Crow Hill adds Wersi-inspired Vintage String Synth to free Vaults pack

The Crow Hill Company released its W “Vintage String Synth” on June 19, giving the free Vaults range a Wersi String Orchestra sample set that goes straight after the vintage string-machine sound people still chase in old Solina and ARP gear. This is not a polite nod to the era. It is a deliberate swing at the thick, chorus-soaked ensemble haze that made 1970s string synths feel bigger than the keyboards themselves.

The pedigree matters here. The Wersi String Orchestra sits in the same broad family as the ARP/Solina String Ensemble, a 49-key divide-down instrument made from 1974 to 1981 whose chorus and ensemble processing became part of the template for the whole category. Collector documentation also places the Wersi as a German 1970s string machine related to the Logan String Melody II, which puts Crow Hill’s release inside a very specific line of hardware, not just a vague “vintage strings” concept. That lineage is exactly why the patch lands at all: these machines were built for instant width, soft motion and pseudo-orchestral glow, not modern precision.

Crow Hill says the idea came from a Hainbach video from about seven years earlier, and the company’s creative director, Dot Allison, spotted it and went looking for a Wersi model herself. Hainbach’s Wersi String-Orchestra video made the case plainly enough: string synths live or die on heavy modulation, the sort of chorus, phaser and ensemble movement that can make a simple divider-based instrument sound eerily animated. Crow Hill leans into that history rather than sanding it down.

The instrument’s interface stays close to the company’s familiar Vaults layout. Two large controls crossfade between upper strings and lower strings, while smaller dials handle low-pass filtering, chorus, rotor and reverb. That is the right move for a machine like this, because the point is not versatility in the workstation sense. The point is to get to the exact width, shimmer and slight wooziness that makes these old string textures work under chords, pedals and slow melodic lines.

Crow Hill also frames the release with Herzog, Kubrick, Coppola and Parliament-Funkadelic references, which tells you the intended lane: cinematic, slightly weird, and useful fast. Vaults instruments are available through the Crow Hill App, and the company’s 2025 relaunch tied archived Vaults releases to a charity model that sends every penny spent on the archived vintage Vaults to Love Music. For players who want the Solina-style payoff without hunting, restoring or servicing rare hardware, this free Wersi-derived release looks like the right kind of compromise: unapologetically old-school, immediately playable, and built around the shimmer that still defines the format.