Product Details

When we introduced our line of guitar sample libraries in 2008, it represented a stunning leap forward in sampled guitar realism. Today, you'll find the Evolution line of guitars and basses in final productions of numerous movie and television scores, trailers, games, even pop hits. Evolution Stratosphere represents the fifth generation of the Evolution guitar engine and incorporates refinements that provide unparalleled realism and more intuitive play.
For example, Evolution Stratosphere has an intuitive, powerful strumming pattern editor. We felt it was important to make something that represents strumming better than the traditionally-used step sequencer approach, so we came up with a more powerful system that's fast and easy to use. It gives you control over which strings get strummed, the direction of the strum, and the speed of the strum. Plus, you can use many articulations within a single strum pattern, and even incorporate special effects like string slaps as part of the pattern.
Evolution Stratosphere comes with a robust guitar effects engine, including a vast collection of modeled guitar pedals. Additionally, you have selectable guitar cab sizes with several options for microphones and mic placement. All together, you have a comprehensive guitar effects suite at your fingertips without external guitar effect processors necessary to get amazing-sounding tones.
But don't just take our word for it, let your ears decide.

Key Features:

- Multitracking up to quadruple tracking.
- Adjustable pick position using our proprietary physical modeling technology.
- Various vibrato styles, from classic vibrato to rock and metal vibrato with adjustable depth/speed. Vibrato can be assigned to MIDI CCs or aftertouch.
- Powerful mapping system that lets you set how you want to trigger articulations, using conditions such as velocity ranges, MIDI CCs, latching and non-latching keyswitches, and more.
- Built-in strum pattern editor for authentic guitar strumming.

Sampling specifications:

- Over 10,000 samples, recorded in 24-bit, 48khz.
- Articulations such as sustains, half palm mutes, full palm mutes, mutes, squeals, tapping, natural harmonics, plus special effects such as chugs, scratches, string slaps, and much more. The articulations amount to 144 unique samples per note, although because each string was sampled individually, in certain cases there are many more based on your ability to play the same note on different strings.
- MIDI articulations for instant upward/downward grace notes, buzz trills, whole-step slides, whole-step hammer-ons, slides (velocity-based and tempo-synced), octaves, and powerchords.
- Legato samples for slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs.
- The articulations have 3 dynamics, 2 pick directions (when applicable), and 2x round-robin.
- Modeled pickup selection for bridge, bridge + middle, middle, middle + neck, and neck pickups.

Change list:

- Separate spring reverb effect module which features 11 spring reverb tanks to select from. New line of guitar cabinets, including modern and classic guitar cabs.
- Added chord mode selection keys for on-the-fly chord mode switching.
- New "Velocity to strum speed", "velocity to strum distance", and "strum velocity decay" settings for downstroke/upstroke strum keys.
- Adjustable legato volume.
- "Sixteenth Note Slide" articulation added.
- Improved automatic chord algorithm.
- Improved dynamic memory mode for additional memory saving, and minor CPU efficiency improvements.

Known issues:

- Strumming pattern sync issues when holding a pattern for multiple bars. The strumming pattern system also needs many improvements in terms of a latching mode for automatic pattern triggering as well as more editing capabilities in general.
- With more and more settings available, we need better organization to make them quicker to find.
- Some library-specific changes needed, such as increasing the volume range of the velocity layers in Evolution Sitardelic and removing unwanted harmonics in several of Evolution Steel String's legato samples.
Here's the plan moving forward. We've begun revamping some of the internal workings (which will probably include some UI changes) of the Evolution guitar engine with these goals in mind:
- Each library will use the same exact resources file, allowing us to easily release more frequent updates for our Evolution series.
- Strumming pattern playback/editing and chord system improvements.
- Settings organized, possibly into multiple sections--for example, one section dedicated to the keyboard mapping, including being able to remap the effect keys.