The Crow Hill Company releases Cello Motors

The Crow Hill Company captures propulsive, gritty, and rosin-rich cellos as CELLO MOTORS, duly designed to provide propulsion and polyrhythmic possibilities.

The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce availability of CELLO MOTORS — duly designed to provide fresh new propulsion for anyone’s scoring sensibilities while exploring the polyrhythmic possibilities of the propulsive, gritty, and rosin-rich cellos carefully captured in Scotland’s celebrated Castlesound Studios — as the latest library to draw upon the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s extensive experience of thinking outside the box when it comes to its expertise in sampling, as of October 21…

“Do you ever get a sound in your head, but it is a sound you know you don’t have, but you want it anyway?” So says Christian Henson — original founder of The Crow Hill Company and a professional film and television composer of some 28 years standing — in the lead up to introducing the latest library to bear said company’s notable name — namely, CELLO MOTORS: “The sound I had in my head was a raw, honest, biting, small section of cellos, providing a forward propulsion for my scores — something that was organic and real, and couldn’t be recreated with samples. So often I tell users to avoid, disregard, or make limited use of the close mics; this library is designed around them — that really upfront, close sound.”

So with that very idea in mind, three world-class cellists gathered in Scotland’s celebrated Castlesound Studios, a state-of-the-art digital and analogue recording, mixing, and mastering facility with a 40-plus-year history of working with leading artists in all fields of music from Scotland and beyond, as well as many clients from the worlds of film, TV, radio, and advertising, famed for its huge, day-lit recording areas and control room housed within a Victorian building outside of Edinburgh. Continues Christian Henson: “It is definitely one of the top five studios that I’ve ever recorded in. There’s just something about the sound there; it has an intimate quality, but without stuff sounding like it’s been recorded in an anechoic space. Those things are so difficult to position in a mix, because the image that is recorded is somewhat divorced from reality.”

Reality, in this instance, dictated that those three cellists were there to be effectively recorded as a dry, up-front, and raw set of ‘motors’ — multi-sampled, looped phrases of increasing complexity with dynamic crossfading around single pitch centres is what the resultant and appropriately named CELLO MOTORS is all about. Announces Christian Henson: “What we’re working with here is just a huge selection of rhythmic passages that are played on single notes, sampled across the keyboard, from the simple — with dynamic crossfades — to the more complex; they sync to your DAW tempo, and all of them are played with such a fantastic amount of attitude and — dare I say it — a degree of Celtic flair. One of the instructions we gave the cellists was, ‘Think of your cello like a fiddle.’ But what’s so totally addictive about using these is that by triggering them at different points you can create even more complex rhythmic passages yourself.”

Indeed, it is possible to employ keyswitches to create even more complexity in those rhythmic passages, and also choose between various diffusion levels in microphones that were specifically selected to provide an attitude-delivered set of recordings. Reasons Christian Henson: “I would use the WIDE and AMBIENT mics as merely something to increase the stereo width of the CLOSE mics; what you will find is that by diffusing this CLOSE image, reverbs will stick to it a lot better, so suddenly it becomes a lot more believable — that you’re in that new space.”

As always, a gorgeous GUI (Graphical User Interface) typical of The Crow Hill Company’s acclaimed attention to design detail ensures that CELLO MOTORS is easily as enjoyable to play as it is to hear — think fancy-coloured keys denoting keyswitch location(s); active articulation window showing articulation determined by those keys, with colour coding showing which key colour belongs to that articulation; and keyswitch location window displaying selected key location. And advanced master controls for those wishing to dig a little deeper include STEREO WIDTH (stereo spread) — adjusts the instrument’s stereo width; ROOM TONE (noise) — adjusts the amount of room tone; MONO FILTER — adjusts the frequency at which the signal folds to mono; RELEASE — adjusts the release envelope times (of longs only); PHASE — inverts the instrument’s phase; and LR RL (stereo swap) — adjusts the instrument’s channel assignment.

“As with all of our plug-ins, we’ve curated a set of production tools at the front, designed to really work with the product that you’re working with,” Christian Henson states. “So we’ve got an EQ that has been designed to make things sound better, not worse, and I’m certainly going to have a lot of fun with the DELAY, then REVERB… it’s not like putting too much sugar in your tea, reverb is good for you — Hollywood and big-time London engineers use tons of the stuff; saying that, I use a lot of CHAMBER as it works better with this release than, say, HALL. However, if you’re wanting to create something a bit more ‘soupy’ then you may want to muck around more with the AMBIENT mics. Certainly something that I’ll be experimenting with — without those mics, probably, and without the REVERB — is hyper compression, distortion… that kind of stuff.”

Signing off on a CELLO MOTORS-induced high note, Christian Henson, unsurprisingly, is impressed; it is, after all, highly unlikely that The Crow Hill Company’s latest library would ever have seen the light of day had he not imagined the sound itself: “It’s just so lovely to realise that sound that I didn’t have, but I wanted! It’s a bit of a rabbit hole that I’ve really enjoyed being down over the last couple of days, and I hope that you enjoy it, too.” 22 tempo-sync’d rhythmic phrases (‘motors’), three mix-ready stereo signals (CLOSE, WIDE, and AMBIENT), and master effects (including DELAY, EQ, and REVERB) should surely be more than enough to provide fresh new propulsion for anyone’s scoring sensibilities while exploring the polyrhythmic possibilities of those propulsive, gritty, and rosin-rich cellos carefully captured in Scotland’s celebrated Castlesound Studios — with many music-making days ahead of them.

Become better acquainted with the carefully captured, propulsive, gritty, and rosin-rich cellos of CELLO MOTORS while watching The Crow Hill Company co-founder Christian Henson’s highly-informative walkthrough video here:

CELLO MOTORS is available at an attractive introductory promo price of only £29.00 GBP until 23:59 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) on October 31, 2025 — rising thereafter to its regular price of £39.00 GBP — as an AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3-format-compatible sample-based virtual instrument plug-in — comprising 4 GB of uncompressed material (compressed losslessly to 2.3 GB) that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)

CELLO MOTORS installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/

For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated CELLO MOTORS webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/cello-motors/









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