Spitfire takes its Evo range of products into a new realm with a series of evolving "motions" that will revolutionise the way in which you write and realise your string compositions. Orchestrated by Ben Foskett, this product exudes class and a cool organic sound that will bring fresh Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams and Arvo Part style sophistication to any composition.

With top-notch samples housed in the wonderfully creative Evo Grid engine, Spitfire Audio’s EVO GRID 3 provides a countless number of evolving musical string textures with just a few clicks.

Thoughts
With it’s top-notch sample quality housed in the wonderfully creative EVO engine Spitfire Audio‘s new Evo GRID 3 has me very excited about the future of the EVO GRID series. For this library the Spitfire team spent over 2 years crafting and recording the selection of tempo-sync’d loops (evos) performed by a small string group that were orchestrated by Ben Foskett. The resulting instrument gives composers a countless number of evolving musical string patterns that vary from subtle to driving, tension building to down-right unsettling – all with the touch of a few different keys.

Evo Grid 3 contains the kind of top-quailty sample sets we have come to expect from Spitfire. Within a few minutes of playing the instrument I was hooked! It is very inspiring and I can see the usefulness it provides those of us scoring with tight deadlines as playing just a few notes of any given Evolution provides the ability to create fluid and evolving string textures that can transform in exciting way.

All in, Evo Grid 3 contains 37 different “evolutions” playable as individual kontakt instrument. The main instruments of the library are 2 different master EVO GRID instruments one “EVO GRID” and one ” EVO GRID PERFORMANCE MW” the latter with Modwheel ties to dynamics AND fade between the first 2 of the 5 microphone/playback samples.

ABOUT THE EVO GRID

‘Evos’ (evolutions) load into the GUI-based matrix grid.

The Evo Grid system was concepted by composer and Spitfire head Christian Hensen, for a scoring project.
He needed to write 13 hours of music for a television series with no orchestra budget and only 3 months to deliver.
After recording a series of string “evolutions” for the project he found that he was able to combine and contrast them to get exciting and unexpected results.

In the Evo Grid 3 press material Christian is quoted as semi-seriously stating, “I could literally hit a big C minor chord, hold my sustain pedal down, reach for my sandwich, and the thing would still be writing itself a minute later while I was wiping mayo off my beard!”

The results were released publicly as the “Scary Strings” and offered up as donationware (in return for a £2.00 GBP donation to charity) available from Spitfires Labs store.

The Evo Grid engine in EVO GRID 3 allows the user to load up the matrix with random evos in several categories with the “die” drop down menu or by “pinning” the matrix interface. The Evolutions are divided into 3 color coordinated categories: Straight (yellow), Tense (blue) and Scary (Red).

In short pinning the matrix assigns one of the 37 evolutions to a selected key range. See the official Evo Grid video for full details.

This is a wonderful release from one of the words leaders in sample library development. As you can tell from my writing I am a fan of the instrument, but as a learned musician and composer myself, I would love to see a literal note/rhythmic representation/transcription of the Evolutions to some how interact with in the interface. This would help me navigate both the individual Evos more quickly as well as allow for a more methodical process of composing with intention while using the matrix instead of relying mostly on randomness and chance.

I love the concept and the sample quality of Evo Grid 3. The “Blue Note” tribute in the art work in the series gave me a smile. Evo Grid 3 does exactly what it set out to do, make scoring evolving textures easy and quick to execute. I look forward to seeing where Spitfire ‘evolves’ the series from here.

BACKGROUND
Are you a media composer having to produce yards of sophisticated underscore for your TV scores? Are you a games composer looking for ways of generating hours of iterative material? Are you a producer looking for cool understated orchestral textures? Are you any kind of writer looking for inspiration? That next great idea?

The genesis of Evo Grid 3 is an evolutionary story in its own right. From our original 'Scary Strings' experiment, sampling players performing 'evolutions' that change over time and over a fixed number of registers, we came to create Angular String Evolutions and Fragile String Evolutions, with an ingenious design that arranges these evolutions across your ranges with a die randomisation function, delivering a near-infinite number of possible combinations. We also produced Woodwind Evolutions, giving you a truly original set of sonic possibilities. Since then, we have collaborated with Olafur Arnalds and Leo Abrahams, giving us their own takes on the Evo Grid.

This volume is the biggest development for the Evo Grid concept, orchestrated exceptionally by Ben Foskett. Initially the concept was to tackle one of the biggest sampling conundrums — the re-bow, i.e. repeated phrasing on the same note. So we thought, what better way to give us all options of time syncable re-bowing patterns than to put them on an Evo Grid? After two years of extended development and fiendish scripting, our alpha version arrived, and it was immediately clear that Evo Grid 3 was going to be so much more than we had originally hoped.

FEATURES
• 37 unique evolutions across the whole range of the string band, grouped into 3 different categories.
• All sounds tempo-locked to your host DAW tempo
• Completely customisable evolutions grid, with a randomise function.
• Four individual mic signals including Close, Sweet Loops, Completely Varped, and Stretched.