Cloud Viola

Master Effects

• High and Low pass filters with resonance
• Three band equaliser
• Rotary speaker emulator
• BPM synced tape delay
• Morphing EQ
• 11 Speaker cabinet emulators
• Filth control
• Master unison control for up to eight voices per note.
• Velocity to volume amount control.
• Aftertouch to pitchbend amount control.
• Aftertouch to filter light/dark control.
• Advanced architecture with automatable midi control of everything on the interface.
• Data readout window shows useful settings of each tweakable control
• Built in instruction manual in RTFM tab
  
  Send effects
• Tempo synced tape delay per group
• 74 specially created convolution reverb impulses recorded from real spaces, expensive hardware and some less obvious sources including spring reverbs, tape delay, reversed impulses, software models, radio, vinyl and the stage of Glyndebourne Opera House.

Effects per 'oscillator'

• ADSR
• low pass filter
• high pass filter
• tremolo with BPM tempo sync plus fade and LFO shape control
• EQ
• tape saturation
• pitch selection
• pan
• reverb send and delay send.

A Cloud Viola happens when you ditch the conventional viola bow and look for something else to stimulate the strings.

After much experimentation I discovered that a ball of course green garden string sounded 'best', but stringing a standard bow with garden twine doesnt work, you'd need an impossible 10 metre bow to play a smooth note (I know it's impossible because I tried). After many experiments a retractable dog lead came to the rescue. It can hold long lengths of twine under tension and when fixed to one end of the studio it can allow the twine to be drawn evenly over the viola string.

Another week perfecting the art of dogbowing and recording hundreds and hundreds of dogbowed, accented and col legno notes it was all starting to make sense and fortunately sounding pretty good too. The final step was to push each note 100% wet through a bespoke swirly setting on my Strymon Big Sky reverb pedal, and then do the same thing all over again with different settings for 200% wetness.

Voila the Cloud Viola !

The new version, Cloud Viola² adds a deeply multi-sampled plucked palm muted articulation, 6 new effected 'clouds' and 3 grain oscillators with snazzy XY pad control.

NOTE: CLOUD VIOLA² will load into Kontakt Player but time out after 10 minutes, so please don't buy this unless you are using the FULL version of Kontakt 5.6.8

• One Kontakt .nki instrument
• 60 snapshots
• 3GB of 24bit samples (uncompressed)
• 2.5GB download
• Three octave keyrange - G2 to A5
• Requires FULL Kontakt 5.6.8 or above - Not for Kontakt Player

• Accent Bow: bowed with a real bow, five round robins per note - recorded with large diaphragm valve condensor mic
• Grain Bow: bowed with a real bow, five round robins per note - played through granular oscillator with XY pad control of playback speed and grain size
• Palm Mute: plucked and muted with palm of the hand - AKG C414 large diaphragm condensor mic- five round robins per note with up to 22 levels of velocity per note
• Grain Legno: Latin for 'gently thwacked with the back of the bow', five round robins per note - played through granular oscillator with XY pad control of playback speed and grain size
• Black Twine Bow: bowed with five meters of coarse green garden string, five round robins per note - recorded with large diaphragm valve condensor mic 
• White Twine Bow: bowed with five meters of coarse green garden string, five round robins per note - recorded AKG C411 contact mic 
• Grain Cloud: Black Twine Bow recorded 100% wet through Strymon Big Sky hardware reverb - played through granular oscillator with XY pad control of playback speed and grain size 
• White Cloud: six selectable multi-sampled and heavily processed viola sample sets - cloud, sad cloud, bit cloud, vox cloud, jitter cloud, pain cloud