The Sunbird library is based on a 1962 Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar and is delivered in UVI format.
The Hummingbird guitar was created in 1960 by Gibson and was the first square-shouldered dreadnought. It was designed to be extremely versatile so that it can cover many music genres and have a deep tone without being too powerful, which is perfect to accompany a voice.
This is exactly in this spirit that we sampled it, together with our powerful strum, pattern and song engine, the Sunbird library is the perfect tool to create accompaniments. We recorded it with a pair of DPA microphones to get a detailed stereo perspective, with a U87 to capture the Bass and a precise mono perspective and using a contact pickup in case you want to put the library through an amp simulation plugin.
We sampled it very deeply, all frets of all strings with upstrokes, downstrokes, round robins, releases, staccatos, mutes, palm mutes, hand blocks, slides, hammer ons, pull offs, retriggers, fretnoises, percussions other articulations. All of these details allow us to reproduce the real playing of a guitar player, and easily.
There are basically 4 modes (that you can choose using key-switches, G5 to C6), the solo mode that allows to play melodies, the chord mode that helps playing strums or picking very easily, the patterns mode that does all of the strumming or picking for you and the MIDI mode that allows you to use your preferred midi guitar controller.
The Sunbird can strum, in various ways, up, down, muted, in legato and allows finger picking. Everything is modeled after meticulously analyzing thousands of real chords played by guitarist. Every aspect of the strumming engine can be tweaked to achieve the sound you want.
The chord recognition engine helps converting any chord you play on your keyboard to a real guitar voicing. Recognizing a chord is made through a database of thousands of standard chords, and you can edit every chord or even add new ones.
The chord hammers feature lets you play left hand hammer ons and pull offs while strumming or picking.
The patterns mode is very similar to the chord mode, the chord recognition engine works the same way, but this time the triggers are not simple strums anymore, they are a set of patterns that you can loop, adapt to the tempo or the metrics, change the velocity in real time using a controller, synch to your host, add groove to.
You can choose from a large selection of patterns or create your using the pattern maker and assign them to each trigger to create a full song in a few clicks.
Creating realistic guitar patterns has never been easier. You can create strumming, picking, or finger picking patterns in seconds and even make them of an infinite size.
We even made the sharing of these patterns easy, just save them and send them to other users, the database can only grow!
The song builder panel is the feature that will let you compose songs extremely quickly. Sometimes playing a series of chords can be complicated, especially if you are not an advanced keyboardist. The song builder allows you to decide which chord will be triggered when selecting only one note. For example pressing only the C will be recognized as a C Major. You can repeat the operation for the whole 12 notes of the octave and this way construct your songs and play them easily.
We included a selection of presets to give song ideas, chord progressions, modes or chord types. Combine this with the patterns and pressing two keys at the same time is enough to play a song.
The solo mode is very simple, and is suited to play melodies. It uses a smart hand position system that decides for you where a real guitarist would put his hand and which string he would play. A piano only has one middle C for example, but a guitar offers a few different options and our script will decide it for you. You can of course deactivate it and use only the first hand position if you want.
The Sunbird features our powerful legato engine that will automatically trigger legato, hammer ons, pull offs, or slides and the legato distance will define the maximum interval in which the legato will apply.
You also have access to key switches to play palm mutes, harmonics (flageolets) or even percussion sounds and control the legato engine.
The Sunbird library comes with 3 microphones perspectives, a stereo pair of DPA and you can adjust the volume of each of them. Every aspect of the library can be tweaked, the release, fret and pre-notes volumes, as well as the midi response of your keyboard.
A three band EQ and a reverb module can be adjusted from the preferences panel, and you can enable and load/unload the pickup or the microphones.
If you own a MIDI guitar and want to expand its sound capabilities, then the MIDI mode is for you, all you need to do is select the 7 different MIDI chanels your guitar outputs and you are ready to play
Tech Specs
- UVI Player version 2.6.5 or higher
- iLok authorization to dongle or computer
- Mac 10.7+, Windows 7 or higher
- Standalone, VST, AU, AAX , 32 and 64 bit
- 8.16Gb uncompressed, 1.53Gb compressed in lossless flac format, around 13300 samples.
- Strumming engine (features chord recognition and a smart strumming technique to produce guitar-like chords) and complete control of all its parameters.
- 67 realistic patterns for easy strumming, picking and advanced playing styles.
- Integrated song builder to create songs within minutes and very easily
- Integrated pattern builder to automatically strum your chords
- Legato script to play natural hammer ons, pull offs and slides.
- Natural hand placement simulation.
- 39 different samples per fret and all 21 fret sampled for each string.
- Multi velocity Hammer on, pull off, slides up, slides down, mutes, ghost notes, pre notes.
- Includes sparkVerb©.
- Control over the two microphones perspectives and pickup volumes.
- Advanced bend control.
- Advanced UVI scripting giving you access to a simple yet powerful interface and advanced features.
Visit the UVI website for the latest version of UVI Workstation.
