Vir2 Mojo Horn Section Library (Native Instruments) for KONTAKT

For many composers working with MIDI, horn sounds for pop, funk and jazz pose so many challenges that many of us have resigned ourselves to the feeling that we'll never get real‑sounding horn lines out of our sample libraries. While we were off lamenting and daydreaming about having a big enough budget to hire Earth Wind & Fire's horn section, the good folks at Vir2 Instruments were busy trying to solve this colossal conundrum.

Mojo is a full suite of horns geared for jazz, latin, pop and funk music production. If you were hoping to get French horns, tubas, euphoniums and so on, I'm afraid you'll have to look elsewhere. What you do get with Mojo is 12 instruments packed with (almost) every articulation you'll need to get your arrangement swinging. These are Alto Sax, Baritone Sax, Bass Trombone, Clarinet, Flugelhorn, Piccolo Trumpet, Soprano Sax, Tenor Sax, Trombone, Trombone Mute, Trumpet and Trumpet Mute.

Each instrument comes loaded with every available articulation. This alone is refreshing, as it saves you the trouble of scrolling through dozens of articulations, plus you need not know ahead of time which ones are needed. Load the alto sax and, via keyswitching, you can access any nuance Mojo has to offer. The down side to this is that you have to load all these articulations into RAM, even the ones you aren't using.

Mojo's sound quality is excellent and highly usable. The samples are 24‑bit stereo and were recorded with top‑of‑the‑line vintage gear, but what I responded to was the quality of the actual recording of the instruments. Mojo's horns are up-front and in-your-face, and the different articulations really give you what you need to put together a colourful arrangement. Besides the usual suspects, like sustain, vibrato and staccato, you get at least a dozen more, including doits, fall‑offs, octave runs, swells and trills.

Vir2 Instruments have done a fantastic job with Mojo. If you put in the time, you can pull off some convincing arrangements. Perhaps after logging in the hours, you could even put down realistic parts in real time. The sections are very authentic and the solo instruments, while not the real deal, are as good as I've heard. Although there's perhaps some room for improvement, if you use horns regularly in your MIDI arrangements, you need to get your Mojo



IMPORTANT: Use the bank with a CRACKED Kontakt, NOT with kontakt Player