Kirk Hunter Studios Lyric Series String Quintet KONTAKT

While there are plenty of good-sounding solo string libraries out there, I found it interesting that for me, a professional string player, it took a lot of "fiddling" with the instrument to get really musical phrases and melody lines. It was easy to get nice "pads" and "fillers" for sure, but I really wanted a believable single, melody line. Nothing out there, not even my older libraries, seemed to capture that certain essence you hear when listening to a professional player unless you took a lot of time to tweak whatever you were working on. And live-playing? No way. Not "out of the box" anyway.

INTUITIVE, STRING-ORIENTED LEGATO TRANSITIONS
Legato Discussion - Valiant efforts have indeed been made over the years using all kinds of "legato" and "interval" tricks and whatnot. Some are very nice, but still fall short. Others do capture the right "sound", but the resulting performance always, at least to me, sounds "clunky", "bumpy" or only sounds good when played at certain tempos.

So in analyzing what string players do, it seems that a myriad variables came to play...so to speak. Bowing, slurring, vibrato (amount, speed and fade-in time), string crossing, left-hand-shifting, and more. With so many of these variables, it is hard to recognize a pattern so as to emulate this in a digital instrument. In fact, at this point in time, it's impossible. However, certain occurrences take place often enough to tell the listener, "yes, I hear this as a professional stringed instrument performance.", that one could, in essence, focus on those, and implement them judiciously. It's like putting in a few "aha" features that make for realism.