Spitfire Audio - Albion Colossus
- Thread starter Sunny Schramm
- Start date
jesussaddle
Active Member
Guy is very entertaining. And he knows more than a hill of beans about composing too.
jesussaddle
Active Member
KEM
The TENET Guy
Arkham City is one of my top 5 favorite games of all time!! It came out when I was in 8th grade and my mom actually picked me up from school early so we could go to GameStop and pick up my preorder, I remember that day vividly. I replay that games story at least every few months or so, it’s never gotten old to me
titokane
Newfangled Member
Shorts and Dive Bombs aren't completely bad (not a guitar player) -- I could see them working as a layer with string chugs (big slow impacts, not fast rhythmic stuff)... but the longs are... well they don't seem particularly useful. No vibrato, no pitch bend control, it all feels somewhat lifeless.
For how good the drums sound these guitars just ain't it.
KEM
The TENET Guy
The lead playing sounds good but it starts to sound fake around 1:16 in the lower register, I think that’s where guitar libraries have the most problems, chugs just sound so robotic and fake on sampled guitars, and as a metal oriented player it sticks out like a sore thumb
KEM
The TENET Guy
I did enjoy the dive bombs a bit, I’ve never had a whammy bar so they sounded like they’d be fun to mess around with, but I definitely wouldn’t pick having good dive bombs over good… everything else
RyanRhea
Member
Got the whole orchestra mapped and I guess I'm just... meh. Not a Colossus by any means, but I can see how it could be used. Just plain weird stuff from SF... but they've been doing a lot of that lately.
The RAM loading light never stops blinking. I got it down to 9GB RAM (all sections, long and short plus a few things like tremolo, etc.) by removing artics, but like BBCSO it starts choking out notes beyond a certain amount of patches loaded in regardless. I get crunch/crackles with those missing notes, too. Again, just like BBCSO when you get up to a certain amount of tracks with it. Strings and horns? Fine. But then add in Woods and it starts missing notes, for example. I am on an M1 Max with 64GB RAM + 8 TB internal SSD a read speed that runs somewhere around 5k Mbps.
The sound of this orchestra is entirely dependent on the Scale slider (blending between small and large orch). Some patches sound better with it up higher, some with it down lower. That makes it far less a universal thing and will likely need to be adjusted to taste. For example, I completely unlink Scale and Depth from Dyn/Exp from the get go, or you'll otherwise question your sanity as the sound goes from bassy lack of high-end to blistering bright as you add in dynamics and you'll not know why. Scale is auto mapped to CC20 and Depth to CC21.. both worth mapping for easy experimentation. Same goes for mapping Hype, which for me is almost useless but maybe some will like it.
I also made Scale unassigned in the long High and Low String patches because the strings get really nasty sounding fast with Scale higher up, but the Brass benefits from a higher Scale setting. 🤷♂️ Brass also benefits from having Scale mapped to a fader because that's how you get it to be nasty when you need it and tamer when you don't. For me a high Scale setting just makes the strings sound crazy wrong.
Woods are ok.
The sound is punchier and less delicate unlike most of their other stuff that I tend to like better. An effort to make something different here I guess, but it ends up being pretty sterile and "trailery" sounding, which I guess is the whole point of this thing in the first place. lol
The player, unfortunately, is buggy like the other stuff.
The RAM loading light never stops blinking. I got it down to 9GB RAM (all sections, long and short plus a few things like tremolo, etc.) by removing artics, but like BBCSO it starts choking out notes beyond a certain amount of patches loaded in regardless. I get crunch/crackles with those missing notes, too. Again, just like BBCSO when you get up to a certain amount of tracks with it. Strings and horns? Fine. But then add in Woods and it starts missing notes, for example. I am on an M1 Max with 64GB RAM + 8 TB internal SSD a read speed that runs somewhere around 5k Mbps.
The sound of this orchestra is entirely dependent on the Scale slider (blending between small and large orch). Some patches sound better with it up higher, some with it down lower. That makes it far less a universal thing and will likely need to be adjusted to taste. For example, I completely unlink Scale and Depth from Dyn/Exp from the get go, or you'll otherwise question your sanity as the sound goes from bassy lack of high-end to blistering bright as you add in dynamics and you'll not know why. Scale is auto mapped to CC20 and Depth to CC21.. both worth mapping for easy experimentation. Same goes for mapping Hype, which for me is almost useless but maybe some will like it.
I also made Scale unassigned in the long High and Low String patches because the strings get really nasty sounding fast with Scale higher up, but the Brass benefits from a higher Scale setting. 🤷♂️ Brass also benefits from having Scale mapped to a fader because that's how you get it to be nasty when you need it and tamer when you don't. For me a high Scale setting just makes the strings sound crazy wrong.
Woods are ok.
The sound is punchier and less delicate unlike most of their other stuff that I tend to like better. An effort to make something different here I guess, but it ends up being pretty sterile and "trailery" sounding, which I guess is the whole point of this thing in the first place. lol
The player, unfortunately, is buggy like the other stuff.
lukevaljean
Member
With the retirement of Iceni the expectation was delivering a more modern replacement, Spitfire's customers have been asking for years is for a rude FFF library so it's not out of character for people to be upset when expectation didn't match reality. I think it's great for what it is we just have to come to accept it's not what some people originally presumed it would be and embrace what its strengths are.
jesussaddle
Active Member
Yeah, I agree, Heavier 7 Strings is certainly not perfect - but it satisfies for me for certain purposes. I guess due to the nature of vibrato on electric guitar, the personal style of one player, if captured in a library, will not cover many others. Three Body Tech did manage to record and feed one players style into their program - and they avoided using pitch bend for vibrato which for electric guitar is a wise choice. Anyway, IMO with the Kronos x/y joystick thing the emotion of the vibrato seems to be playable. Its good for arpeggiated notes as well (the sustains ring out like electric guitar strings do, fading over a very long time. Now for chunks and rhythms and low end, there's an area which I haven't found a single instrument to handle.
From what I hear of Colossus I'm not at all liking the guitar, but I do think the library can have its use. They mention at one point that some may feel like skipping Albion One and getting Colossus instead. I wonder if that means they'd let me trade in my Albion One for Colossus. No?
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QuiteAlright
Gastronomer
About the RAM usage, I'm guessing that it loads both the chamber version and the symphonic version of each sample so that it can crossfade between them. And it loads multiple mic positions for the corresponding slider, and multiple dynamic layers... All of that adds up.
I think their design choice to make everything a slider does make things easier in a sense, but it comes with the sacrifice of RAM on the other side.
I think their design choice to make everything a slider does make things easier in a sense, but it comes with the sacrifice of RAM on the other side.
jesussaddle
Active Member
Exactimundo.
KEM
The TENET Guy
Honestly I think I prefer Albion One just for the Easter Island hits, I use those on pretty much everything, and I use the string ensemble patch to do all my sketching and it usually ends up staying in my final tracks as well just for reinforcement. I do hear things in Colossus that I could make use it, but are they things I’d use in every single track? Probably not
jesussaddle
Active Member
I was thinking exactly this. Its like it goes to 8 but offers a synth bed underneath and saturation on top. Problem is that you can get sounds if you make your players Play at eleven, that you can't get with this. But on the good side, it does offer a workflow for contrasts that might be useful for some of us. Maybe I should buy some bits of Ark 1 before I comment though, because that's kind of a defacto standard for trailer-ish stuff anyway.
jesussaddle
Active Member
jesussaddle
Active Member
As was I.
KEM
The TENET Guy
It is, and like I mentioned earlier, this library is called “Colossus” and is marketed as being “the pinnacle of modern epic scoring”, if it delivered on that claim and it’s namesake I wouldn’t have brought up JXL Brass, but the brass in here doesn’t even reach half of what JXL Brass does. I only brought it up to show just how poorly this product is marketed
titokane
Newfangled Member
If you don't have a ton of other libraries, this one has some interesting things that it brings to the table. I do have a ton of libraries, though. After digging around, here are the things I think will probably make it on to future productions / find a place in the template:
• Altered Drumkits -- no brainer for me, these sound great and having 10 options an articulation set away makes them incredibly valuable. Limited "drums" per patch, but these are instant industrial.
• Percussion (Concert, Traditional, Junkyard) -- these are all pretty solid, and while they aren't as extensive as the other drums in my template they have some more immediate sound design potential. Automating hype sounds great with these.
• Synths -- I might just save some of these patches in the template for fast drafting work, or when I don't have time to do detailed sound design in a more flexible plugin. Again, having them accessible through articulation is a nice workflow benefit.
• Hairpins (Orchestral instruments) -- I think these sound really nice and the long ones are pretty swell, if you'll excuse the pun. Like a bigger version of OA Chamber Waves.
For everything else... I'm not sure yet. I think a lot of the orchestral instruments could replace patches that I have from Albion One for some more boisterous work. The guitars are probably never going to get touched.
It is all very slow to load though, I assume because so many mic signals are coming in whether you need them or not. I REALLY wish they just had the mic page as an option instead of forcing you to load up four(?!) mixes all at once. No surprise that it takes four times as long to load each patch as it probably should. I can only hope they change their minds and add a mic page in the future.
Compared to the other Albions, Colossus somehow manages to feel more complete and less extensive all at once. It also feels like it has a bit of an identity crisis. All the prior Albions feel to me like they know EXACTLY what they want to be and had lots of a very specific character. This one feels like it can't decide if it wanted to be an Albion or an Aperture and ends up somewhere in the middle.
Very little about the library sounds BAD, for the record. It just might not be as immediately inspiring for me as some other options.
• Altered Drumkits -- no brainer for me, these sound great and having 10 options an articulation set away makes them incredibly valuable. Limited "drums" per patch, but these are instant industrial.
• Percussion (Concert, Traditional, Junkyard) -- these are all pretty solid, and while they aren't as extensive as the other drums in my template they have some more immediate sound design potential. Automating hype sounds great with these.
• Synths -- I might just save some of these patches in the template for fast drafting work, or when I don't have time to do detailed sound design in a more flexible plugin. Again, having them accessible through articulation is a nice workflow benefit.
• Hairpins (Orchestral instruments) -- I think these sound really nice and the long ones are pretty swell, if you'll excuse the pun. Like a bigger version of OA Chamber Waves.
For everything else... I'm not sure yet. I think a lot of the orchestral instruments could replace patches that I have from Albion One for some more boisterous work. The guitars are probably never going to get touched.
It is all very slow to load though, I assume because so many mic signals are coming in whether you need them or not. I REALLY wish they just had the mic page as an option instead of forcing you to load up four(?!) mixes all at once. No surprise that it takes four times as long to load each patch as it probably should. I can only hope they change their minds and add a mic page in the future.
Compared to the other Albions, Colossus somehow manages to feel more complete and less extensive all at once. It also feels like it has a bit of an identity crisis. All the prior Albions feel to me like they know EXACTLY what they want to be and had lots of a very specific character. This one feels like it can't decide if it wanted to be an Albion or an Aperture and ends up somewhere in the middle.
Very little about the library sounds BAD, for the record. It just might not be as immediately inspiring for me as some other options.
Jorf88
Member
Okay, I listened to all of their demos and what videos I could find... I just don't get it.
This is not the quality we've come to expect from SA. This sounds terrible to me.
I feel like Albion 1 can do almost everything that this library can, but better... never mind something superior at being gritty like MA1.
Big miss.
This is not the quality we've come to expect from SA. This sounds terrible to me.
I feel like Albion 1 can do almost everything that this library can, but better... never mind something superior at being gritty like MA1.
Big miss.
