Fast-forward to 2006: VSL releases the Vienna Instruments, which combine a virtual instrument-style screen with VSL’s impressive set of sampled orchestral instruments. Not only did it eliminate the need for a go-between utility, and its internal processing made extremely lifelike, musical performances possible. In the simplest of terms, you didn’t need to load umpteen separate articulation presets to sequence a convincing orchestral part.
For ultra-believable mockups, this delivers the goods and then some . . . for a price: a total of $17,850 for the entire 18-piece collection that comprises Vienna Instruments I and II. This is where Special Edition enters the picture.
OVERVIEW
Special Edition (SE for short) is a “one-stop” collection of 36 instruments, culled from the more comprehensive Vienna Instruments I and II. Considering a single instrument set from VI I or II costs roughly $300–$550, SE is indeed an attractive offering for first-time buyers or anyone hoping to work with Vienna-quality instruments on a single desktop or laptop computer, as opposed to the multiple machines professional composers have been known to use to host the full collection.
Some corners have been cut to make SE more CPU-friendly. For example, most instruments’ scales are sampled every whole step, not every half step. Even so, there’s a lot packed into SE: 81GB of material with a dizzying number of articulations and dynamics, all in 24-bit resolution. Visit VSL’s website or www.keyboard mag.com/0807122 for a complete list of instruments and articulations included in the Standard and Extended Special Edition libraries.
SOUND QUALITY
Vienna Instruments definitely have their own sound, which is quite different from most other orchestral sample libraries. This is because VSL records their samples in a special room dubbed the Silent Stage, which is a relatively “dry” environment. This ensures the samples have a low noise floor. It also means there’s very little ambient room tone recorded with the samples. This is a good thing, as it allows the programmers to create presets that can alternate among a variety of articulations, repetitions, and runs without any unnatural artifacts caused by reverb being built in to the samples. However, it means you’ll need a quality reverb to produce a more conventional, Hollywood-style orchestral sound. My go-to choices are AudioEase AltiVerb, and Space Designer, which is included with Apple Logic Pro.
SE’s instruments are uniformly detailed and up-front. In a word — pure. In particular, the solo strings and woodwinds are superb. When I need a solo instrument for an exposed passage, SE is a first call. Likewise, the solo trumpet is fantastic — I don’t think another library can touch it. The solo and ensemble strings work very well in rock and pop as well as orchestral music. Other highlights include the Bösendorfer grand piano, which may not cut it for solo passages, but is easier to fit into an orchestral mix than most dedicated virtual pianos. In the extended library, you’ll find solo saxes (alto, tenor, and baritone) that offer a compact-yet-useful bunch of articulations for concert band and jazz. I was less impressed by the solo and ensemble trombones and French horns, for which I prefer more ambience. I just could not seem to get what I was after by putting them through my high-end reverbs.
USER INTERFACE
The musical experience of playing SE has just as much to do with its software interface as with the samples themselves. For instance, say you have a passage that begins with a staccato ostinato, moves to a tremolo ascending line starting at pianissimo, and crescendos into a whole-step trill. With SE, you could easily perform this in real time without having to juggle separate articulations or MIDI channels.
It works like this: Instruments are organized into three kinds of performance files: Patches, Matrices, and Presets. At the lowest level are Patches. Articulations such as detaché, pizzicato, and legato, are separate Patches, which can be combined in square “Matrix” with 12 cells on a side. That equates to 144 possible articulation/instrument choices for a single Matrix. You’re free to load and play single Patches, but the included Matrix files are more useful, as you can switch among patches in a Matrix via continuous controllers and keyswitches (keys assigned on the MIDI keyboard). SE ships with a number of Matrix files (combinations of patches), and you can make your own, which can be saved and recalled from the instrument’s browser. As someone once said, though, no one can be told what the Matrix is — you have to see (and hear) it for yourself.
You can stack Patches to create layered articulations; staccato-plus-sustain is a popular combination in SE. Velocity switching between dynamic layers can be affected by note-on velocity or by a MIDI controller, and you can alternate between “normal” velocity switching (playing hard produces louder notes) and controller switching (note-on velocity is ignored; a controller such as mod wheel determines which velocity layer is played). You can even transition from pp to f while sustaining a note, and the timbre of the instrument changes accordingly.
Here’s where it gets silly: At the highest level are Preset files, each of which can contain a total of twelve Matrix files, which (not surprisingly) can be enabled using keyswitches. That amounts to a whopping 1,728 possible articulation and instrument choices available from a single MIDI channel! While most of us may never need that many options under our fingertips at one time, this kind of flexibility makes it possible to play and program just about any kind of passage you might find in 18th- and 19th-century orchestral literature.
IN USE
Once the software was installed, I needed to authorize both the USB dongle that came with SE, then the library content itself. I had problems with copy protection — Vienna uses Syncrosoft for this, and I ran into failures ranging from the dongle not being recognized (even though I had registered it, and Syncrosoft’s License Control software saw the dongle during previous sessions), to licenses for SE’s sampled content not being found. After some troubleshooting with the experts at VSL, I only had to deal with the occasional missing-dongle issue. A cold restart of my computer always fixed things, but for the record, I think Syncrosoft is a bad choice for copy protection.
I then put SE through its paces inside of Logic Pro. Prior to receiving SE, I had been using the complete Vienna Instruments I collection, so I was already intimately familiar with SE’s instruments and articulations. I love the playability and flexibility of these instruments. For performances that are difficult to sequence with any degree of believability (e.g., natural-sounding legato, portamento, etc.), SE and its parent collections are best-in-class. What’s more, SE’s instruments pair nicely with other orchestral libraries such as East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra — the blend between SE’s crisp soloists and EWQLSO’s rich ensembles is especially compelling.
What I like with SE, specifically, is that you get a broad palette of instruments that could easily satisfy serious orchestral composers as well as pop producers. As someone who’s had the luxury of working with the full-sized collections, I’ll say this: SE does a respectable job of providing nearly all the articulations you’d need to cover a wide range of styles. I found the lack of half- and whole-step trills to be a major limitation, and I also missed the chromatic and diatonic runs included with the larger instrument sets, but this isn’t a deal breaker. There’s no upgrade path from SE, so if you want those runs and other specialized articulations later on, you’ll have to pay for the individual titles
Regarding SE’s CPU usage, I ran a nearly complete palette of instruments (solo and ensemble woodwinds, brass, and strings, plus percussion, harp, and celeste) with the occasional hiccup from a 1.67GHz Apple Powerbook G4 with 2GB of RAM, hosting the samples on an external FireWire 800 drive. During dense passages, hard drive access and RAM were the biggest bottlenecks. There is a RAM optimization mode that, when activated, learns the notes in a sequenced part, then unloads all unnecessary samples. In practice, this worked well, and I eked out even more performance.
CONCLUSIONS
With Special Edition, VSL targets two groups of musicians: those who don’t have the big budget of Hollywood composers but still want world-class sound, and those looking for a streamlined set of instruments for a mobile composing rig. On the first count, SE is an absolute success. To run an entire orchestra on a laptop, though, you’ll still have to make some standard tradeoffs, such as freezing tracks, using RAM optimization, or simply writing parts that don’t overtax your computer.
The obvious competition is Quantum Leap’s Symphonic Orchestra Gold bundle ($895). If you bought both, you’d have the best of both companies for a lot less than you’d have to pay for their most premium offerings. If you can only afford one, you owe it to yourself to listen to the online demos for each, as you’ll get a good sense of their sonic signature.
Anyone who understands the fundamentals of orchestration will have no problem making dynamic, expressive, and evocative music with SE. More importantly, Vienna Instruments Special Edition is a remarkable deal. It brings a staggering number of musical possibilities for composers and producers, as well as no-compromise sonic quality, down to an unprecedented price point — low enough, in fact, to be a Key Buy-winning value.