Medieval soundscapes
Venture into the sonic heart of a dark, foreboding forest with Grimm. With six ensembles performing textural, melodic, and aleatoric articulations as well as an array of processed pads and impacts, Grimm puts instruments and sounds from distant eras into a new context. It’s a set of cinematic scoring tools with historical associations but a contemporary edge.
Grimm was made together with Bleeding Fingers Music explicitly for screen scoring. Its foundation consists of six three-piece ensembles made from selected traditional European instruments: Tagelharpa, tagelharpa cello, lutes, sackbuts, hurdy-gurdy, baroque flutes, recorders, and strings. Building from these instruments’ characteristic sounds, the articulations and processed patches in Grimm instantly set scenes and manufacture moods.
Highlights
What's included
Grimm contains six ensembles containing a blend of antique, non-orchestral instruments. Reduced to their core, these ensembles represent woodwinds, high strings, mid strings, low strings, plucked strings, and brass. Here’s a closer look at the instruments at the heart of these ensembles:
The baroque recorders and flutes in Grimm are made of wood and known for a clear and sweet sound. Grimm focuses more on their textural capabilities than their stereotypically melodic nature. Unconventional playing techniques were frequently employed for breathy, airy, or otherworldly textures.
Our “high strings” ensemble. Hurdy-gurdy 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. We’ve encased it in the mellow soundbed of two baroque violins.
The tagelharpa is a bowed lyre from northern Europe dating back at least as far as the 10th century. It’s an instrument with a gritty, earthy sound that blends splendidly with two baroque violas for string textures in the mid range.
The big brother of the tagelharpa, the tagelharpa cello exhibits the same bite and mournful wail, but is deeper in pitch. Flanked by two gut-string basses, this ensemble provides the hefty low end.
The sackbut is the baroque and renaissance era precursor to the modern trombone. The bell shape and smaller bore give these instruments a different timbre than their contemporary ancestors.
We all know the lute as the instrument of choice for baroque or renaissance bards. In Grimm, we’ve put together a lute ensemble with a selection of different-sized lutes. The plucked string sound fills needs both textural and melodic.
Instruments inspired by stories of old
Since the instruments of Grimm are frequently associated with medieval or fantasy worlds, the collection naturally makes an exquisite palette of sounds for these genres. However, it’s capable of much more—from modern horror to crime drama, Grimm adds texture, tension, and emotion to scenes in need of a slightly melancholy tint.
In addition to the six instrument ensembles, Grimm contains an array of processed pads and impacts. With distortion, filters, and numerous other digital and analog effects, our experts sculpted the original samples into new soundworlds. Gritty, dark, eerie, melancholic, or even sweetly dystopian–these patches conjure moods with an immediacy that transcends time.
Bleeding Fingers Music is an all-star team of composers founded by Hans Zimmer, Russell Emanuel, and Steven Kofsky under the credo that collaboration fosters innovation and creativity. Their work can be found in major film and television productions including Blue Planet 2, Prehistoric Planet, The Simpsons, Beckham, and a lot more. Grimm was made in close collaboration with Adam Lukas (left) and Jacob Shea (right) specifically for their work on an upcoming series.
Recorded at Teldex, mapped for modern tuning
All of the instruments in Grimm were sampled at Teldex Scoring Stage in Berlin, enabling you to blend these sounds seamlessly with other Orchestral Tools libraries such as Miroire or the Berlin Series.
You don’t have to worry about transposing anything with Grimm—regardless of the instruments' original tuning, all of the ensembles are key-mapped for compatibility with modern (A4=440 Hz) tuning.
