Need help finding Orchestral String library

[myronman]

Hello,

I am new to VI's and electrical music. I'm going to school for composition and want to be able to produce good performances of my pieces. I bought the MSI a few months ago and frankly, the sounds that came with it are... so so. My friends have told me that they sound "8-bit-ish".

Can you guys reccommend sound libraries that work for msi, or dp5 that have damn good sounds that I can use for cello and piano and put right into dp5 and get a really good sound?

Also, have any of you guys used Vienna's Orchestral strings? How does that work?

[Spikey Horse]

VSL recently introduced 'vienna instruments' which uses the same samples (and more) as the previous editions except now works as an AU plug in with new intelligent patch selection based on your keyboard playing as well as teh usual keyswitching etc.

The point is this thing is much more compatable with DP (or any sequencer) than previous VSL editions (no performance tool or separate soft sampler needed) as well as being more advanced performance wise.

If you *just* want to play cello and piano then maybe the Vienna Instruments 'solo strings' might be an option (its' a bit cheaper than 'chamber' or 'orchestral' strings packages). OK I know it's still pretty pricey - I'm still saving up myself!

There is no piano in any VSL edition at the moment.

Another option might be getting Kontakt 2 which comes with approx 8GB of VSL content including some nice legato string patches + you get a free sampler!!!

For piano Akustik Piano is pretty good as is Ivory (which I have not really heard). Again neither is exactly cheap but like any of the VSL stuff it's all good value .... you only have to try any of them to be hooked.

Maybe some of the old Horizon series is being discounted now? I haven't looked as I'm waiting to get the new 'instruments' packages.

Prices can be found on their site:

vsl.co.at/index.html

EDIT: BTW I don't think you can use other libraries with MSI..... but I don't have it so can't say or 100% sure. If you don't yet own a soft sampler and think you will probably need one somewhere along the line anyway then the K2 option might be worth considering - it is a great little intro to VSL as well as being a great sampler in it's own right - with plenty of compatable Piano libraries I'm sure out there, too.

[utility531]

Check out www.Synful.com. If you like being expressive and easier to play strings etc. Listen to the many demos in their site. I especially like the solo violin. It is not for everyone but you might like them. I have not seen anything that can match them yet for expressiveness using an expression pedal or your mod wheel. And this is a VI synthesizer!

Garritan also has a stradivarious solo violin (you need Kontakt 2 to use it though - unfortunately)

So much of this is connected to one's ability to play a viloin on a keyboard that actually sounds like the real thing.

[Frodo]

I would recommend Miroslav Vitous Philharmonik. It really holds up in audio quality, and the interface has tons of processing tools, including IKM's CSI reverb-- and it has a grand piano, harpsichord, catherdral pipe organ, celetse, and other goodies.

It's more flexible than something like GPO, (just my opinion) and has a warmer, richer sounds-- also fun to use. It was one of those plugins that allowed me to do an entire 6 minute orchestral sequence on the day I installed it. Can't say that about other collections-- not yet, anyway.

http://www.philharmonik.com/Main.html?prod_MP

Like Spikey Horse mentioined, the Vienna Instruments 10 volume set can be used one section at a time. Unlike their earlier collections, you can actually buy one volume at a time. No piano, confirmed.

Utility531 makes an excellent recommendation with Synful's collection. The one thing this has over other libraries is that it the entire orchestra fits in 32M of memory and loads in seconds. This means that you could make amazing use of your CPU and RAM resources-- and there is a free trial! The days of having to use cheesy orchestral sounds are clearly over-- and the ability to use great sounds at a reasonable price are here to stay.

[emulatorloo]

Can you guys reccommend sound libraries that work for msi, or dp5 that have damn good sounds that I can use for cello and piano and put right into dp5 and get a really good sound?

No included piano, but some like EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold http://www.soundsonline.com/sophtml/det ... sku=EW-160

Good demos on that page. I think I have seem better pricing on it than that.

[mhschmieder]

Thanks for the reminder about Synful Orchestra. It's been on my list of products to watch for a couple of years now, but I hadn't thought to check for updates and was quite surprised last night when I revisited their site for the first time in well over a year and saw that they now have a Mac OS X version and have added tons of features for more realistic rendering.

I have downloaded and installed the demo and will try it tonight on some pre-recorded tracks (even those don't have as much expression, or perhaps precisely for that reason, out of curiosity of how Synful interpolates and infers expressiveness and phrasing from its look-ahead capabilities).

I will compare those renderings against MOTU Symphonic Instrument, and possibly against Notion (now that they have a downloadable demo for the Mac), as Notion doesn't depend on MIDI (though it probably does not infer additional phrasing characteristics if you merely import a MIDI vs. starting from a traditional fully annotated and marked score).

Surprisingly, the Mahler demos quite impressed me, as did the other Late Romantic works, but the earlier classical works did not. Possibly this means that Synful does a better job of more elongated passages than of quick passages with lots of articulation.

Some of the forum members suggested layering Synful with a quality sample library. This makes sense to me, as I often do this with FM-based sounds when dealing with instruments such as marimba, where the FM patch captures the transients and the quality sample provides the realistic sustain.

Synful uses additive synthesis, not physical modeling or subtractive synthesis or even FM synthesis (which is sometimes combined with additive synthesis).

To be clear, Notion uses some sort of phrase interpolation algorithm, but it applies it to sample-switching; whereas Synful uses no samples at all, but has a set of additive synthesis algorithms that are phrase-oriented (where the various envelopes presumably chain together to form a phrase).

Considering the price of Synful ($489 or so from their website, and possibly there are cheaper street prices through third party vendors), I don't think it's at all OT to introduce this product into the discussion and to discuss its merits and drawbacks relative to sample libraries.

If combining the two approaches, it would be interesting to hear which sample libraries have worked best in conjunction with Synful, to form an overall budget for the paired products.

[Frodo]

MHS- cheers!

The price is something to watch, but most vendors will do 15-20% off if schmoozed the right way. Hmm.

What is MOST intriguing to me is the light system load, which is often the big trade-off. Using it in terms of layering other sounds means that one could have a sample-based VI loaded and use Synful without enduring much of a CPU hit at all.

I'm downloading the demo now as well. Maybe we can compare notes...

[mhschmieder]

I finally got around to spending a few hours with my Synful orchestra demo last night.

A total disaster. I would have to re-track the MIDI from scratch in order to get musical/usable results. I didn't have time for that.

This is not a criticism of Synful Orchestra, as even the results that I got sounded more human and expressive.

But it is unlikely that an existing MIDI sequences that was entered via live playing at a keyboard, is likely to have usable data from Synful's point of view.

As I do not own Sibelius, Finale, or Notion, I do not yet have the option of entering a formal score for Synful to interpret. I imagine this process would generate more successful results.

As it is, I would have had to seriously alter the velocities and note lengths of my entire set of MIDI files that I tried, and for me that would be way more time-consuming than re-recording them; hopefully with liove monitoring of Synful so that I'm "playing" it like an instrument as I create the best-matched MIDI (with the delay for superior rendering feature temporarily turned off, of course).

I will not bother buying this moderately expensive product (which I can't afford at the moment anyway) until after taking care of my notation needs. But it is probably a great product for more advanced orchestrators who have the other requisite tools at hand.

[Frodo]

It's always the way with proprietary sample formats. I can't even swap a piano sample with the same MIDI track. Because of the way the samples are mapped and with specialty behaviors with all of them, they have to be played very differently to work just so. I've come to expect that. In those cases, for me it's easier just to play the parts again to go for the best possible performance if the sounds are worth using.

What's nice about doing this is it allows for more convincing stacking. But time and results always have to be in balance.

Hmm. I'll chime in on this in the next day or so.

[mhschmieder]

Hmm, I thought I entered a note about my Notion demo (which arrived Monday, and which I tried that evening), but maybe I did that in the Yamaha Motif forum instead?

Anyway, the Notion scoring program really impressed me with its smoothe sample-interpolation of both a fresh score that I entered (with LOTS of marking; not just notes!), and the ones they ship as demos with the package.

The LSO samples that come with Notion are apparantly more phrase-oriented, and as Notion is not MIDI-based (though it is MIDI-aware), it is able to deal with 1000 levels vs. 128 levels of volume and other attributes. I believe this makes a huge difference in the quality of its audio rendering of the score.

Whether or not throwing Notion into the regular workflow or not makes sense, is up to others to investigate, as I am not sophisticated enough yet with computer-based music to know what all is possible, or how easy, to integrate different tools and repurpose them as live playback sources.

[Frodo]

mh-- I thought I did see your post about Notion. Very curious about that app and will check it out once I get through Metro and Synful tryouts. (Am also about to go on tour for a couple of weeks...)

The all-in-one app concept is still one of intrigue. Of course, much depends on the type of music you are doing. Being a rather old school sort of musician, there is a sense of near completion in terms of getting a good performance recorded in. The thing that is most depressing is tweaking controller curves and preferences to create a meaningful performance, especially after you've managed to play it in just so. Things I play into DP sound hideous in Finale, for example, and I often begin to doubt what I've written unless I totally ignore what I'm hearing and trust what I'm seeing much more-- which is the total opposite approach from working with audio mixes.

I've discovered that not all of my projects are the same-- beyond style of music, they tend to draw from different creative pools, require different methods, etc. A file being scored in DP to be ported to Finale is done very differently than one just being done in DP for audio output. I tend at times to ignore click and barlines and just use DP like a tape recorder-- works great for orchestral tracks. That certainly does nothing for porting data into a notation program, but it does render more of a real world performance. Then there are those "slave-to-film" projects which require a bit of both.

The idea of Notion being an app that would allow for more expressive playback while pegging the details of notation itself is fascinating. I hate Finale's MIDI functionality and note input, but I love its display and publishing output. I love DP's MIDI input, but avoid QuickScribe for everything except for easy note editing. The experience of working with a truly expressive notation program would be a new experience for me-- and if it works it could have a huge impact on how certain projects get done.

Okay, so I've already committed this summer to starting all over with DP after 10+ years in a shootout with Logic, using Metro as a tie breaker just to keep things honest. I wish Nuendo had a demo, because I'd love to at least work with its notation features which seem appreciably upscaled from Cubase, DP, and Logic. But certainly, a Finale-Sibelius-Notion shootout is worth doing.

Maybe I can find some extra days in the week on e-bay or something to get all this done!!