On Friday, The Crow Hill Company launched its new free Vaults Orchestral FX strings virtual instrument.

The new Halloween-themed plugin is a macOS and Windows release available in AU, VST3, VST, and AAX formats.

In the introductory YouTube video for the release, The Crow Hill Company founder Christian Henson described the instrument as “30 string players in a very gothic hall in Glasgow doing one thing, and one thing very well.”

As you can hear in the intro video, Orchestral FX is very fitting for a Halloween release, as it sounds like the orchestral stabs from a classic horror movie.

Listening to it instantly brings to mind the soundtrack to the infamous shower knife attack scene in Psycho. 

If that sounds like something you could use in your toolkit, visit The Crow Hill Company website and download it before it disappears like a vampire at dawn.

This is because, as Henson explained in the video, “the concept behind Vaults is to provide you with single-use little gems that drop into the vault for six months then drop out, so we keep on refreshing the tools that we’re using.”

BPB readers may recall that Vaults is The Crow Hill Company’s free virtual instrument series.

The developer drops a new Vaults release each month, and six are currently available for download. 

All the Vaults series releases have a similar control scheme, with a preset selector up top, two main parameters in the centre then four additional controls below that. 

Orchestral FX doesn’t seem to have a normal product page, as far as I can find. Instead, it’s just lumped together on one big page with all the Vaults releases, with no real info provided on any of them. 

So, what we know about Vaults is almost entirely gleaned from what Henson shows us in the YouTube demo. 

As we can see in the video, the plugin offers a preset selector and the following controls: Distance, Aberrate, Chatter, Spook, Echo, and Splosh. 

Distance and Aberrate are the two central controls. Distance takes you from a close proximity sound at 0 up to a distant, wider sound at 100. 

Aberrate is a “reverse pitch echo” that Henson says reminds him of Star Trek. When maxed out, Aberrate makes the strings sound quite otherworldly and disturbing – even more so than usual that is.

These two main controls can then combine with the other four controls to create quite an array of different sounds, as you can see further in the video. The whole lot still sounds like a horror movie though. 

Check out the Vaults page for the full details on the installation process for Orchestral FX.

Download: Orchestral FX (FREE)

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