Introduction

Welcome to the Orchestral Tools Capsule User Guide!

Capsule (Control And Performance Symphonic Utility Engine) is Orchestral Tools‘ groundbreaking scripting technology that powers a growing number of collections.

Capturing details, the creation of emotive tools with a maximum of efficiency, and a dedication to the sound led us to the Berlin Series. An ambitious project over many years with the vision to create the most complete and flexible Virtual Orchestra. Capturing the beautiful details, gestures and colors of a symphonic body inspired us to new innovations in the industry.

Recorded in Berlin, we took advantage of the unparalleled acoustics of the room - not too wet to stay flexible and focussed or to dry to be able to create a fully blendable orchestral body where all the single instruments and sections come together to a single entity. We engaged renowned musicians from the most famous orchestras in the world and conceived a whole new workflow, which will instantly support you to create more realistic results in a shorter time.

After years of development, we were the first to present the Adaptive Legato Concept. Capsule senses the speed of your playing and does not only switch automatically between 3 available legato slots,  but also adapts all of the important controllers and variables in the background to offer you the most fluid legato you have ever played. Entering the world of Orchestral Tools also means to be on board on a journey infused with new ideas and the introduction of tools never built before. The Runs Builder lets you create the most convincing fast runs based on pre-recorded micro runs. These are just a few examples of our investment into the future of orchestral sampling.

Using our extensive set of articulations efficiently is fundamentally important. That´s why we didn’t just develop yet another tool; we conceived a radically new workflow which will instantly support you:

The Control And Performance Symphonic Utility Engine.

Capsule keeps all our different colors with care and integrates perfectly into Native Instruments´ Kontakt at the highest possible system efficiency. We simply improved everything. Long time desired multi articulation facility exists now in parallel to fully flexible single articulation patches.

You can easily apply True Legato to any long notes of your choice. There is so much more potential in these brilliantly sampled collections to exhaust. So why simply switch between articulations, when you are able to blend them? Like a painter mixing colors to create new shades, you can easily do the same with articulations. Doing this in a time-efficient way leads to a wholly new technique:

Polyphonic Keyswitching enables you to stack different colors over each other. Simply press up to 4 keyswitches simultaneously and choose how you want to blend or switch between chosen articulations. Choose between equal power crossfading, velocity switching, MIDI controller switching, or open up a whole new world of sounds with our 2D equal power morphing. With an assigned midi CC this is even easier to do. You don´t need to waste time anymore setting up complicated sample mappings. Your samples are now intuitively and easily playable.

We redefined the way how you mix within a Capsule Patch. With the innovative Auto Gain, the overall volume stays at the same level while you morph between the different microphone positions. A feature that helps you to keep the natural orchestral dynamics in balance. Fast tools like the chaining option or the purge all function will support you to find the sound and timbre to your personal taste in a faster and more elegant way. Every channel can now be routed to an output of your choice.

To allow all these articulations to stack, switch and morph, we completely overhauled the Berlin Series. A dedicated team re-arranged the natural orchestral dynamic balance between all Berlin instruments and articulations, matched the mic position volumes to each other and developed a new approach to set up the release samples in a more natural and organic way. Now each articulation sits wonderfully and convincingly in the best-balanced room you ever heard.

One of our key visions for Capsule is to save time, especially when composers build their own templates. Capsule‘s Controller Table holds all assigned elements and midi controllers in a dedicated list. Once you have set up a custom controller table, you can save it in a preset on your computer to share it between different Capsule instances. It has never been so fast and easy to set up your Berlin Orchestra.

Flexibility in Capsule’s single articulation patches is just paramount. Now you can create your very own Round Robin rules. With only one click, you can use the neighboring zones to triple the available number of Round Robin samples to add a more organic feel and avoid any kind of machine gun effect. Also, each Round Robin can be controlled individually. You can turn off specific dynamic layers to adjust the dynamic range to your needs or apply our new Niente option to any articulation, where the dynamic range starts with complete silence. This is an important feature, especially for strings (where a tone can evolve from total silence) and breath controller use. Almost every feature here is available for each articulation in the multi articulation patches as well. But of course, you don't have to change anything. We already designed a very playable and optimized setup for you. Just load a patch and play.

Orchestral Tools is a sampling project driven by a few composers like you with their vision of a growing orchestral palette. We develop Expansion Sets for all our Main Collections which will extend your personal library in an organic way. Orchestral Tools is a growing project - always up to date. We constantly work on existing collections to make them even better and to unleash their full potential. Maybe it is the whole package of unparalleled sound, innovations, captured details and intuitive handling which has made our products standard tools for many composers over the world.