Included are over 25 instruments from China,
India and Persia, plus a 30-piece middle-eastern string section. Each
instrument has been played by ‘master’ players, and then meticulously
multisampled by EastWest with extensive articulations, numerous
alternate samples (to avoid repetition), and full phrases “to give the
feeling of smooth effortless performance”.
Silk runs on EastWest’s Play engine as a DAW
plug-in or in stand-alone mode. In-depth scripting in Play allows for
automatic transposition on the fly, so if the user wants to play a riff
on, for example, a Chinese Erhu, in an arabic scale, they can choose a
scale from a list of ‘microtunings’, select their key, and only samples
of notes in that key will be triggered. This, says Silk producer Nick
Phoenix, makes the virtual instrument incredibly easy to play and very
realistic-sounding.
