 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. A couple of weeks ago I let you know about a new free piano library from Heavyocity. That's the Foundations Piano. Now if you liked that, and I know many of you did, then you're in for a treat because Heavyocity have also just released a free strings library. That's the Foundations Staccato Strings. As I say it's free and it works with the free version of Contacts though. Everyone's a winner. Now I've only had this actually for a couple of hours and I've thrown together a quick demo using the new Staccato Strings and also the piano as well. Let's have a quick listen to that now. Now if I'm honest with you and always try to be, that demo was a pretty generic composition if I may call it that. But the sound itself is not generic at all. In fact with this demo I really wasn't doing it justice and showing you what it's really all about because if you remember with Foundations Piano it was all about the sound of the texture. Now the texture is the sound which is coming after the main note is played and it's really here in the decay. You'll see two big knobs on the user interface here. One for the volume of the strings themselves and one for the volume of the texture. So if I just push that up a little bit I'm just going to play a single note okay and have a listen to the decay. Get all of that lovely rich stuff happening there on the decay of the notes. And of course if you just want to use it just as a string sound you can definitely turn the texture all the way down and you do get a really nice sounding staccato string. One of the things I actually really like about this or a couple of things I like about the strings just by themselves is first of all they've just got a really nice feel in terms of velocity so you get that it just feels good to play. And the other thing the stereo spread is quite nice if we have a listen at the top end it comes sort of out of one ear much much more so and then down at the lower end you sort of really hear that stereo spread which is rather nice. But there is much more to this instrument than just the combination of the strings and the texture. So let's go through some of the other pages that we can see from these tabs here. So the first one here we have an ADSR envelope control so ADSR for those of you not familiar it stands for attack decay sustain release. We've got some control of that there and actually I'd say you know the attack especially can really change the sound of this instrument. So here's how it sounds at the moment. I'll just turn that attack all the way up actually and it becomes much more gentle because you're getting that sort of fade in you. So that's one of the great ways that you can change the sound here. We also have an arpeggiator. I'll get back to that in a moment because I just want to quickly tell you there is an effects tab you've got some good stuff there like delay and reverb etc. But let's go back to that arpeggiator. So we can actually arpeggiate both the strings and the texture and we can either use it as an arpeggiator in terms of it's playing many notes. So I'll just switch on for the strings here you know that's sequencing the notes. Just notice I'm just playing one note and holding it down there have a look. Yeah so you can use it for arpeggiating notes you can also use it to arpeggiate texture the texture side of things and you can also use it to arpeggiate a gate. This is best demonstrated not with my clumsy sort of representation of it there but by going to some of the presets. So I'm just going to flick through and go to this one first of all hateful eights okay and I'm just going to hold down let's try just a D minor chord. Yeah so you can really really quickly get some nice sort of rhythmic things going on there just by sustaining a chord and letting the plug in do the rest of it. Let's just go to another one which I really rather like I have to say where was it this one muted ice drops again we'll just try that that D minor chord. Just just get inspired to use this right way and I think that's so important with any library like when you open up and you start to use it do you just want to make music with it. I do with this and it's probably what I'm going to do now to be honest with you so I just wanted to quickly show you this absolutely brand new free library as I say it works with the free version of contact I'll put a link for both of those in the description down below. Now if you want to find out about more free libraries and effects that you can use in your music production check out my playlist for that I've got absolutely a gazillion of them which I've shown you about over the last few years so check it out and binge watch it.