Woodwinds, the mellow and warm side of the orchestra. The Sustain Woodwinds SFZ library consists of:

• 4 Flutes
• 4 Oboes
• 4 Clarinets
• 4 Bassoons

Although woodwinds are more commonly used for solo melody parts, they can also be used in unison sections to get that big sound that remains mellow, gentle and warm. Even if it is possible to use multiple solo woodwinds to form a chord, having multiple unison woodwinds gives more timbral possibilities in your orchestration. This allows the instruments to have a supporting harmonic role or have more volume in melodies, making it more balanced with the strings and brass.

Obtaining the library

The SFZ library is available in 3 variants:

• Full version at Gumroad (7.5 USD). Chromatically sampled with borrowed velocity layers in wav format. This is also bundled with other instruments at a lower combined price.
• Lite version at Sampleism (1.99 GBP). Sampled at minor thirds and in wav format.
• Lite version at Gumroad (Free or pay what-you-want). Sampled at minor thirds and in lossy compressed ogg format.

All samples are stereo and at 44.1 kHz. The wav samples are 16bit. All samples are looped in the SFZ file.

Note: Some key-mappings in the lite versions are slightly altered to avoid some noise-like qualities that can result when certain woodwinds notes are time stretched.

General Usage

Plogue sforzando, Cakewalk sfz capable plug-ins or the Linux Sampler may be used in your favorite DAW or live host.

Mastering suggestions

Use of reverb and equalization is recommended. For maximum versatility, the audio samples themselves are kept dry and unprocessed as much as possible. However, to make the SFZ library more playable “out-of-the-box”, SFZ opcodes have been used to low pass filter the samples. Using SFZ opcodes avoids the need to modify the audio sample files and gives users more freedom as SFZ text files are easy to edit. Filtering can be tweaked as desired by modifying “filter2_type” and “cutoff2” parameters within the SFZ scripts.