Rating: ***** 5/5 Stars
Billed as a hybrid/organic strings toolkit, Nightfall by Realitone is a follow‑up to the company’s excellent Sunset Strings. While it takes a darker turn from its predecessor, it still offers users the opportunity to create musically satisfying hybrid instruments between organic and more synthesized textures via crossfading or mixing. The potential timbral results are almost endless, and the instrument ultimately provides a deep tapestry to expand the capabilities of your existing libraries.
As in Sunset Strings, Nightfall does not contain legato performances, but rather a large collection of textures, loops, performances, sustains and aleatoric patches to combine and explore. One can imagine a scenario, for instance, where your existing string package is used as a legato instrument. Now is there a particular sustain which — after fading to a whisper — you’d like to further melt into a flautando, and then bend a whole step up as it disappears into a granular cloud? This is where Nightfall excels.
Exploring further, I set layer 1 to ‘Landscapes’, a gorgeous and buttery texture built on what sounds like an orchestration of flautandos, muted strings and midrange harmonics, and which includes some organic but minimal movement, while layer 2 was set to ‘Random Bowings’. As I used the mod wheel to crossfade evenly between the two sound settings, the gentle wash of the first texture gradually morphed into movement, and then into an aleatoric wonderland: it was great fun to say the least, and crafted an astounding ‘nature emerging’ type of patch.
While the mod wheel is used to control gradual crossfades by default, it can be set to partial crossfades, which mix the two layers together, or natural crossfades. For those looking for hands‑free insta‑success, Nightfall also has an ‘automatic mod wheel’ feature where any setting assigned to the mod wheel ramps gently from top to bottom, creating automatically evolving sounds and leaving both hands free to play. In the above‑mentioned combination, the mix of automatically changing filters allowed me to achieve everything from a modernist orchestra sound to an evocative dystopian landscape with just enough timbral variation to keep things endlessly evolving.
With controls automated or set to auto‑motion in the hands‑free mode, the timbral variation can be quite intense.
Bearing a similarly simple and intuitive interface to Sunset Strings, Nightfall has a separate effects area for each of the two layers. The controls include a ‘tone shaper’, a granulator, a low‑pass filter, an LFO‑like ‘motion’ filter, a delay and a lush onboard reverb. With controls automated or set to auto‑motion in the hands‑free mode, the timbral variation can be quite intense. If there is one complaint about this beautiful instrument, it is that it is hard to dial back the reverb at times, making the sounds very wet by default. Aside from this, there is very little to dislike about Realitone’s Nightfall. Attractively priced, the package comes highly recommended!
$199
$199