# Spitfire BBCSO to professional or Berlin berklee



## morgs500 (Sep 21, 2021)

Hi
I am a newbie and have only been learning and trying to understand how to write for film and orchestra i have so far come up with
5 short ideas in the last 6 weeks .I am enjoying the journey I have no formal training only my intuition and ear has served many plus
hours of you tube tutorials. So to get to the point I have the BBCSO Core and would like to know from people opinion if it is worth up grading
to the pro version for more colours in my pallet or go for the new Berlin Berklee offer. Having survived covid after leaving hospital 
I had a strong desire to completely abandon pop music and try to write classical and movie type scores. I am experienced with writing pop music but i want to leave that behind and concentrate on honing my skills. I am sure more experienced member would argue that the BBCSO is more than adequate to serve my needs, but I have come into a small amount of money and would like to invest wisely . Thank you for your time
View attachment POTTER tribute.mp3


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## José Herring (Sep 21, 2021)

morgs500 said:


> Hi
> I am a newbie and have only been learning and trying to understand how to write for film and orchestra i have so far come up with
> 5 short ideas in the last 6 weeks .I am enjoying the journey I have no formal training only my intuition and ear has served many plus
> hours of you tube tutorials. So to get to the point I have the BBCSO Core and would like to know from people opinion if it is worth up grading
> ...


I don't have Berlin Berklee but from listening to demos and looking at the specs it's not going to offer up much more than what BBCSO Core already has. The two products are actually quite similar though BBCSO seems to have a larger string section. 

Personally BBCSO Pro would be a good choice though I never got it because I honestly don't want to take up the harddive space even downloading it to delete 90% of the mics later on, but I may just do that, but for now I'm just using Core. 

You may want to consider going in a different direction and getting Cinebrass when it is on sale to complement the brass in BBCSO Core or getting Hollywood Orchestra OPUS edition. I'm a big fan of HOOPUS and quite frankly it's a complete set and would offer you a lot more than Berlin Berklee at about the same price point. Price is an issue for me and OT's stuff just cost too much to be blunt. Great stuff though so you can't go wrong either way. 

No matter what orchestra you get though remember than BBCSO was recorded in perhaps the largest room on the planet. So blending any orchestra with it could get tricky, but worth the effort just so you have a more flexible sound pallet to chose from when needed.


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## eakwarren (Sep 21, 2021)

I recommend subscribing to ScoreClub and invest in skills rather than another library at this point. For years I did the Youtube route also and while I did learn a lot, it was hodge podge, engineering focused (template setup, balancing, etc.) and left gaps in my musical knowledge. I didn't know what I didn't know, if you _know_ what I mean.


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## morgs500 (Sep 21, 2021)

eakwarren said:


> I recommend subscribing to ScoreClub and invest in skills rather than another library at this point. For years I did the Youtube route also and while I did learn a lot, it was hodge podge, engineering focused (template setup, balancing, etc.) and left gaps in my musical knowledge. I didn't know what I didn't know, if you _know_ what I mean.


Hi Thanks
For your advice I have spent over twenty years working with daws and recording and engineering so i understand that side of music production but this is a new journey for me learning how to think and write for music scores and orchestration that is what i am trying to understand. I will check out scoreclub.Thanks


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## mybadmemory (Sep 21, 2021)

As you guessed, I’d probably advice you to stick with Core for some time, get all of the great free stuff like LABS, and perhaps some of the really cheap Originals. And then just use all of that and write music with it for some time until you know where it falls short for you, why, and what you actually need.

Do you want a different sound? A larger or smaller orchestra? A larger or smaller room? More epic or more subtle? Or do you want another workflow? Full Ensembles for fast writing or individual sections and soloists for more detailed writing? Or perhaps more textural and inspirational stuff? Do you want to stick with spitfire or expand into other developers, sample players, and sampling philosophies?

Basically, anything you buy before knowing more about what you need risk ending up not being used. 

But if we disregard that and go back to your question, the main reason for going from Core to Pro would be if you really needed the mic options to mold the sound, or if you really needed the more rarely used additional instruments for your writing. 

The reason for going for Berlin would be if you wanted a different orchestra in a different room with every instrument sampled individually instead of in sections, and all of this running in a different player and with just one mic option. 

So again, it comes back to what you need. More mics and bass flute? Go Pro. Another sound and three individually sampled trumpets? Go Berlin. But It’s probably wiser to stick with Core for just a little longer.


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## morgs500 (Sep 21, 2021)

José Herring said:


> I don't have Berlin Berklee but from listening to demos and looking at the specs it's not going to offer up much more than what BBCSO Core already has. The two products are actually quite similar though BBCSO seems to have a larger string section.
> 
> Personally BBCSO Pro would be a good choice though I never got it because I honestly don't want to take up the harddive space even downloading it to delete 90% of the mics later on, but I may just do that, but for now I'm just using Core.
> 
> ...


Hi Thanks for your response .So more mic positions and the need for extra hard drive space it doesn't seem to offer much more than what I have. I have listen to Cinebrass but was not impressed with the sound and bought the Tom Holkeborg 12 horns sample from OT just the one patch. Do you think its worth the sub for East west stuff?


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## Loerpert (Sep 21, 2021)

If you feel like you need all the individual instruments per section, go for Berlin. Otherwise go fo BBCSO Pro


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## José Herring (Sep 21, 2021)

morgs500 said:


> Hi Thanks for your response .So more mic positions and the need for extra hard drive space it doesn't seem to offer much more than what I have. I have listen to Cinebrass but was not impressed with the sound and bought the Tom Holkeborg 12 horns sample from OT just the one patch. Do you think its worth the sub for East west stuff?


The JXL brass is actually really good. But, Cinebrass for some reason just seems to work in context quite nice. It's a matter of taste. 

With BBCSO pro you do get some extra instruments too so you have to decide if you want those instruments.

You can try composer cloud for a bit and see if you like HOOPUS. You will need two reverbs for HOOPUS though. Turn off the built in reverb and use one reverb in your DAW for the room sound to make it better and another for a Hall Sound. I'm biased towards HOOPUS because I've been using HO for a decade now so I can still do things with it that I can't pull off with other libraries.

If you get HOOPUS let me know and I will do a short video on how to match it with BBCSO.


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## morgs500 (Sep 21, 2021)

mybadmemory said:


> As you guessed, I’d probably advice you to stick with Core for some time, get all of the great free stuff like LABS, and perhaps some of the really cheap Originals. And then just use all of that and write music with it for some time until you know where it falls short for you, why, and what you actually need.
> 
> Do you want a different sound? A larger or smaller orchestra? A larger or smaller room? More epic or more subtle? Or do you want another workflow? Full Ensembles for fast writing or individual sections and soloists for more detailed writing? Or perhaps more textural and inspirational stuff? Do you want to stick with spitfire or expand into other developers, sample players, and sampling philosophies?
> 
> ...


Hi Thank you for your sound advice. I am trying to understand or get my head around what libraries and articulation for all the instrument are required to achieve a professional sound as I said i am a newbie but love the depth and feel and beauty this film and orchestrated music offers. I know nothing about smaller or larger orchestras but have invested in samples from ark1 berlin inspire and vs big bang and have created a template in cubase pro . Also it is difficult to know what to buy when there are some many conflicting reviews .What recommendation would you suggest ? I have listen to some of your music it is wonderful .Thanks


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## mybadmemory (Sep 21, 2021)

morgs500 said:


> Hi Thank you for your sound advice. I am trying to understand or get my head around what libraries and articulation for all the instrument are required to achieve a professional sound as I said i am a newbie but love the depth and feel and beauty this film and orchestrated music offers. I know nothing about smaller or larger orchestras but have invested in samples from ark1 berlin inspire and vs big bang and have created a template in cubase pro . Also it is difficult to know what to buy when there are some many conflicting reviews .What recommendation would you suggest ? I have listen to some of your music it is wonderful .Thanks


Tbh, not much at all is required. As you know coming from pop, you can very well create a major hit just using Logic and whatever comes with it. Or just using a crappy casio keyboard from a garage sale. Or just using a single drumloop, a single bassloop, and a single very annoying brass hook.  You get the drill. It's not the tools but the carpenter.

You've made a good first investment in BBCSO Core, and just that already includes more than what is necessary in terms of instruments and articulations to create professional sounding orchestral music. The rest is mostly about personal taste in sound, personal taste in workflow, having more tools to find inspiration, and having more tools to achieve very particular tasks.

Btw, I'm absolutely no professional in this by any means, just a hobbyist as yourself gradually trying to get better, but Core served me well for well over a year (the tracks linked in my signature are all using Core only), until I realised I wanted a closer sound, at which point Pro started to seem like a good option since it added the Close mics.

Before that I also randomly added a bunch of other libraries without really knowing why that are still largely unused since they didn't really add anything I needed. How could they when I didn't know what I needed? So my point is: Listen to the many amazing tracks are out there by people from Spitfire, Dan Keen, Jeff Hijlkema, etc, that are made using nothing but Core, try to get to the same level, and buy more stuff first when you know what you need.


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## ProfoundSilence (Sep 21, 2021)

eakwarren said:


> I recommend subscribing to ScoreClub and invest in skills rather than another library at this point. For years I did the Youtube route also and while I did learn a lot, it was hodge podge, engineering focused (template setup, balancing, etc.) and left gaps in my musical knowledge. I didn't know what I didn't know, if you _know_ what I mean.



some of the OTL courses would probably encourage someone to want a library more like berlin.

having individual players changes what you're actually interested in writing. If you're going to smash things in by ear in the first place, a lot of woodwind writing won't sound too great playing things like chords because of the organ effect - something the individual players avoids entirely. 

It's not as bad using brass samples as it is woodwinds - but it does influence writing. 

BWW is still widely used and sworn by.


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## morgs500 (Sep 21, 2021)

Thank again I would imagine from listening to your music that you have been working at your craft 
for a very long time .Was there a eureka moment when you knew that you had something good ?like most things I think all the pieces fit together eventually but like all of us i am making the first steps on this new journey and any advice is very welcome.


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## SupremeFist (Sep 21, 2021)

Because José is too modest to say so, I will point out that he can make just Core sound like this:






My first mockup (after trashing BBCSO Core I went back to it)


After initially denigrating and trashing BBCSO Core (check this thread: BBCSO disappointment) I took a break and then started again from scratch. Here is my first attempt to use it to create a mockup of a composition of mine (also a first attempt at orchestral music). Please don’t destroy...




vi-control.net


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## PaulieDC (Sep 22, 2021)

BBCSO Core is also my choice. The large amount of tutorials out there to know how to best use it are worth the price of admission alone. Amazingly, some of the best are done by Paul and Christian, the owners of the company. One of the Spitfire customer service reps who also studied orchestration wrote a beautiful piece with BBCSO, so Spitfire has him do a walkthrough on it and even provides the MIDI files in the comments. I recently upgraded to Pro during the sale but starting with Core, especially on sale, with a company that provides THAT much support, seems like a win-win. I love the Berlin stuff, my goodness, the sound of the horns in some of the patches is crazy, but wow, what an investment. The Berklee version is pretty much the equivalent to BBCSO and is actually cheaper than BBCSO Pro, but the support and fan base of BBCSO paints such a bigger better picture. Just me take on it!


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## dcoscina (Sep 22, 2021)

I have both Berlin Orch and BBCSO Core & Pro. Unless you are mocking up concert works where you need the division between instrument groups to write divisi or true unison parts, BBCSO is probably a better path. For laptop composing, it's a draw between Core and BOB (Berlin Orch Berklee) for me. I'm spending the next week with only BOB up at the cottage so I will dig into it to see how it fares but I've been using BBCSO heavily since v1.2 and I think it sounds incredible. Keep in mind that while there might be fewer instruments in BBCSO Core, there are more articulations per instrument. BOB does not have a lot of variations in articulations. So if you are going for coloristic orchestrations, the Spitfire fare might be more up you alley. 

now, the full Berlin libraries, well, that's a whole other can of beans. Deep deep programming and flexibility. And on StaffPad, I pretty much only use the Berlin expansions, but that's kind of comparing apples to orangutans


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## ProfoundSilence (Sep 22, 2021)

One issue I've also had is that VEpro and bbc(the spitfire player in general) are nearly unusable. It's just a 32bit vst version for some reason and just crashes after a handful of instruments(although vst 3 works fine, there isn't vst3 implementation in vepro7). 

Just a FWIW if you planned on trying to find a purchase you can use later on.


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## pandamacion (Sep 25, 2021)

How do people feel about Berlin having more dynamic layers than BBCSO? Despite having more articulations and about the same instrument set, BBCSO Core is 28 GB while Berlin is 40 GB. I feel that a 12 GB difference must be due to the dynamic layers.

Unlike the OP, I don’t have Core already, so I’m trying to decide between Core and Berlin. For me, with the edu discount, the difference between them is $360 and I don’t know if additional dynamic layers and the ability to write divisi is really worth it. However, if I need to start substituting sections in Core, like getting CSB or CineBrass, then the price difference decreases. It doesn’t seem like I would need to substitute sections with Berlin since the samples are pulled from the full Berlin series.


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## mybadmemory (Sep 25, 2021)

pandamacion said:


> How do people feel about Berlin having more dynamic layers than BBCSO? Despite having more articulations and about the same instrument set, BBCSO Core is 28 GB while Berlin is 40 GB. I feel that a 12 GB difference must be due to the dynamic layers.
> 
> Unlike the OP, I don’t have Core already, so I’m trying to decide between Core and Berlin. For me, with the edu discount, the difference between them is $360 and I don’t know if additional dynamic layers and the ability to write divisi is really worth it. However, if I need to start substituting sections in Core, like getting CSB or CineBrass, then the price difference decreases. It doesn’t seem like I would need to substitute sections with Berlin since the samples are pulled from the full Berlin series.


I think you’re right in that bbc opts for more articulations and Berlin for more dynamic layers and round robins. It’s a trade off. But in the same way as people miss the top dynamic layers in the bbc brass, people also seem to be missing articulations like fast legato, marcato and portamento for the strings in Berlin.

Sooner or later you’ll probably have to substitute and add more things regardless of where you start. But generally people seem to prefer the brass in Berlin and the strings in bbc. Woodwinds and percussion might be tie based on opinions here, at least so far.


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## Jotto (Sep 25, 2021)

I would have liked to upgrade to BBCSO pro.,, but. Do i want all those mics? No. It just confuses me. Do i want 550 gigs of BBC on my computer? Absolutely not if im not gonna use it. Spitfire should imo opinion have released a pro version with four mices. OT sounds very good but is a bit pricey. And the added vat when you check out have stoppes me from buying their stuff many times.


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## pandamacion (Sep 25, 2021)

mybadmemory said:


> I think you’re right in that bbc opts for more articulations and Berlin for more dynamic layers and round robins. It’s a trade off. But in the same way as people miss the top dynamic layers in the bbc brass, people also seem to be missing articulations like fast legato, marcato and portamento for the strings in Berlin.
> 
> Sooner or later you’ll probably have to substitute and add more things regardless of where you start. But generally people seem to prefer the brass in Berlin and the strings in bbc. Woodwinds and percussion might be tie based on opinions here, at least so far.


I’m probably not as picky as some people, so I think I could live with the strings in Berlin. Plus there is a chance OT may add more later the same way Spitfire did with the 1.2 update. Since it’s made for Berklee, they may decide to improve it after receiving a semester or a year’s worth of feedback from students and teachers.


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## José Herring (Sep 27, 2021)

Jotto said:


> I would have liked to upgrade to BBCSO pro.,, but. Do i want all those mics? No. It just confuses me. Do i want 550 gigs of BBC on my computer? Absolutely not if im not gonna use it. Spitfire should imo opinion have released a pro version with four mices. OT sounds very good but is a bit pricey. And the added vat when you check out have stoppes me from buying their stuff many times.


Yes, they absolutely need to do a mix with only about 4 mics. I wish they would. They can call it BBCSO Semi Pro. Or BBCSO Pro, but not "Pro" enough.


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