Arctic Strings: Mirage

Arctic Strings has a beautiful shimmering tone with ethereal high strings and powerful basses; perfect for playing chords and harmonies. Create swells of intensity and emotion using the dynamics knob, which blends the sound between real recordings of the strings playing softly, and playing loudly. As well as this, this instrument’s sound fits excellently with both synths and real instrumentation. This means Arctic Strings works well in anything from emotional cinematic scores to background elements in an electronic track.

The samples are wide and lush stereo recordings from a medium-sized string ensemble recorded in a church. It is not a deep-sampled and technical concert hall type library, instead, this library excels at strings for ambiance and atmosphere. They are incredibly easy to use and fill that gap between detailed realism and smooth, rich pads.

A single easy-to-use articulation

The string section very commonly plays large chords or is used to add additional texture to other more prominent instruments. This is where Arctic Strings excels: the entire realistic-sounding string section is available at your fingertips – from basses to violins. The attack and release can be controlled like a synth, and you can even set the instrument to play monophonically, allowing for a legato-like playing style.

42 presets

With Mirage, you can take the sound beyond the realms of realism and create organic-synth instruments. You’ll find examples of this in the 42 included presets. These are arranged into 3 categories: Realistic, Realistic Processed and Sound Design. In the Realistic folder you’ll find patches for emulating real strings: wide chords, monophonic and octave harmony patches. The Realistic Processed folder explores the boundary between realistic and synthetic. Including washed-out string reverb instruments and filtered string sounds. The final category, Sound Design, contains synth-like presets that make full use of Mirage’s features: synth plucks, distorted leads and drifting detunes.

Arctic Strings is distributed as a digital download only. It should only take a matter of minutes before you can start using it in your production. FrozenPlain has a streamlined checkout system, you only need to put in essential information. For the first product you buy here, you will be prompted to set a password in order to create an account. All products you buy on this site are added to your account and the latest versions can be re-downloaded at any time.

You can pay for Arctic Strings with a credit card, debit card, PayPal, or Apple Pay. The payment process is handled by our online reseller Paddle.com. Once payment has been completed successfully you will be able to download Arctic Strings instantly.

Arctic Strings is designed to be as accessible as possible to producers, composers, musicians, and sound designers. You probably already have what you need if you are producing audio on a reasonably modern computer. There is one exception – Arctic Strings is not available in the AAX plugin format yet, and so will not run in Pro Tools. Here are the specific requirements:

• Windows: a computer running Windows 7 or higher. Mirage is available as a 32-bit and a 64-bit plugin. However, the installer needs a 64-bit machine. Virtually all Windows machines are 64-bit.
• Mac: macOS 10.12 or higher. Both Intel chips and M1 chips are supported (universal binary).
• A host that can play either a VST2 plugin or an AudioUnit v2 (AU) plugin. Examples of such hosts are Cubase, Ableton Live, Studio One, Reaper, Reason, FL Studio, Logic X, Garage Band, and many more. Logic 9 or older does not support AudioUnit v2, and so this product will not work in it.

• 42 presets, saved as separate mirage-strings files
• Mirage sample-based synthesis engine included
• Arctic Strings Mirage library (closed format mdata file)
• ~250MB file download