(...) For instance, I think you can hear that there’s quite gorgeous timbres captured in SStS in something like this:
Ism,
There are at least four or five libraries in Spitfire’s catalog — not to mention the many libraries from other developers — that can do that kind of thing A LOT better. It’s not for me to say of course what other people ought to be doing with their libraries, but I just don’t get why you would want to buy a library of
a studio orchestra, recorded in a smallish space, only to then try to turn it into a spacious, washy, large-scale kind of thing. That’s fake double up, if you ask me.
I strongly disagree with you, you see, that because of its baked-in early reflections, the Spitfire Studio Series ‘takes to an external reverb quite well’. I believe, in fact, that the exact opposite is true, because those early reflections, which are indeed a distinct part of the sampled sound,
suggest confinement (as early reflections invariably do). Adding a hall reverb to these samples creates a spatial conflict between, on the one hand, the suggestion of confinement as imprinted in the samples and, on the other hand, the suggestion of large-scale spaciousness that comes from the reverb. And that simply doesn’t sound right to my ears.
(That conflict is least distracting with the strings, and in certain carefully judged situations, you can more or less work around it with several of the woods as well, but it becomes an unsolvable problem with the brass. You can hear all this in the official demo’s. And also in MikeT’s “Avenger” rendition, which, while well done, sounds both big and boxy at the same time.)
When the Studio Series was originally announced, I got quite excited actually. Finally, I thought, we would have an orchestral library, built with Spitfire’s incomparable experience and peerless craftsmanship, with which to render small-to-medium-sized orchestral music in not too big and not too wet a space. Something I’ve been dreaming of for, well, over 20 years. See, my favourite orchestral sound is not the big, lush, glossy, ultra-wide, pristine sound that, for example, the combination Williams-Murphy gives us, no, I prefer something on a more modest scale: an expanded chamber group in a mid-size recording studio. Or, as Wiliford (whose earlier post I agree with entirely) put it: the smaller, drier sound you often used to hear in scoring for television. I really like that.
To give you an idea, here’s
https://users.telenet.be/re-peat/TheMenu.mp3 (<b><u>an excellent example of the sound I’m talking about</u></b>). That’s the cue “The Menu”, from the first “Jaws” (a soundtrack which, like a lot of Williams’ earlier work, sounds very much like an orchestral tv-score of its day). The sound in that example — both of the orchestra and of the space — is what I hoped and expected the Studio Series would allow me to emulate (insofar as samples are capable of such a thing, of course). And on paper it does. Which is why I bought the Pro version of the three volumes without thinking twice. After all, this is Spitfire we’re talking about, right?
Sadly, a number of things went wrong during the production of the Studio Series, in my opinion. I’ve said on a few occasions that, to my ears, it sounds as if Spitfire sent out their B-team to do the job, but apparently, that wasn’t the case. Still, I don’t think the sound engineering is up to Spitfire-scratch (also illustrated in the official demo’s), far from it even, I further believe that they sacrificed several essential articulations in favour of non-essential ones (the shorts department is frustratingly under-populated), moreover the concept of stacking smaller sections to suggest bigger ones also strikes me as a surprisingly un-Spitfire-ishly approach, and the programming is annoyingly slap-dash in places as well. Try, for example, to forge a coherent-sounding, musically expressive phrase combining various articulations, with any of the solo instruments, and you’re in for an extremely harrowing time with little if any outlook on a truly good result.
My initial grave desillusionment with the library has abated a little, but I still think it’s a very weak set. (Not just in the subjective light of my personal expectations, but also in the more objective light of what the product is claimed and sold as to be.) Time and again, I’ve tried to make it work, but apart from the occasional satisfying string part (and a single use of the bassclarinet in a non-orchestral setting), I’ve always given up and turned away pretty disappointed to look for a solution elsewhere. So far, I haven’t heard anyone else either do anything with it that I find enjoyably convincing, sonically or musically.
(And again: the idea of somehow circumnavigating the baked-in studio ambience of this library and make it appear as if the included instruments and sections were captured in a sizeable hall, simply doesn’t make any sense to me at all. If I’d want that, I’d use a different library. If you want the sound of a church organ, you don’t start with a Farfisa either.)
Were one, on a particularly intrepid day, to try and mock-up “The Menu” with the Studio Series, you would barely get past the opening horn staccato’s, and then you would already be stuck as there is simply no content available in the library to progress successfully. That, I find, shouldn’t be the case with a so-called
professional studio orchestra library from one of the top developers.
I’m not saying (as, during the first days of my disappointment, I used to say) that this library is completely without value or potential, but I do firmly believe it isn’t fully capable of being what its developer describes it to be, and I’m also of the opinion that, strictly technically speaking, it falls well below the standard set by Spitfire’s best work.
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