Osterhouse Sounds Secco Strings — Free Download

Core Instrument Design

Secco Strings offers a compact yet flexible ensemble of four bowed string instruments: viola, violin, cello, and bass. Each instrument includes three articulations—Pizzicato, Peck, and Bounce—covering plucked, short, and percussive styles. Its single-page interface keeps all controls accessible, with global settings for attack, decay, low cut, and saturation to shape the overall tone.

The engine is built around three distinct play modes. Single Notes mode lets you assign up to eight steps, each with its own instrument, articulation, and placement on the XY pad, which controls volume, panning, direction, formant, and octave per step. Rhythm mode plays steps sequentially with adjustable time division and a jitter control for natural timing fluctuation.

Advanced Play Modes

Texture mode offers a physics-based approach: steps move and bounce off each other and the walls at a user-defined speed, generating evolving swarms, textures, or chaotic ensembles. A distribute button allows parallel playback, where each note cycles through steps. You can assign up to fifteen steps in this mode, each linked to a different articulation or instrument.

The main XY pad is fully automatable, with assignable parameters including panning, direction, formant, and octave. A second Tone pad crossfades between multiple layers—four for pizzicato and three for arco—and can be modulated by proximity and velocity sensors, adding expressive control without complex menus.

User Sample Integration

Secco Strings includes four user instrument slots for importing your own samples via drag-and-drop (Kontakt 6 and later). This allows you to replace or extend the built-in sounds with your own recordings, applying the same step sequencing, XY pad, and effects to your material.

The integration works seamlessly with the play modes: your samples can be assigned to steps, placed on the XY pad for spatial and timbral variation, and processed with the built-in reverb. This makes the instrument a flexible tool for sound design beyond traditional string sections, such as layering custom percussive or synthetic sources.

Workflow and Presets

The instrument ships with a large collection of ready-made presets: twenty-one for Rhythm mode, seventeen for Single Notes mode, and thirteen for Texture mode. These provide starting points for fast setup, covering rhythmic patterns, melodic sequences, and textural beds. Presets can be saved and loaded as .nka files, enabling you to build a personal library.

A dedicated reverb section offers eight convolution reverbs with control over send level, pre-delay, time-stretch, low-pass, and high-pass. This lets you place the strings in various spaces, from intimate rooms to large halls, without external effects. The combination of step sequencing, XY control, and reverb makes Secco Strings suitable for both realistic string parts and experimental soundscapes.

Key features

• Three play modes: Single Notes, Rhythm, and Texture
• Four instruments: viola, violin, cello, and bass
• Three articulations per instrument: pizzicato, peck, and bounce
• Four user sample slots with drag-and-drop import (Kontakt 6+)
• Fully automatable XY pad for panning, direction, formant, and octave
• Dedicated Tone pad with proximity and velocity modulation
• Eight convolution reverbs with extensive controls

Best for

Ideal for composers and sound designers seeking a compact, expressive string tool for creating plucked rhythms, evolving textures, and custom sample-based sequences. Its step sequencer and XY pads make it especially suited for experimental scoring and electronic music production.