The Crow Hill Company has announced Brother Tree Sound, a new strings library plugin built around a quartet of the same name. The release marks the Edinburgh-based company’s first library using what it calls a “fragmentary” sampling approach, developed by co-founder and BAFTA Award-winning composer Christian Henson alongside the Brother Tree Sound quartet during a week of intensive recording sessions in London.

The core idea behind the plugin addresses a long-standing frustration with conventional string sampling. Standard sample libraries require each note to begin and end in silence, which strips out the natural movement and anticipation a player brings to a live performance. Instead of recording isolated notes, Henson had the quartet perform a composed piece straight through without retakes, then extracted the needed material from within those performances. The result is audio that carries the physical momentum of real playing rather than the static quality of traditional samples.

The plugin’s interface organizes sound into what the company calls “Partials,” borrowing terminology from Roland’s D-series synthesizers. These include “Feathers,” which are note attacks recorded from a resting position and controlled by velocity, and “Longs,” which are cut directly from the live performances and offer up to four dynamic layers. A modulation wheel controls dynamic crossfading, while CC 11 handles expression as a separate volume trim. Notably, articulations like Sul Tasto cover a full dynamic range rather than being locked to quieter settings, as is common in other libraries.

Brother Tree Sound is available now through The Crow Hill Company’s website.