This started all the way back in 2023, when I made a Collab album with my (now ex) girlfriend (who making the cover art, it was a Halloween album).
I originally set out to record violin glisses (notated by me) as well as a creepy aleatoric pizzicato texture,
all recorded by my friend Arianna Cunningham.

In 2024, I went through a really bad breakup with the person who did the cover art and
I deleted the Halloween album…

Time skip to Christmas of 2024, and I remembered that I still had Arianna’s recordings, so with her permission,
I decided to put them into a Sample Library I already started developing with her at the time.
It was only intended to be a violin library, but then I saw some guy (he’s name is Noah) recording a
strange effect which sounded a bit like a light saber with a cello. So, since he didn’t find a use case for it, I asked him if I could also use this in here, and he said yes.

I notated some freaky slide ups for a contrabass (playing in a Cello register) which also have these shudder FX (by asking the bassist to play a bit of tremolo in between the note)
and also instructed a cellist to play slide ups in a perfect 5th, but on the 5th to apply as much vibrato as they could without it sounding silly.

To prevent this sounding like a typical “string library” I mainly dedicated this to just to the things we don’t get much of for free.. HORROR FX!
So what better way to do that than to add an extra knob which is designed to really mess up the sound.
CUE THE SLAUGHTER KNOB! The Slaughter knob essentially messes up the sound, how? Well, if I told you that, there wouldn’t be much mystique.

MANY THANKS TO THE MUSICIANS INVOLVED:
Violin: Arianna Cunningham
Cello: Nickels (on Discord) and Noah (on Discord)
Contrabass: Nate (on Discord)

That being said, have fun!

Video Overview:

Contributors

Mark ("Nowa") Taylor

Majority of the Programming, Testing, Score prep, mixed (and mangled) recordings.

Arianna Cunningham

Recorded all violin parts.

Soroosh Mohassesi

Helping with extra programming (and making sure that I don't mess up)

noahdurik

Associated performer (Cello)