Medieval music instruments in general sound wildly different from what we are used to in anything from classical works like Beethoven’s fifth or Mahler’s sixth. Perhaps that’s why they are so useable in compositions for horror and fantasy movies. After going through Orchestral Tools’s latest library, Grimm with Bleeding Fingers, I’m convinced — and my fingers are still fine, thank you.
Grimm with Bleeding Fingers is an evocative collection of historic instrument ensembles created in close collaboration with the Hans Zimmer-led composing collective Bleeding Fingers Music for an upcoming series. To be honest I’d never heard of Bleeding Fingers (sorry guys), but they have worked on projects like The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Prehistoric Planet, Faraway Downs, Blue Angels, Beckham, Colossum, and many more.
The Orchestral Tools library uses instruments of a medieval orchestra with expressions that are appealing to the modern composer. When I went through the library’s ensembles, I indeed got visions of pristine landscapes and palaces no matter the era with the posh folk having a party or going about their business as usual. However, a good deal of them are clearly not intended to be used for playing La Quarte Estampie Royal, but wouldn’t go amiss at the court of count Vlad the Third.
Horror, sci-fi, fantasy…
Except for the harmonic articulations in this new library, you will find many authentic sounds and timbres designed specifically for contemporary melodic and especially textural expression with a nice bias towards modern drama, horror scoring, historical fiction, and fantasy.
The three ensembles include a “high strings” ensemble with a Hurdy-gurdy, an instrument that is played by cranking a wheel that serves as a bow continuously rubbing against the strings. It produces a sound with rich overtones and a buzzing, thrumming character. I personally dislike the sound of that instrument as IO associate it with scratching your nails across a blackboard. It appears I’m not the only one, as it has been encased in a mellow soundbed of two baroque violins.
Another instrument that can easily put you in a pre-19th Century mood when played by a skilful instrumentalist is the sackbut, the baroque and renaissance era precursor to the modern trombone. The bell shape and smaller bore give the sackbut a different timbre, i.e. much less majestic, dryer, harsher and potentially more threatening, probably due to that dryness of the sound, which I find quite discomforting to the level that I would feel an uncontrollable urge to put a massive reverb on a track using it.
In addition to the six instrument ensembles, Grimm contains an array of processed pads and impacts. For those articulation sets, distortion, filters, and other digital and analogue effects were used. The results are mouth watering unique, much more so than when electric guitar is added to the mix. There’s one specific articulation that really blew my mind. It’s an indescribably deep, dark sound so “defined” for lack of a better term that I don’t believe you can make it using a synth.
While the other articulations can be used for period movies or series besides horror, sci-fi and fantasy, the pads and impacts belong firmly in the gritty, dark, eerie, melancholic, and dystopian categories. Many send shivers down your spine. The articulations from the other ensembles are in my opinion best combined if you want to use them for the scene from Grimms’ original version of “Snow White”, where, although the Queen is little Snow White’s mother instead of her stepmother, she still orders her Huntsman to kill the poor girl and bring home the child’s lungs and liver so that she can eat them. Yummie, mummy.
Orchestral Tools has released other libraries in the past that can be used to give an audience an uncomfortable feeling, but this set of cinematic scoring tools beats them all. And yet, Grimm with Bleeding Fingers does also contain enough articulations to be useful for less bloody drama.
Orchestral Tools’s Grimm with Bleeding Fingers is available now for an intro offer price of €179 (€249 VAT regularly) until May 22, 2024.
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