river angler
Senior Member
My first ever post here!...
(Please forgive its length!)
I am a pro composer/songwriter/musician working mainly in film/TV.
I was about to post this thread under a different heading when I noticed EastWest have Hollywood Orchestra bundled with its Hollywood Solo Instruments libraries now on sale for an astonishing $372 ! Hence the title: "What's the rub?"! I suspect at this give-away price they must be imminently releasing a new orchestral library no?
For over a year now I have been deliberating investing in Spitfire's Symphonic Orchestra Complete package.
For longer than I'd care to admit I have been working with Miroslav Philharmonik (original) and the basic Kontakt library for most of my classical scoring mock-ups and occasional mastered projects. However, as much as I have grown used to a certain way of working round their limitations I am now increasingly finding the amount of that work needed to get my compositions to decent presentable form for my clients on time is now proving too stressful to achieve.
Yes! you may well wonder why I have never upgraded from these libraries who's samples are well over a decade old! Call me a luddite! but I guess I'm just one of those musicians/composers who upgrades majorly in one fair swoop rather than jump on the bandwagon of increasingly frequent plugin product releases. Also I've always been a believer that working with less tools brings out the best in a composer and accordingly have invested in quality studio kit over the years that captures what I write well but least interferes with the creative writing process.
One of this Miroslav/Kontakt combo's weak points is that their samples dynamic layers and levels of crossfading between those layers when composing on the fly are rather limited. The abrupt jump in timbre between velocity 89 and 90 in the Kontakt brass patches for example has always been a frustrating one to deal with both when playing in and editing an arrangement. Then there is the lack of true legato patches that more often than not forces my having to employ various time consuming tricks to make the arrangements sit musically. Oh! yes! and my peers have often reminded me how I have also overlooked the fact that I have grown too used to spending quite some time blending mixtures of instruments from both libraries in the overall ambient mix!
A lot of things I mention here hint to production technique topics no doubt well covered in generously informative forums such as this one but things that I have been urged to address fortunately only by my peer composer friends and not by my clients!... well.. so far!
Recently I spent a week on my own at a friends studio trying out East West Hollywood Orchestra composing fresh music and transcribing some already written pieces of mine. Of course I immediately heard the difference in playability and the greater range of articulations was in another league, needless to say sonically the samples themselves are recorded with greater sonic fidelity plus one has full control over mics and stereo placement. However during that week I found HO needed quite a lot of work during the more subtle musical passages where longer samples are exposed to get them to sound close to how I wanted them to sound. I found the Player 5 engine tricky to work with: a trait I have heard grumbled about from many others! I could get used to it of course but even during the intense week I spent working with HO I couldn't help feeling that the end result for these quieter pieces didn’t sound as good as I had hoped. For these, lets say, non-bombastic orchestral arrangements, I found the overall impression a little underwhelming. I was left feeling that either I need a lot more time to tame this library into a way of working quicker with it within this area of slower, more sensitive composition, or that the problem lies inherent in its samples that may have been recorded too precisely for my taste. Perhaps something in the style of the musicians they used to make those samples and how they blend together is just not doing it for me…?
Unfortunately I have not yet had a chance to test out Spitfire's Symphonic Orchestra Complete package. However from the vast amount of compositions and tutorials I have heard Spitfire Audio samples do seem to sound more "musical" to my ears and for want of a better phrase, a little "warmer" in character especially for slow tempo composition. This impression must be born from the kind of musicians they used to record those samples, maybe because the samples aren't derived from a commercial "Hollywood Film" pedigree. Spitfire samples, tonally, seem to have a subtle nuance to them hence a less clinical overall feel. A lot of this may also be down to the sonics of the Air Lyndhurst Hall compared to a conventional, if large, recording studio live room where EastWest recorded theirs. I have always had the impression that EastWest gear their orchestral products toward the big commercial Hollywood scene/music production and as such I have yet to come across a demo not touting the generic Hollywood movie score, revealing instead a more sensitive use of its orchestral libraries.
As much as the pursuit of one’s own individual style as a composer is generated from the actual content one writes I am keen to acquire the most musically versatile sounding complete orchestral package I can find to work with. Of course a composer always makes the best of the tools he has in front of him as I have endeavoured to do all these years with Miroslav and Kontakt! No doubt getting used to Spitfire or EastWest on my part could yield the right results eventually once I found my own efficient methods of taming either to my needs: I just don't want to find myself in a similar position I am currently where potential pitfalls in the design of a library force me to spend precious time amending things: time a composer can no longer afford in this modern age where us composers are increasingly asked to work under such short deadlines! However despite such a plethora of choice out there and so many of these libraries capable of great results in the right hands, for straight orchestral work, it doesn't make sense to me to blend different manufacturers libraries so I'm keen to plum for one or the other manufacturer. Time is money and I now must upgrade to the most appropriate choice regardless of how much or little it costs.
I have considered other companies like Orchestral Tools but have decided to limit my choice to these two for my own sanity! but more seriously if only because they now both offer all the other orchestrally related expansion libraries.
Hence if any readers here have recently migrated to Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra/Complete from having been regular Hollywood Orchestral users OR VICE VERSA why did they do so?
I'm sure other composers here perhaps in a similar position as myself would also be intrigued to read comments from users of EastWest Hollywood Orchestra in the professional field who have been satisfied using this package for more subtle composition rather than the myriad of "Hollywood-esque" compositions one can listen to ad infinitum on Youtube!
I'm curious to gauge what the general consensus is regarding Hollywood Strings as a versatile full orchestral package especially now in the light of it's current super low asking price!
Anybody chiming in much appreciated!
(Please forgive its length!)
I am a pro composer/songwriter/musician working mainly in film/TV.
I was about to post this thread under a different heading when I noticed EastWest have Hollywood Orchestra bundled with its Hollywood Solo Instruments libraries now on sale for an astonishing $372 ! Hence the title: "What's the rub?"! I suspect at this give-away price they must be imminently releasing a new orchestral library no?
For over a year now I have been deliberating investing in Spitfire's Symphonic Orchestra Complete package.
For longer than I'd care to admit I have been working with Miroslav Philharmonik (original) and the basic Kontakt library for most of my classical scoring mock-ups and occasional mastered projects. However, as much as I have grown used to a certain way of working round their limitations I am now increasingly finding the amount of that work needed to get my compositions to decent presentable form for my clients on time is now proving too stressful to achieve.
Yes! you may well wonder why I have never upgraded from these libraries who's samples are well over a decade old! Call me a luddite! but I guess I'm just one of those musicians/composers who upgrades majorly in one fair swoop rather than jump on the bandwagon of increasingly frequent plugin product releases. Also I've always been a believer that working with less tools brings out the best in a composer and accordingly have invested in quality studio kit over the years that captures what I write well but least interferes with the creative writing process.
One of this Miroslav/Kontakt combo's weak points is that their samples dynamic layers and levels of crossfading between those layers when composing on the fly are rather limited. The abrupt jump in timbre between velocity 89 and 90 in the Kontakt brass patches for example has always been a frustrating one to deal with both when playing in and editing an arrangement. Then there is the lack of true legato patches that more often than not forces my having to employ various time consuming tricks to make the arrangements sit musically. Oh! yes! and my peers have often reminded me how I have also overlooked the fact that I have grown too used to spending quite some time blending mixtures of instruments from both libraries in the overall ambient mix!
A lot of things I mention here hint to production technique topics no doubt well covered in generously informative forums such as this one but things that I have been urged to address fortunately only by my peer composer friends and not by my clients!... well.. so far!
Recently I spent a week on my own at a friends studio trying out East West Hollywood Orchestra composing fresh music and transcribing some already written pieces of mine. Of course I immediately heard the difference in playability and the greater range of articulations was in another league, needless to say sonically the samples themselves are recorded with greater sonic fidelity plus one has full control over mics and stereo placement. However during that week I found HO needed quite a lot of work during the more subtle musical passages where longer samples are exposed to get them to sound close to how I wanted them to sound. I found the Player 5 engine tricky to work with: a trait I have heard grumbled about from many others! I could get used to it of course but even during the intense week I spent working with HO I couldn't help feeling that the end result for these quieter pieces didn’t sound as good as I had hoped. For these, lets say, non-bombastic orchestral arrangements, I found the overall impression a little underwhelming. I was left feeling that either I need a lot more time to tame this library into a way of working quicker with it within this area of slower, more sensitive composition, or that the problem lies inherent in its samples that may have been recorded too precisely for my taste. Perhaps something in the style of the musicians they used to make those samples and how they blend together is just not doing it for me…?
Unfortunately I have not yet had a chance to test out Spitfire's Symphonic Orchestra Complete package. However from the vast amount of compositions and tutorials I have heard Spitfire Audio samples do seem to sound more "musical" to my ears and for want of a better phrase, a little "warmer" in character especially for slow tempo composition. This impression must be born from the kind of musicians they used to record those samples, maybe because the samples aren't derived from a commercial "Hollywood Film" pedigree. Spitfire samples, tonally, seem to have a subtle nuance to them hence a less clinical overall feel. A lot of this may also be down to the sonics of the Air Lyndhurst Hall compared to a conventional, if large, recording studio live room where EastWest recorded theirs. I have always had the impression that EastWest gear their orchestral products toward the big commercial Hollywood scene/music production and as such I have yet to come across a demo not touting the generic Hollywood movie score, revealing instead a more sensitive use of its orchestral libraries.
As much as the pursuit of one’s own individual style as a composer is generated from the actual content one writes I am keen to acquire the most musically versatile sounding complete orchestral package I can find to work with. Of course a composer always makes the best of the tools he has in front of him as I have endeavoured to do all these years with Miroslav and Kontakt! No doubt getting used to Spitfire or EastWest on my part could yield the right results eventually once I found my own efficient methods of taming either to my needs: I just don't want to find myself in a similar position I am currently where potential pitfalls in the design of a library force me to spend precious time amending things: time a composer can no longer afford in this modern age where us composers are increasingly asked to work under such short deadlines! However despite such a plethora of choice out there and so many of these libraries capable of great results in the right hands, for straight orchestral work, it doesn't make sense to me to blend different manufacturers libraries so I'm keen to plum for one or the other manufacturer. Time is money and I now must upgrade to the most appropriate choice regardless of how much or little it costs.
I have considered other companies like Orchestral Tools but have decided to limit my choice to these two for my own sanity! but more seriously if only because they now both offer all the other orchestrally related expansion libraries.
Hence if any readers here have recently migrated to Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra/Complete from having been regular Hollywood Orchestral users OR VICE VERSA why did they do so?
I'm sure other composers here perhaps in a similar position as myself would also be intrigued to read comments from users of EastWest Hollywood Orchestra in the professional field who have been satisfied using this package for more subtle composition rather than the myriad of "Hollywood-esque" compositions one can listen to ad infinitum on Youtube!
I'm curious to gauge what the general consensus is regarding Hollywood Strings as a versatile full orchestral package especially now in the light of it's current super low asking price!
Anybody chiming in much appreciated!