Because of the naturally quiet volume of these guitars, which are typically small parlor guitars, a high output pickup is typically installed for amplification. Part of the magic of a rubber bridge guitar comes from the duality between the pristine, crisp acoustic sound of the instrument and the rich, powerful signal of the pickup.
The Evolution Rubber Bridge was recorded using a nearly century-old parlor guitar converted to a rubber bridge guitar and equipped with a classic Tokyo-style gold foil pickup. The pickup and stereo microphone signals were recorded separately so you could mix the warm, punchy sound of the pickup and the crisp, clean mic signal. The Evolution Rubber Bridge was recorded with the guitar tuned a whole tone lower than standard tuning, giving it a deeper tone and a naturally lower playing range.
We developed the library in collaboration with Rosewood Recording Company, one of Utah’s most venerable recording studios. Guy Randle, owner and engineer of Rosewood Recording Company, has incorporated analog audio equipment to skillfully shape and highlight the rich tonal qualities of the guitar. The Evolution Rubber Bridge includes both the recorded signal and the enhanced signal.
The Evolution Rubber Bridge is based on our Evolution engine, which provides you with a variety of features: an innovative pattern editor, automatic chord detection, and an extensive collection of built-in effects to add the final polish to your guitar tone. If you have used any of our guitar or bass libraries that use the Evolution engine, its interface and workflow will be very familiar to you.
The library includes a variety of ready-to-use factory presets for a variety of guitar tones. Some presets focus on the acoustic side of the guitar with pristine, clean tones, while other presets take advantage of the guitar’s electric component by running its pickup signal through a guitar cabinet, sometimes with the addition of spring reverb or even distortion.
- Built-in effects collection for production-ready rubber bridge guitar tones.
- Pattern editor and chord voicing system for authentic strumming and picking patterns.
- Adjustable pick position using our proprietary physical modeling technology.
- Powerful mapping system that lets you control how articulations are selected, using conditions such as velocity ranges, MIDI CCs, latching and non-latching keyswitches, and more.
- 6.9 GB (compressed to 3.5 GB using the lossless NCW audio format) of 24-bit samples.
- Articulations such as sustains, palm mutes, mutes, natural harmonics, plus special effects like string slaps, muted strums, body hits, and others.
- Legato samples for slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs.
- The articulations have 3 dynamics and 4x round-robin.
Orange Tree Samples has released update 1.2.5 for all Evolution-based instruments.
Here’s what’s new:
- Ability to lock individual tunings and articulations, allowing you to switch snapshot presets without overwriting specific tunings and mapped articulations. Note that the old “Lock Mapping” setting has now been removed. If you were relying on this setting in any existing projects, the new version will automatically convert them to use the individual locking settings.
- New setting: “Performance Effect Keys”, allowing you to control the range of keys that performance effects are mapped to.
- New setting for Evolution Bluegrass Banjo: “Drone String in All Chords”, allowing you to include the drone string in any chord voicing, or exclude it from chord voicings that don’t include its pitch as a chord tone.
- Improved fretboard display efficiency.
- Changed legato pitch and range settings to semitones instead of interval names.
- Fixed a heap memory issue when unmapping a sustain articulation, but try using one of the MIDI based articulations like slides.
- Fixed a bug that affected the velocity slide articulation when combined with a sustain pedal press condition.
- Capo position now modulates the custom chord voicing selection.
- Open string legato mode now allows not only pull-offs to open strings, but also hammer-ons from open strings to higher notes on the fretboard.
- Added tooltips.
