violins reaching all the way up to the high C at the top of the 88-key keyboard, played at the very physical end of the violin fingerboard.

This also means that through most of the range, each note can be played on various different strings, and as you play, you can choose which of them you prefer. They are all recorded and available.

Our Virtual Concert Master automatically chooses the string for you, based on context, but you can easily override the automatic string selection as you play.

All attacks, shorts and release samples were recorded in both bow directions, for increased expressive expression and realism. Bow directions are automatically selected by the Virtual Concert Master, but can be manually overridden via key-switch.

We know that everybody works differently, and everyone has their own gear and their own workflow. To make it easy for you to integrate BOwTOWN Express – Pop Violins into your workflow, and optimize it for use with your gear, we also offer the option for user-created presets, to coordinate MIDI CC assignment, and other preferences, right from inside of the instrument. You can even create different presets for different setups you use. For example, you might have an 88-key keyboard in the studio, and might use a smaller keyboard on the go, for travel or live shows. We’ve got you covered. You can create and save as many presets as you want, and get the instrument to respond in the most optimal way for your current setup and workflow.

This instrument includes real slur Legato transitions at various speeds, from a properly slow, lush Legato, through agile Ostinato-style Legato, and all the way to playable runs that can truly be played at speeds no other strings library has been able to play realistically before.

But it doesn’t stop there. We also recorded Legato-to-Short, Legato-to-Short with accent, and runs to short. Then there are the Portamento, and the Slide-Legato…

You will have no shortage of note transition types, articulating every nuance to your heart’s content.

As with our Broadway series, generally, the only audio processing our recordings go through, is very careful noise reduction, and levels optimization. This means that the raw audio you get is extremely flexible when mixing it, as it is practically raw.

That said, sometimes you might want an instrument to sound perfect right out of the box, without having to fiddle with it in the mix. For that, we’ve added the mixing presets.

We provide several mixing presets in various styles, and in many cases, we indicate the titles of the song that inspired those presets, to make it easy to know what to expect.

In BOwTOWN Express – Pop Violins, we are introducing the Virtual Concert Master.

It enables automating many of the choices that strings players have to constantly make, which a keyboard player is not used to making, such as string selection. bow direction, and many more.

As a result of it, we can enable a lot more control than exists in any other virtual strings, because the choices are done automatically by default, but can be manually overridden with ease.

Some unique controls are:

• Vibrato speed
• Tremolo and trills speed
• Shorts length
• String selection override
• Bow direction override
• Bow Change during a Legato phrase
• Managed Detache
• Dynamic selection of attack and release types
• Fluid switching and activation of articulations such as starting to trill from an ongoing note, etc