# Total newbie here, looking for advice.



## kociol21 (Dec 18, 2019)

Hi all!!! 

Just discovered this forum few days ago, it's great place, full of knowledge. Quick info about me, I'm complete newbie to "orchestral" music making, though not totally new to music creating. I played guitar and I was vocalist in bands for many years, but nowadays I don't have much time (work, kids etc) so I switched to making music in the box. So I already have my DAW (Studio One) full Kontakt version and I'm familiar with composing, mixing, routing midi tracks. 

Way back in the day when I had to write ochestral intro for one of my bands it was way easier to grasp. You had probably EWQL and few terrible sounding free libraries and that was it (it was probably around 2003-2004). Now when I saw the absolutely vast pool of libraries and companies to choose from I'm kinda overwhelmed. There is so much stuff out there...

I watched a LOT of youtube reviews, showcases, listened to a LOT of demos and read a LOT of threads here but in the end it kinda makes it even more confusing. Everyone has different opinions and it doesn't help that everybody uses cryptic abbreviations that are extremely similar to each other and are probably obvious to everyone involved but absolute pain for beginners. Like "Hey, what do you think about LSS? Oh it's great though SSS is better and I'd rather choose SLS or LSL or LASS or CSC etc  Google usually helps but there was cases when even Google had no clue and gave me some German company manufacturing screwdrivers when looking for abbreviation. 

Ok I'm offtopic now. So first thing first, I'm gonna need some libraries. My friend who is more into orchestral movie stuff recommended that I get Metropolis Ark 1 and as I see, this is very popular library. Thing is, a lot of people, a lot of channels on YT focuses on very epic, bombastic, loud and dense movie trailer stuff and I'm not really into it. I'd rather have something that CAN be loud and epic if really needed but is also suitable for stuff like dreamy ballads etc. I also want to kinda learn basic orchestration and I suspect that this can be hard when all you have is "string ensemble", "brass ensemble" and "winds ensemble". So I'd rather have libraries that allow for greater customization between sections. I also don't care for sound design, guitars, bass, drums etc. becasue I already have a lot intstruments and synhs for that.

And as I said, I have Kontakt already so I'd prefer Kontakt libraries.

So for specific sections:

Percussion: here I don't have to choose for now, because I'll be using Superior Drummer Orchestral library, it may be not popular choice as I see but I'm using Toontrack stuff for years and it never let me down.

Strings: oh boy... so much of them. Cinematic Studio Strings, Spitfire Symphonic, Spitfire Chamber, Cinestrings etc. So far after listening to demos on YT I like Spitfire Chamber Strings the most, it's like middle ground Between very wet and wide Symphionic and dry and defined Cinematic Studio stuff. 

Brass: Spitfire Symphonic? Cinebrass? Cinematic Studio Brass? Honestly I like all of them. Again I love the sound of Spitfire Cinematic but I'm afraid that it is a bit to wet and locked to more "classic orchestra" stuff.

Winds: I have no clue? Didn't looked at winds much yet.

Also, a question. If suppose I get libraries from three different companies for different sections, will it blend? I mean, every section will have different room sound so won't this sound very unnatural? So becasue of that is it better to stick to one series for all sections?

And can you recommend some articles and/or youtube videos on making orchestral music where I can learn more about details of orchestration, composition etc. So far I found Spitfire tutorials helpful, I watched some Daniel James "track from scratch" and I absolutely LOVE Thinkspace Education channel. 

Sorry if this post came out so long and uncoherent and sorry for bad english, it's not my first language and since I finished my school long time ago, I've forgotten most of it.


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## Bluemount Score (Dec 18, 2019)

Hey Kociol, welcome to the forum.

Looks like you already informed yourself quite a bit.


kociol21 said:


> My friend who is more into orchestral movie stuff recommended that I get Metropolis Ark 1 and as I see, this is very popular library. Thing is, a lot of people, a lot of channels on YT focuses on very epic, bombastic, loud and dense movie trailer stuff and I'm not really into it.


I was at a similar point (even though I now own Ark 1 and 2 and they are awesome).
The amount of possibilities is really huge these days and kinda confusing. Still, the perfect do-it-all library hasn't been made yet. You got pros and contras in whatever you'll get and most likely want stick to your first purchase forever.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Cinematic Studio Series (Woodwinds and Percussion are still missing). It fits my needs the most and is very versatile for a lot of stuff, however still far from perfect.
When it comes to sticking to one series in terms of blending, I do it whereever I can, but this is generally not the number one thing that will make a track good or bad. The Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra gives you a complete orchestra out of the box, where the great room tone and the way it was recorded gives you arguably the best and most natural blending out there, everything sits where it's supposed to be. But often different libraries can blend very well together, or it's just a matter of how good your mixing skills are.


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## Bluemount Score (Dec 18, 2019)

My current big main template (for inspiration, contains only libraries that I think sound great, but again, none is perfect so I stick with multiple choices and blend them wherever needed):

Strings:
Cinematic Studio Strings
Cinematic Studio Solo Strings
Native Instruments Symphony Series
Metropolis Ark I
Metropolis Ark II
Spitfire BBCSO

Brass:
Cinematic Studio Brass
Metropolis Ark I
Metropolis Ark II

Woodwinds:
Metropolis Ark I
Metropolis Ark II
Spitfire BBCSO

Percussion:
Native Instruments Symphony Series
Native Instruments Action Strikes
Native Instruments Damage
Native Instruments Studio Drummer
Spitfire Albion ONE
Metropolis Ark I
Metropolis Ark II
Spitfire BBCSO
(...and a couple more, damn these are more than I thought)

...plus another instance of Kontakt, loaded with Cinematic Studio Piano, Choir from Ark 1 + 2, and more subtle stuff.


I can recommend all of these libraries, however what I'll recommend even more is to start simple and learn what you are missing by composing and making the best out of what you currently own. Buying libraries can quickly become a serious addiction 
Also, look out for freebies. Good thing you already own full Kontakt.
This one for example is great:








Haunted choir


Visit the post for more.




www.fluffyaudio.com




Check out Spitfire LABS if you haven't yet.

Something I don't own but might be very interesting for your needs (not section-based etc.) is the Spitfire Audio Studio Series.


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## Bluemount Score (Dec 18, 2019)

You already named a couple of great channels.
Here are some that helped me out a lot:









Ashton Gleckman


Ashton Gleckman is a composer for visual media. On this YouTube channel you can find the "Behind the Score" series, a series of videos dedicated to analyzing...




www.youtube.com













Joël Dollié


Joël Dollié : Mixing/Mastering Engineer Check out my work ! Want to learn more about Orchestral mixing and mastering? ► Mixing Modern Orchestral Music (Ebook...




www.youtube.com













Alex Moukala Tutorials


Tutorials on How To Write and Produce Orchestral Music by Alex Moukala: Official FL Studio Power User, Trailer Music & Videogame Music Composer. Trailer Cred...




www.youtube.com













In The Mix


In The Mix is all about simplifying the recording, production, mixing and mastering process and helping you unlock your creativity. No matter which DAW you u...




www.youtube.com


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## Jimmy Hellfire (Dec 18, 2019)

Regarding the blending: as it most certainly won't suprise you at this point - there's all kinds of beliefs and convictions regarding this as well. 

Some people insist on having their whole setup from one series. Others mix and match all the time. The pros of having everything from the same series or the same company is that (at least in theory) the sound will be more consistent, and will hopefully require less mixing and fine-tuning. The downside is that you're locked into one developer's ecosystem and have to put up with their unique brand of quirks and setbacks no matter what you do. Also, while the libraries might blend very well - perhaps they only blend in that one particular way, and getting a totally different sound might be difficult.

Mixing and matching has the obvious downside of having to work harder to make it all sit together, and relying on mixing skills and external plugins more. But I personally like that, to me it's part of the creative process and makes me think about my musical and sonic goals more consciously, rather than just recreating "that company XY sound" time and time again. Obviously I don't have the biggest output in terms of pure numbers, that has to be said as well. It takes time. 

Another thing: I prefer having the freedom of picking the libraries that are most attractive to me over the consistency of going "all in" with one series or developer. One developer might have great strings, but perhaps I'm not the biggest fan of their woodwind library, or something like that. In any case, both approaches are certainly valid.

As far as Woodwinds go, generally the two "serious" options currently are VSL and Orchestral Tools. The VSL Synchron-ized Woodwinds are awesome and attractively priced, but they run in VSLs own Synchron Player. If you'd prefer to keep everything in Kontakt, this leaves you with OT - awesome as well, but more expensive. Fluffy Audio's Woodwinds have their fans too, from what I've been hearing, but I don't have any personal experience with those myself.

I too am a fan of the Cinematic Studio Series. Very fairly priced, a very "practical", high quality set of samples, and sonically quite flexible (isn't bone-dry, does have a natural sense of spatial depth, but is tight enough to not drown everything in ambience, also works very well with an additional algorithmic reverb tail to make it more lush and spacious if needed). I think they are a good starting point - generally very workable and reliable while sounding great.

I would advise against breaking the bank right away without having too much practical experience with all this stuff. It's way more important to just get your feet wet with samples. Once you've spent some more quality time with this crap and realized how many quirks, problems and different approaches to recording and design philosophy there are to it, then you can make better, more informed decisions on future purchases.

In any case, keep an eye out for Holiday deals ... for example, in the case of Spitfire, they have this thing called the Wish List, where you can put libraries on and assuming they stick to their usual procedure, they'll be offering discounts based on the Wish List around Christmas. Would be a good idea to make an account and put stuff on your list beforehand.


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## Ben H (Dec 18, 2019)

Hi and welcome.

I'm not going to make any suggestions about libraries, because we all have our own opinions on what we like and what sound we are after.

Just posting to let you know there is a sticky of what all the abbreviations mean here:





Glossary of VI-C Abbreviations


AAF: Able Artist Foundation (link) AAX: Avid Audio Extension (plugin format created for Pro Tools) AB: Adventure Brass (Music Sampling) AD/AD2: Addictive Drums (XLN Audio) AI: Audio Imperia ALB1/ALB2/ALB3/etc: Albion Series (Spitfire) ALBO: Albion ONE (Spitfire) AM: Audio Modeling AMS: Aleatoric...




vi-control.net


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## tokatila (Dec 18, 2019)

Template suggestions:

Audio Imperia Nucleus or
Spitfire BBC Symphonic Orchestra

Then spent the rest of your budget on teaching materials.


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## jbuhler (Dec 18, 2019)

I would proceed mostly based on sound, and listening carefully especially to walkthroughs. Which libraries' sound speaks to you, inspires you, do you hear your music in? Second, do you prefer wetter libraries or drier ones? If you like wetter libraries, do you like the sound of the hall and are you ok with most of your music sounding like it was done in that hall? In my experience most libraries will mix and play together reasonably well, but some take more work than others. People like to do rankings around here, but I have found that top-line libraries are all very good. You can't really go wrong with any of them so long as the library suits your music, and with practice you can get good things out of all of them. But they are each optimized to do certain things well, they each encourage a particular workflow, and you often get a good sense of all that from the walkthroughs. 

Finally, I would also look at computer resources. For instance, I've never been able to run OT's Berlin Strings properly because I don't have the rig for it (one machine, 64GB). I love the sound, but it doesn't work well for me. Maybe it will when OT ports the library to Sine. That's my hope. But the point is that some libraries can work very well on a 16GB laptop whereas others require quite a lot more so if you need to run it on a relatively low powered machine, it's worth checking to see if folks have had any issues doing so.


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## Fever Phoenix (Dec 18, 2019)

I can only agree with the posts above. jbuhler has also given me great advice here, alongside many others. But in the end you have to decide and spend hours with walkthroughs, demos and reviews.

My gateway drug was the first Albion by Spitfire, the old one, Redux, before it became Albion One. I still use both of these and I personally love the Spitfire sound a lot. 

Go slow, exchange with like minded people, explore. There are so many great libraries around for all kind of needs.

Oh and welcome to the forum


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## Fever Phoenix (Dec 18, 2019)

and another great YT channel might be Think Space Education


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## Mrmonkey (Dec 21, 2019)

Hey I’m also a noob (2 months in) and after doing research I have BBCSO and ark 1 and 2.
BBC is great for forcing you to have to actually orchestrate and not cut corners. The strings are amazing and it has everything you need including percussion. Think of it as a baseline.you even get things like solo cello and violin.

Ark will give you an amazing choir and is great for louder, more in your face noise. Having the ensembles is good for adding depth on top. The brass are great. It doesn’t have the same depth but together they work really well to give you lots of versatility.


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## Ashermusic (Dec 21, 2019)

In my view, a “total newbie“ should _not_ be focused on what experienced people use to good result. Instead they should get one complete library and spend at least six months learning to do MIDI Orchestration with it well.

i would recommend the Amadeus orchestra since you want Kontakt. While it lacks true legato, it is inexpensive, it has the important articulations, it won’t tax your computer and does not have a steep learning curve.

You can always add more later.


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## kociol21 (Dec 22, 2019)

Thanks to all for replies! Sorry for late reaction, I was kinda busy for couple days and never found enough time to reply.

@Bluemount Score Thanks for very detailed answer. I'm leaning more and more towards Cinematic Studio stuff. They are relatively cheap, UI and controlling seems really thought out, seems very polished and the sound is amazing. I prefer more wet sound but really it's easier to fix dryer sound by adding some good convolution reverb, than try to tame wet samples. And thanks for channel recommendation. I found Alex Moukala channel quite informative even if his music isn't really my pair of shoes.

@Jimmy Hellfire thanks a lot! Yeah, there is a dichotomy here. I shouldn't rush with buying anything too quick but on the other hand, now is the best time because of Christmas sales  And yeah, I'm probably overestimating this blending thing. 

@jbuhler that's super important thing you touched there - hardware limitations. I'm just not used to orchestral libraries. As of now, my largest songs made in DAW took maybe 10-12GB RAM and usually it was closer to 7-8 GB. Just Superior Drummer, 5-6 relatively small Kontakt instruments and couple synths. I wasn't even utilising 30% of my 24 GB. Then I noticed threads where people say that their template PURGED takes 60+ GB that's insane. On the other hand, when I watched youtube channels, I noticed that people tend to have enormous templates. Like 300 tracks by default and more. I'm minimalist and I work best from ground up so I usually use just piano as template and then I add tracks one by one when needed. Probably because I'm hobbyist and I don't have deadlines to chase.

@Ashermusic that's valid point probably. On the other hand, I don't have a lot of money and I don't make a penny with my music so I don't mind buying good stuff but my every purchase I try to be thought out and enough for at least couple years. If I buy some plugin/library I tend to use it for years and this strategy worked for me till now. So I get your point but my nature opposes against buying something inferior just to learn few things and then buying better stuff again. I'd rather just buy this better stuff in a first place.

Any way, thanks guys. I've read quite a lot threads for last couple days and there is some big chunks of knowledge here, also lot of really talented and experienced musicians/composers, also lot of big egos but that is to be expected :D


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## Ashermusic (Dec 22, 2019)

kociol21 said:


> @Ashermusic that's valid point probably. On the other hand, I don't have a lot of money and I don't make a penny with my music so I don't mind buying good stuff but my every purchase I try to be thought out and enough for at least couple years. If I buy some plugin/library I tend to use it for years and this strategy worked for me till now. So I get your point but my nature opposes against buying something inferior just to learn few things and then buying better stuff again. I'd rather just buy this better stuff in a first place.



If your skill level surpasses all that the Amadeus Orchestra can provide in only two years, either you are spending a massive amount of time with it or you are wayyyy more talented than I was when I was a newbie. And you can learn wayyyyy more than a "few things" with it.

But whatever you choose, you will be in for an interesting ride so saddle up, cowboy.


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## robgb (Dec 22, 2019)

Ashermusic said:


> i would recommend the Amadeus orchestra since you want Kontakt.


Amadeus is a great library and is on sale right now for about $120. Biggest bang for your buck for a full orchestral library.


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## jononotbono (Dec 23, 2019)

robgb said:


> Amadeus is a great library and is on sale right now for about $120. Biggest bang for your buck for a full orchestral library.


Bit expensive for you though isn't it?  
Christmas Joke Rob!


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## Nihiloth (Jan 14, 2020)

I'm at the exact same point with you OP. So thanks everybody for every response.
One thing really boggled my mind is; few days ago I was about to buy Albion One due to lots of great reviews and while researching synth libs came upon a topic here in which most people was discussing how synthy Albion is and that it's mostly frowned upon. So I'm still in a blank state 😐


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## kociol21 (Jan 14, 2020)

Nihiloth said:


> I'm at the exact same point with you OP. So thanks everybody for every response.
> One thing really boggled my mind is; few days ago I was about to buy Albion One due to lots of great reviews and while researching synth libs came upon a topic here in which most people was discussing how synthy Albion is and that it's mostly frowned upon. So I'm still in a blank state 😐



I actually had I chance to demo a lot of libraries at my buddy's friend's home studio so. He had lot of Spitfire stuff, OT Berlin, Cinematic Studio series, two Albions, couple of Metropolis Arks and lot of smaller libraries. I can tell you that I firmly decided on Cinematic Studio Strings and Brass. 

I've tried Albions I and V and I really don't find them 'synthy'. Honestly it probably depends of how you write your parts. If you just play a sustain chord with no modwheel movement in ensemble, every library I tried sounded a bit like "string pad" from 80's synthesizer 
If you write for every section separately, this isn't a problem. Albion One has some very good sounds but doesn't have what I wanted the most - ability to write realistic lines. You have strings high/low, brass high/low etc. but no way to actually write violins, violas, cellos, trombones or trumpets parts so it's lacking in 'freedom department'. 

I also depends whether you need additional stuff like synths, FX, percussion etc. I had it all covered so things like Albion had too much unnecessary stuff for me. Honestly I am extremely happy with Cinematic Studio series. If I were to buy only one library and it had to be mostly orchestral I would buy Palette or Berlin Inspire or Nucleus. If it had to be hybrid, I'd buy Jaeger and then maybe Albion.

Just my few cents as OP after a month of researching this stuff


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## Nihiloth (Jan 15, 2020)

kociol21 said:


> I actually had I chance to demo a lot of libraries at my buddy's friend's home studio so...
> ...
> ... Just my few cents as OP after a month of researching this stuff


Thanks for the insight. I feel closer to Nucleus at the moment but a comparison session awaits till I decide. Again, much appreciated!


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## bill5 (Jan 20, 2020)

robgb said:


> Amadeus is a great library and is on sale right now for about $120. Biggest bang for your buck for a full orchestral library.


Nice demo here FYI https://www.kvraudio.com/product/amadeus-symphonic-orchestra-by-sonic-scores-music-software

Far as I can tell from that, a really nice sound, easy to use, and plenty of options for instrumentation, both solo and sections. On my list


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