Bohemian Violin Expansion 1 is the latest release by VirHarmonic. Building off of the first release in the Soul Capture Series, Bohemian Violin Exp. 1 features a ton of new content ranging from new articulations to fully designed playing styles called “Moods.”  This library was developed for the UVI Workstation and it offers composers the ability to plug and play without the need for key-switching. Bohemian Violin Expansion 1 retails for 199.00€ and you can learn more by checking it out at VirHarmonic.

 

“This library simply performs like a real instrument. The Bohemian Violin gives me the power to plug and just play solo violin lines with virtuosity and emotion without having to spend hours tweaking Midi CC messages.  VirHarmonic’s concepts and approach with this series is all about capturing the soul of the performer and instrument and you can really hear the life this instrument has built into it. This is one hell of a library!”

 

 

Pros and Cons

Let’s just start with the con (singular). This library was developed in the UVI Workstation which is not a very popular sampler for 3rd party development. Because of this, you will not have access to a lot of behind the scenes editing that you are accustomed to with Kontakt.  This is honestly the only negative criticism I had for this library. That feeling lasted for the first 10 minutes when I was setting everything up. After that, I couldn’t care less about which sampler this library was in because I did not have to deal with it. This library was simply designed extremely well and takes the guess work out of the composer so you can focus on creating.

VirHarmonic recently released the Expansion 1 version of this library. In it, you get the original released version as well as the updated Exp. 1 patch which offers a lot more from what was originally released. In its current form, the Bohemian Violin offers 3 types of playing styles called Moods which are performance based legato patches that have built in programming to determines which articulations will be triggered. This is all based on how you play. Speed, Velocity, and note duration all effect what this script triggers. If you don’t want to play with those built in Moods, you can simply key-switch, via a toggle or latch mode, to all of the various articulations. This is especially useful when needing to reach for those articulations that are not included in the Moods such as Spiccato and Portamento.

I’ve used a lot of solo violins out there and they almost always start with a long period of frustration as I figure out the built in workflow or how to customize them to my own playing style. Bohemian Violin is the first that has completely taken that process out of the equation for me. Once I was able to sit down and start working with this library, I fell in love. It’s true that this library have a very specific color and character but, at the end of the day, its all about creating music and this library can do that extremely well. Compared to the rest of the market, Bohemian Violin is competitively priced and on track to have 3 more expansions added which will include more articulations and Moods.  Check it out over at VirHarmonic.

Review Disclaimer: This review is not sponsored. All thoughts and views expressed in this review are honest and 100% based on my own experience with this product. This library was kindly sent to me by the developers for review.