# Need Help Choosing My First Orchestral Library (Example Songs incl).



## pawhii (Nov 26, 2021)

Hi Vi Community. I'm new to VSTs, and learning music while searching for my first orchestral library since last year, waiting for black friday sale. At first I aiming to build up my repretoire piece by piece, which is why I purchased LASS on black friday last year. But I soon found out that method becomes very costly, so I'm opting to get an all-in-one orchestral library and see how things go from there.

I've listened to all the popular ones like OT, Spitfire Albion / Orchestra/ BBCSO, Nucleus, Amadeus, Red Room Palette, ProjectSAM Symphobia, EWHO, EWSO etc. But due to lack of experience, I don't know how far I could push those VST libraries during the mixing / effects stage after learning a bit of synth, sound design, mixing etc. I'm assuming libraries with lotso f baked in reverb leave very little room for change.

I hope to compose songs that lean towards orchestral music and in-your-face rpg music (which I read is highly compressed live performance + patches)

Example songs are:
Heartbroken Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service
Town with an Ocean View from Kiki's Delivery Service
Merry Go Round from Howl's Moving Castle

From Final Fantasy XIV
Painted Foothills
The Dark which Illuminated the World
The Mushroomery
Neath Dark Waters (basically a piano solo)

My CPU and Ram specs are
Ryzen 3700x
16GB Ram (some would say 32GB is ideal...but I'll leave that as is for now).

I have LASS and libraries included in Full Kontakt 6

Thank you in advance. Any help is appreciated!

After looking around, it feels like VSL Synchron-ized Special Edition Vol 1+2 seems like a good place to start? I'm totally lost in the myriad of choices.


----------



## pranic (Dec 1, 2021)

This is like the $1M question -- and I think the answer is different depending on who you talk to. I put most of my eggs in the Spitfire basket, becasue I really like BBCSO's comprehensiveness with both instruments and mic positions. The majority of the examples you shared should be pretty accomplishable (is that a word  ) with BBCSO _with the caveat that to get the dry microphone positions, you'd be wanting to look at BBCSO Pro, which is not cheap_. I don't think you'd be happy with Albion One in this context, because it sounds like there's a lot of variety in orchestra instruments in your examples -- and BBCSO is *very* comprehensive when it comes to the instruments of the orchestra!

You might also want to look at Century Strings and Century Brass from 8DIO, and while I don't have hands-on experience with AI's Nucleus, I do have the same source content in Jaeger and if you needed to push into the "epic" and _fff_ ranges, Nucleus might get you where you want to go, too. 

I'm curious to see others' opinions in here, and am curious to hear their recommendations, too.

All the best of luck in finding the right library for you!


----------



## BenG (Dec 1, 2021)

I think the Cinematic Studio Series would be your best bet in terms of price, sound, playability, etc. But I always say, listen to the demos + developer walkthroughs and see what fist your style and workflow best!


----------



## Jamie Sun (Dec 10, 2021)

Whenever I need orchestral instruments
I am fine with IK Multimedia Miroslav Phliharmonik. There is also a small version with less than 20 GB size afair.


----------



## Jamie Sun (Dec 10, 2021)

Found two videos about the small version, sample size is 10 GB only btw


----------

