# NI Symphony Series



## DerGeist (Oct 21, 2018)

Hi all

Not exactly a new product but its one that doesn't seem to come up a lot. This is less a review than my 2 cents and a few recommendations regarding how to make the most of this library.

Some background. A month or so ago I decided to rid myself of subscription services, musical or otherwise. This included composer cloud. My primary orchestral library has been HW Gold for quite some time. I liked it a lot but lost it to my goal of lowering my monthly bills. I will probably buy it outright when there is another sale. I picked up NI Symphony Series as part of their latest sale. I bought more for price than anything else. As it stands now the only tools I have are: Symphony Series, KH Diamond, Kontakt Library, and KH Virtuoso Ensembles (I love it). So, NI is really the heavy hitter here and I was determined to learn how to make the most of it.

I think this is a great library once you get used to it. It suffers greatly from really bad initial presets. If you put in some work this is a great library.

Strings. They sound great but I really had a hard time playing them. The default legato settings are ridiculous, the initial mic settings are not ideal, and the reverb is questionable. The core library and the divisi are fantastic. I think this library is one of the best out there if you: 1. Crank up the legato speed, the stock speed makes everything sound like the trombone sound used for when you lose on a game show. Tweaking this makes a world of difference. 2. If you put the big knob much beyond 2:00 you have probably gone way to far unless you really want more of an effect than an articulation. 3. The stereo mics are not the greatest default. Either mix with the close mic or turn of in favour close mics has helped me a lot. Crank the verb down. Sahara down. Once I tweaked my settings it was like a whole new library.

My comments on mics, legato, big knob settings, and reverb pretty much apply across all instruments.

Percussion. Not much to say here. The library is good and covers most of the common ground. Crank down the reverb.

Woodwinds. This is the hardest one. On the surface it seemed like by far the worst library. Turn of the stereo mic and use the close mic and crank down the reverb. Be careful with the knob. Once I did this and practiced with the mod wheel a bit I was very pleased.

Brass. Tricky. I find this one works great for big chords right out of the box. If you want anything more subtle, ostinato, or anything other than the sound of the police battering down your front door at 6am with a NOLA Brass Band you will need to tweak. Mostly the mics and the verb.

Not sure if this helps. I'm learning to love this library and is default settings really do a bad job of showing what it can do.

General complaint…please make these interfaces smaller. I know the single knob on big background looks great but you could fit all of the parameters on the same screen if you didn't sacrifice usability for looks. Not really singling NI out here. This seems to be the trend.

Tim


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## cqd (Oct 21, 2018)

Hi Der Geist..
Yeah, I've been trying to settle on what to do with the Mics and reverbs on these lately..I find the brass nice for softer stuff, but struggle to get it punchy..The winds are really nice sounding, but I dunno, yeah maybe more practice playing them..the shorts on the strings are disappointing too..


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## bfreepro (Oct 22, 2018)

I did a review recently on the percs here https://www.bfreemusic.com/news/2018/9/27/review-native-instruments-symphony-series-percussion, gave them 8/10. I also own the winds. The percs are good except the default mic on the mallet instruments has SO much room noise and overall, sound worse than the Kontakt Factory library. I found when I enable the close and/or spot mics they sound significantly better. Except the celesta honestly sounds... awful, IMO Haven't played around much with mic positions in the woods. They do seem to have a very... processed sound overall. They sound good, but not nearly as realistic as some others. I do appreciate all the articulations (effects and other things like that). Will check out your recommendations for mic mixes! I think they offer a great value tho and cover all my bases, for exposed solo stuff I always use 8dio Claire, but, Symphony Series Woods fits well in a mix with the rest of an orchestra.


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## MartinH. (Oct 22, 2018)

DerGeist said:


> Hi all
> 
> Not exactly a new product but its one that doesn't seem to come up a lot. This is less a review than my 2 cents and a few recommendations regarding how to make the most of this library.
> 
> ...



I was experimenting with custom mic setups for strings as well and ultimately went back to using the stereo mix with slightly reduced release (for less sampled reverb) and an additional 3rd party reverb.
What I didn't like about using only close mics with external reverb was that the stereo panning on the close mics seemed waaaaay too extreme for my liking. Gave me a very artificial impression compared to the stereo mixes (with which I'm not 100% happy either). Mixing close with mid and far came closer, but the performance hit was a bit too much for my system to handle, so I went back to the stereo mix.

How do you work around the hanging notes bug on strings? I ended up disabling auto-divisi and legato on all patches and do manual divisi writing now. Don't think I've encountered that bug since. 

The different divisi sections actually sound quite different on some articulations, I found it worthwhile to try out case by case which of the two sounds better.

@Cory Pelizzari has some cool videos with recommendations on how to tweak this library on his youtube channel: 
https://www.youtube.com/user/ShaloksMoshVids/videos


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## DerGeist (Oct 22, 2018)

MartinH. said:


> How do you work around the hanging notes bug on strings? I ended up disabling auto-divisi and legato on all patches and do manual divisi writing now. Don't think I've encountered that bug since.
> 
> The different divisi sections actually sound quite different on some articulations, I found it worthwhile to try out case by case which of the two sounds better.



Its funny, I had hanging note issues with PLAY when I was using HW Gold so I'm used to trying to work around them. I eventually ended up disabling divisi in NI, not so much for hanging notes but because I am a piano player and using auto-divisi and playing chordally tended to give my orchestration a keyboard arrangement type sound/feel rather than though out orchestration feel. I think the auto-divisi feature requires more planning than the term "auto" suggests. You really need to think about and plan out note/voice leading etc. or it just sounds wrong. When done right the results are impressive. For most, turning off auto divisi is probably the best move.


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## cqd (Oct 24, 2018)

The lack of marcato in the brass especially is poor..stacking articulation is a kind of workaround..I've been playing around with the strings too..trying to boost the highs on the eq on the mixer page is unusable pretty much..yeah, for a library that costs so much it is lacking..


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