The Best and Brightest

These days, anyone with a decent spec’d computer and a MIDI sequencer or notation program is able to realize their orchestrations with an unprecedented degree of realism. But with the number and variety of choices, it can also be confusing on many levels. Factors such as disk streaming, 24-bit resolution, release-triggered ambience, legato programming, ensemble size, articulation variations, and more all weigh in when it comes to deciding which library is right for your needs and goals.

To help make sense of it all, we devised a plan to cover a variety of virtual orchestras that run the gamut from flagship premiere collections to lean, mean, “load and go” offerings. Hence the following roundup. Notice we didn’t say “shoot out” — we’re not on a mission to proclaim one product as The Best of the Best. That would be unfair and unrealistic. After all, the needs of an arranger working out parts for their local civic orchestra are quite different from a guy cranking out cue after cue for episodic TV in his spare-bedroom-turned-studio. Likewise, a songwriter looking to add realistic orchestral elements to a pop track is very different than someone who’s been tasked with sequencing ultra-believable mockups for a critical film director. It’s all about context and application.

With this in mind, we chose the following libraries for their strengths and advantages in key areas. We’ve put each product into perspective: Who is it targeted toward? How deep and flexible is its soundset? How much of a learning curve does it present? What sets it apart from the competition? Hopefully this information, along with the chart on page 33, will help inform your decision when it comes to choosing a virtual orchestra that’s right for your budget, your studio, and your music.

Before we go on, let’s dispense with a quick disclaimer: All of these libraries are excellent, and while they each have their own sonic character and advantages, any one of them can be used to create great music. Where one collection might have a “hole”, another might fill it. In fact, there’s no reason you can’t mix and match — find out more about how to do this with virtual orchestras on page 48.

LIBRARIES OVER $1,000

All of the products featured in these pages offer a wide assortment of instruments and articulations; however, there’s an obvious dividing line based on price/performance. For this reason, we’ve grouped each collection into one of two categories: under $1,000 and above. Here are those selling for upwards of a grand.

EastWest/Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Pro XP

This is a detailed collection with a dizzying number of articulations performed by soloists as well as smaller and large ensembles. For example, in addition to solo violin, there are 18-, 11-, and 4-player ensembles. This modular design allows you to tailor the orchestra’s size and also gives you the option of programming soloist parts with orchestral accompaniment.

Sonically, this is a muscular and dexterous orchestra with a very “Hollywood” sound. Each section offers a set of “musical effects” that are perfect for dramatic builds and creating tension. Across the board, Pro XP’s samples have a fatness to them that other libraries don’t quite capture. This has its obvious pluses, but also some pitfalls. The low- and low-mid frequencies can get muddy with lots of layered instruments, so you may need to EQ out some of the girth to keep things balanced.

One of the hallmarks of Pro XP is its “multiple microphone perspective” approach: Everything was recorded from three mic positions, close, stage, and hall. You can control the amount of natural ambience by loading and blending among the various mic positions. In practice it works quite well.

Pro XP relies on Native Instruments Kompakt player, which provides more sound editing capabilities than most other plug-in-based libraries. (See Figure 1.) However, in stand-alone mode it only supports eight parts, which isn’t enough for serious work. Fortunately, the library can be opened inside of Kontakt 2, which allows a max of 64 parts, supports program changes, and features a (mostly) useable search engine — handy for navigating through Pro XP’s 138GB worth of sampled instruments.

Programming is top-notch, as you’d expect from a product in this class. The idea with Pro XP was to get final-quality results right out of the box without the need for tedious MIDI editing to achieve musical results. EWQL tackled this in a couple of ways. First, a number of “mini performances” — subtle swells, a delayed hint of vibrato, etc. — were recorded. This gives Pro XP an expressiveness that many other collections lack. Second, the developers used some clever programming to create the illusion of live performances. For example, when a note is repeated, the sample engine will cycle through several (or more) takes of the same articulation so repetitions sound more natural with slight variation on each note. Additionally, mod wheel is used to transition among different sampled dynamic layers, so when a note’s volume and intensity increases, the timbre changes in a natural way.

Working with these features doesn’t present much of a technical hurdle, since much of the technology involved is kept behind the scenes. More challenging is the process of getting to know the wide range of articulations and how they can be performed and edited for specific results. This is true of all the premiere libraries in the “above $1k” category, however. Think of these collections as serious instruments — don’t expect to master them in an afternoon.

Ultimately, the level of warmth and detail in the recordings, multiple mic perspectives, flexible ensemble sizes, and wide range of articulations make Pro XP an obvious choice for anyone whose goal is to produce ultra-realistic MIDI mockups. However, if you’re looking for a library to help you flesh out arrangements in a notation program, Pro XP is probably overkill for your needs.

Sonivox Complete Symphonic Collection

Many current sample-based orchestral libraries are wrapped inside a plug-in interface or software instrument, but Complete Symphonic Collection (CSC from here on) is “just” a library, formatted for GigaStudio 3. CSC is a versatile and well-programmed set of instruments that are easy to use and understand from a musical perspective, i.e., patch names give clear indication of articulation type, as well as which controls are set up for expression, etc. Speaking of, there isn’t a lot of fancy programming or technical controls that users needs to worry about. Instead, CSC employs a handful of controllers that are consistently used across the entire collection for adjusting aspects of the sound, such as attack and release lengths or crossfades among dynamic layers. Here again, the technology is kept mostly behind the scenes similar to Pro XP, leaving you to focus on playing and performing.

CSC was recorded in Boston’s Sonic Temple, which has a smaller-yet-lively acoustic fingerprint that you can hear in the samples. Reverb tails are triggered on key-up (this is called release triggering, a technique that’s used in other collections as well), resulting in a natural-sounding ambience. In CSC’s case, the built-in ambience isn’t overdone, making it possible to apply additional reverb to create a larger sound. In fact, four reverb impulse responses are included for this very purpose, and can be use with Giga’s GigaPulse convolution reverb (see Jargon Jockey on page 28).

Instruments and articulations are organized in a sensible fashion, with release and non-release versions available, allowing you to reduce the CPU usage by loading “NR” patches. Similar to Pro XP, CSC’s ensembles are modular, with special attention paid to woodwinds and brass. However, strings are not divided into small groups — there aren’t any solo strings at all, in fact. Fortunately, there are 1st and 2nd violin sections for variation.

Sonically, CSC’s orchestra is intimate and present, with more of a “large room” than concert hall or scoring stage feel. It’s a sound that lends itself to more sensitive material, even chamber work. However, at higher velocities the brass and strings can get very aggressive. You can hear individual players within section patches, and in places there are minor quirks such as the occasional rough attack or slight intonation problem that actually give the collection a level of realness that many sampled orchestras lack.

Ultimately, CSC strikes a nice balance between meeting the needs of mockup masters and musicians who want playable sounds out of the box and quality-sounding results without having to spend a lot of time mixing or programming. The obvious but limited disadvantage is that CSC is tied to Giga, which is a significant factor for some users.

Vienna Symphonic Library Vienna Instruments: Symphonic Cube

VSL’s Vienna Instruments is geared toward composers who demand the highest degree of realism and the technical capabilities to control virtually every aspect of a performance. It’s fair to say that VI is pushing the boundaries of how sampled instruments sound and play. Whereas each of the three libraries at the top end of the spectrum is clearly aimed at the professional MIDI mockup market, VI is very different from the competition in several key areas.

For starters, it’s built on a sophisticated (some might say “intelligent”) MIDI processing engine that analyzes incoming MIDI data, and uses this information to switch among a staggering array of articulations and sampled phrases, resulting in highly musical and predictable performances. For example, you can play slow then fast then slow, and VI will automatically switch between sample sets of longer and shorter notes. This happens on the fly, so all you have to do is play a line and VI takes care of the technical mojo in the background. And the result? A performance that sounds strikingly real. This is just one example of how VI analyzes MIDI data, in this case the speed of incoming note on events, to do its magic. Other more conventional controllers (mod wheel, velocity, keyswitches, etc.) are also implemented.

As you might imagine, there’s a level of complexity that can seem daunting at first. Fortunately, the user manual is clear and helpful, and VSL has created a series of short video tutorials that also helps minimize the learning curve.

In order for VI to seamlessly transition from one articulation to the next, the samples themselves have to be relatively dry. If they had lengthy reverb tails, the sampled ambience would get in the way of all the behind-the-scenes sample switching. (This concept is well documented by VSL and has been their approach to sampled orchestra since they arrived on the scene with the original Vienna Symphonic Library for GigaStudio, reviewed Dec. ’03). What this means for the end user is that it takes some work (and an arsenal of high-quality reverbs) to create the kind of wide, reverberant orchestral sound that comes naturally to Pro XP and CSC. Some might look at this as a shortcoming, while others see it as the price to pay for having what is arguably the most detailed and realistic sampled orchestra to date.

None of the underlying technology behind VI would mean anything if its sample set wasn’t any good. But that’s not the case at all. Most of the material is taken from the highly acclaimed VSL Pro Edition and Horizon series libraries, with a small amount of new material. The recording quality is uniformly excellent, the performances are consistently superb, and the range of articulations is exhaustively comprehensive. However, the overall “vibe” isn’t as aggressive or cinematic as the competition, but that’s not to say VI can’t be just as evocative. It just takes good writing and orchestration. While other libraries might “let you off the hook” with their fantastic out-of-the-box sound, VI challenges your musicianship. Your playing skills need to be sharp for the MIDI engine to properly interpret your intent, and you’d do well to have an understanding of how to write for each instrument (good advice no matter what library you use).

LIBRARIES UNDER $1,000

The following four products are more budget oriented, but their respective soundsets and capabilities are by no means weak. Whether you work in pop, rock, classical, or film music genres, each one of these collections is worthy of consideration.

Garritan Personal Orchestra

Garritan’s GPO is squarely aimed at educators, students, copyists, and arrangers. GPO also boasts a respectable number of solo and ensemble patches that nicely complement larger, more extensively sampled collections.

Weighing in at a lean 2GB, GPO’s soundset is surprisingly flexible and expressive, given the library’s small footprint. Articulations include vibrato and non-vibrato variations for most instruments, flutter-tongue woodwinds, and more. Programming wise, instruments benefit from added expression via mod wheel, which is set up to affect volume and dynamics. None of this is new under the sun, but what gives this collection its edge is the number and variation of solo instruments that are provided. For example, there isn’t just one solo trumpet, there are three — and yes, the samples are of different players and instruments. Having so many solo choices available allows you to build and customize your ensembles in a very practical way. This “real world” approach to layering instruments is helpful for working out how an arrangement will sound with a live ensemble, because each virtual soloist contributes their own timbre and subtle variation of articulation. The net result is a more natural-sounding arrangement than what you’d get if you were to use 2- or 3-player unison patches for each line in a polyphonic setting.

Building ensembles “from the ground up” means you need more multitimbral parts than plug-ins that offer samples of larger ensembles. However, GPO is based on Native Instruments Kontakt player, which is only 8-part multitimbral. Translation: You’ll need to run multiple instances of it within a compatible host DAW to get the maximum effect of a large simulated ensemble. But what if you use notation software that doesn’t support plug-in hosting? GPO has you covered. Its companion software, GPO Studio, lets you stack up to eight instances of the player (see page 34 for more on using virtual orchestras with notation software).

To keep CPU requirements on the lighter side, GPO loads its samples into RAM rather than streaming them from hard disk. Also, there’s no built-in reverb, which can add to the processing load, but it means you’ll need to apply your own ambience, as these samples are rather dry and somewhat plain sounding. This is due in part to the fact that there are very few dynamic layers per patch, which helps keep RAM consumption low, but at the expense of added realism. In other words, you won’t hear the kind of natural timbral changes you’d hear when playing from mezzo piano to fortissimo, for example.

Collectively, GPO’s range of articulations, broad choice of soloists, CPU friendliness, and straightforward no-frills interface make it especially well suited as a notation tool. For mockup work, you’ll get even more mileage out of it by adding a high-quality reverb or two.

IK Multimedia Miroslav Philharmonik

The Miroslav Vitous orchestral library has been around in various incarnations since the early ’90s. Recently, IK re-mastered the original sampling sessions and gave the library a new lease on life by programming the instruments into a plug-in interface based on IK’s SampleTank 2.1 engine.

Currently only available as a plug-in (a stand-alone version is in the works), MP provides up to 16 multitimbral parts per instance, and is designed for ease of use and light CPU load. Basic controls for patch volume, pan, and output assignment are available for each part at all times, so there’s less hunting and pecking when it comes to creating a blend of instruments. MP’s integrated browser is straightforward, and the naming convention of files is easy to grock, but the Search function is of limited use. It requires that you enter only terms programmed into the instruments by IK. You can’t type “soft” or “mezzo piano”, for example, and get any results.

Multiple instruments can be quickly combined and mapped to sections of the keyboard — great for whipping up quick demos or if you like to take an improvisatory approach to composing. What’s more, tweaking an instrument’s tonal characteristics is dead simple. A 3-band EQ with parametric mid-frequency lets you dial in your sound quickly, and other aspects, such as the attack and release times, are just as easily adjusted. A good cross-section of effects (compression, reverb, lo-fi, chorus, etc.) is included, which can be handy for pop/rock applications, but it’s unlikely that you’d want to phase shift your oboes in an orchestral setting.

Samples were recorded in Prague’s Dvorak Symphony hall, which has a lush, darker ambience that gives a rich, romantic sound to the instruments. You’ll find the typical assortment of solo and section articulations for brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion, along with a few less common articulations such as sul ponticello strings and flutter-tongued winds. However, MP is light on “specialized” articulations such as grace notes, eerie effects, glissandi, etc. More significantly, there aren’t a lot of dynamic layers, which limits their ability to fool a trained ear into thinking it’s hearing a live player.

Fortunately, what MP lacks in sampled dynamics it makes up for with expressive programming, allowing you to coax the most from its instruments. Along these lines, in addition to the usual assortment of string, wind, and percussion instruments, a number of “bonus” instruments are provided, including a well-rounded set of choir patches, acoustic piano, harpsichord, and pipe organ.

It boils down to this: For stage or studio use where you’re looking to add a realistic orchestral element, Miroslav Philharmonik is a strong candidate. It avoids processor-hungry features such as convolution reverb, release-triggered ambience, and disk streaming, and instead offers a simple-yet-effective interface, the ability to quickly combine individual instruments as a multi, and solid, useable content suitable for more than just fleshing out orchestral arrangements.

MOTU Symphonic Instrument

With Symphonic Instrument, MOTU set out to create an instrument that covers the bases for not only film and TV composers, but also educators and arrangers who prefer to work in notation software rather than a host DAW. To appeal to both crowds, SI is equipped with an ambitious feature set. For starters, there’s built in convolution reverb, which does wonders for adding a believable ambient dimension to an otherwise dry, upfront, and closely miked soundset.

An Expert Mode gives you access to keymap and velocity range settings so you can build custom combinations — you can even assign keyswitches to activate individual instruments within a combination. This is the kind of premium programming power you’d expect from a library costing much more.

With its 64 multitimbral parts (divided into four banks of 16 channels), SI is more than capable of handling serious playback demands. Additionally, each virtual MIDI port is available at the operating system level, so if you have a notation program that can address virtual ports (such as Finale), SI makes a good writing partner. Another factor: Samples can either be loaded into RAM or streamed from hard disk — you decide, so if you find you’re running low on RAM and aren’t able to load as many instruments as you’d like, just switch on disk streaming.

Sonically, SI is a bit on the raw side. You’ll hear breath noise in the woodwinds and brass, rosin artifacts in the strings, and other mechanical and physical noises that are part of playing an acoustic instrument. On one hand, this gives the instruments a more real-world quality, but some may take exception to the occasional wart. Ensemble patches sound as though the performers were recorded “in position” (i.e., where they’d normally sit in an orchestra), which makes it easier to create a believable blend among sections. However, none of the soloists seem to share the same stereo placement as the ensembles, so you may want to pan the solo patches for more appropriate placement.

In addition to a well-stocked collection of solo and ensemble instruments from the string, wind, and percussion sections, SI features a variety of offerings you won’t normally find in an orchestral setting, such as classical guitar, solo alto, tenor, bari, and bass sax, lute, several varieties of harpsichord, pipe organ, and even a crumhorn. (What were those crazy MOTU developers thinking?) If you’ve been itching to write a crumhorn concerto, now’s your chance.

All the basic articulations are covered, but there isn’t a lot more beyond the usual suspects. For example, you won’t find vibrato and non-vibrato patches for any instrument. That said, many of the patches are more flexible than their naming convention would suggest. For example, the “Sustain” woodwind and brass patches have plenty of bite and personality, so by using different playing techniques you can achieve portato- and tenuto-like performances.

Generally speaking, the ensemble patches do an acceptable job of conjuring a believable orchestral sound, while a number of solo choices work well as “second chair” players when mixed with a more comprehensive library. However, as with GPO and Miroslav, none of SI’s patches offer more than two or three dynamic layers (to my ears many of them sound like they have a single layer), making it difficult to produce the kind of nuance and life-like expression that more extensively sampled instruments are capable of.

On the plus side, SI’s elegant interface is arguably the best of the bunch. The browser is a highlight: Program names are large and easy to read, and plenty of screen real estate is given to navigating through the hierarchy of files and folders. (Plug-in developers would be wise to take note.)

Steinberg HALion Symphonic Orchestra

HALion Symphonic Orchestra combines a rather stately sounding set of solo/ensemble patches, which have been expertly programmed for maximum dynamics, making this collection an easy pick for quick-yet-professional-sounding mockups. Technologically, there isn’t a lot to get bogged down with, leaving you to concentrate on orchestrating rather than fine-tuning an EQ or adjusting an amp envelope.

Sonically, HSO has a darker, slightly distant tone but without any perceptible natural reverb. Global ambience is on board for adding a hint of spaciousness, but this doesn’t quite give the effect of a high-end reverb plug-in. (The ambience is more of a “filler” than anything else.)

Where HSO shines is in its variety of instruments and articulations. Nearly all the typical choices — legato, staccato, muted, tremolo, trills, etc. — are on hand, but Steinberg went further by including a selection of musically useful articulations and techniques such as crescendo, diminuendo, tight and loose pizzicato, swells, ornaments, and more. These provide the kind of nuance that’s hard to simulate with artificial means.

Of course, MIDI controllers are commonly used to breathe life into static samples, and HSO does a good job in this department, too. Mod-wheel is used extensively to add expression, as is keyswitching to access multiple articulations from a single program/MIDI channel. Some of these programs are quite elaborate: Switches designated with “kr” are momentary controls that only activate a specific sample set when the key is held down, so you can quickly engage an articulation and return back to legato or staccato without having to press another key. Impressive. On the downside, a majority of patches use only one or two velocity or dynamic layers. In other words, the reality factor is low.

HSO is somewhat at odds with itself. On one hand, it offers a deeper, more expressive, and higher quality soundset than some other instruments in its class, not to mention some clever programming that you’d have to pay a lot more to get anywhere else. But at the same time HSO comes up short in certain areas that affect its overall usefulness for mockup work. Here’s an example: Trumpet programs are divided into three-player and solo categories, with the same choices available in both, including fortissimo and mezzo piano dynamics. But none of the programs actually combine these dynamics, allowing you transition between the two using a continuous controller. It’s an obvious disconnect. In fact, there’s no way to even create this kind of program, or any kind of user program for that matter. It’s a shame, really, as the raw samples are a cut above what a lot of other libraries in this price range offer.