「Phoenix Scream」

—— Chinese Suona Virtual Instruments

Suona is the Chinese variant of surnay that originates from Central Asia. It has a characteristic reed made of bulrush trunk, resulting in its featured metallic sound, rich in high frequencies. Suona is highly expressive, especially for extreme delight or grief-stricken emotions. Thus, it is commonly used in both weddings and burials in Chinese tradition. Nowadays, it appears more often in maestoso or heroic themes in contemporary works. Also, Suona’s expressiveness is reflected in its ability to reproduce real-world sounds with highly flexible performances, such as birdsong, monkey cries, and frog croaks, and these are all included in our virtual instrument.

To make it easier to create harmonic parts, we made two virtual instruments for Suona: Phoenix Scream with the most commonly used pitch range, and Phoenix Growl, which is a bass Suona. Phoenix Growl was not recorded independently, and it uses repitched samples of Phoenix Scream. Phoenix Growl is gifted to you when you purchase Phoenix Scream.

Samples: 3617

Samples parameter: 44100 Hz / 24 bit

Sample size: 5.2GB

Adjustable Sound Field

When samples were recorded, 5 different microphones were used with different positions to capture the spatial and reverb characteristics of Suona. All these channels were mixed down to four channels: Yin, Yang and far stereo. The volumes of these four channels were adjustable in software, making it possible to obtain the most various tones.

Performances

By controlling airflow and fingers, Suona has a very rich set of performances such as mordent, finger pole popping, trill, flutter, vibrato, staccato and gliss. All these performances can be triggered in Phoenix Scream software, making it the most adjustable Suona virtual instrument.

Realistic Expressions

Phoenix Scream has real-recorded expressions that are freely controllable. With the control of MIDI CC, it can express tone changes like a real Suona performance.

Gliss

With three different speeds of real-recorded gliss samples and sample synthesis technique, Phoenix Scream can perform gliss at freely adjustable speed.

Vibrato Engine

A self-developed, real-sample-based LFO engine makes Phoenix Scream perform vibrato that is both realistic and adjustable.

Abundant sound effects

We summarized and screened 29 techniques of Suona, including traditional performance techniques, film and television soundtracks, and special techniques commonly used in Chinese ancient-style songs, just to preserve the natural talent of Suona to the greatest extent.

Spectrum fusion legato technology

Real-recorded legato samples can enhance the realism of legato instruments, but the junction created by a naive cross-fade of two samples would induce phase-cancellation problems. In order to make legato more cohesive, we use our self-developed “spectrum fusion legato” technology. When necessary, frequency-domain fusion is used instead of time-domain cross-fade to create the transition between samples, which improves the smoothness of the connection.

Convolution reverb

At the beginning of the Chinese Traditional series development, we started to record the convolution reverb samples from spectacular places, famous natural and historical heritages in China. Thus you can simulate Phoenix Scream being played at the Great Wall or Terracotta Army site.

Effect Rack

From the Heavier7Strings’ effect rack: Compressor, EQ, Chorus and Ping-Pong delay are included, allowing you to create more flexible sounds.

Pattern Library

A complete pattern library, allowing you to capture your works and ideas easily, with a rich preset of patterns that can be updated in the future. And you can create your own patterns by dragging MIDI clips inside.