UVI’s Toy Suite virtualizes the musical instruments of your childhood
Add the sound of nostalgia to your digital audio workstation.
Software instrument developer UVI are swapping their virtual cellos and pianos for Speak & Spells and music boxes. The company's latest library contains over 70,000 samples of nostalgic musical toys, giving musicians the freedom to create anything from the cutest compositions to discordant nightmare fuel that Trent Reznor would be proud of.
UVI has chosen a wide array of toys to sample. Along with the expected instruments like tiny pianos and xylophones, some less traditional toys like moo boxes and keychain harmonicas will trigger forgotten memories. The library also comes with an 8-bit emulator to generate the bleep-bloop sounds of the Game Boy and Commodore 64.
While the real-life equivalents of these toys are adorably crummy-sounding, UTI sampled them using the same hardware and workflow as their more prestigious instrument libraries. "We utilized the same professional studio, class-A microphones, outboard processors, multi-sampling techniques and expert editing to produce the sounds of Toy Suite that we've used on countless classical instruments," says UTI.
Toy Suite will work as a standalone program or will integrate into DAWs as an AU, VST or AAX plugin via UVI Falcon or UVI Workstation. If you're interested, you're probably going to want to have a specific project in mind beyond just mindless noodling, though -- these samples aren't cheap. UVI is offering the library at an introductory rate of $279, but will increase the price to $399 after September 10th.
