As always Daniel, thank you for taking an insane amount of time to share your live run through of HZS. As I've said before, it's like going round to a mate's studio for a bit of banter without having to leave my own house. And I now have a mental postcard of Jack Sparrow I am unlikely to be able to erase from my mind anytime soon!
Curiously, I have to start off by speaking in Spitfire's defence! I saw the teasers and then the demos and the walkthroughs I even before HZ commented about Dunkirk, I did think I heard sounds in there that reminded me of Dunkirk. At the time when I saw the movie I can remember thinking that the strings sounded thick and fuzzy, like somehow the sound was too fat to be able to fit into my ears - or a bit like when you've been to a gig and everything afterwards sounds a bit fuzzy (analogous to when a bomb has just blown up on a beach next to you - which I assumed was the effect he was going for - reflected in much of the 'sounds' of the film). At the time I assumed there was analogue processing and a chain of distortion fx creating the sound rather than 344 players in a big room - but listening to the walkthroughs and demos it all kind of made sense. And where the rest of us would reach for the plug-ins, Hans has earned the right to the resources to hire £250k worth of musicians and stick 26 mics in front (and behind and underneath) them and see what it sounds like. To some it might seem self indulgent - but like I say, he's earned that right on the back of a career of consistently getting it right within the deadline.
Which brings me onto defending 'Marketing'. Before my current life, I was a marketer by trade.
I am willing to bet that 99.9% of the pros on this forum have been asked by a client to rip off a cue by HZ (for me, the word 'Zimmer' has appeared in a brief 5 times in the last 6 months - though to be fair, one of those was an ad for products for the elderly). While I have no feel for the hobbyists musical tastes, I can bet a large proportion have tried to write a HZ rip-off. The market for a library which would give you the big legato low end of Batman, the detailed intricate strings , early strings or intense 'flagellation scene' strings of DaVinci Code, the earthy bombastic strings of Pirates and so on and so forth, would be huge. Such a library would have been a godsend to pros and hobbyists alike. It's all very well to say 'learn your tools', but if you have to crank out 10 minutes finished music a day for two weeks to hit a deadline - 'out of the box' works very nicely for me every time.
THAT HZS library would have been the marketer's choice. You could keep releasing upgrades too, it would take 10 years to cover his existing work and so long as he keeps on working you would need new material every year to cover his latest creative direction. A legend who keeps re-inventing himself is a match made in marketing heaven.
As I have said before, one of the issues with composer / developers is that they tend to get enthusiastic about products which suit their own compositional style. If they only ever use legato in unison they can easily create a library that can't cut it for composers who routinely use legato for 5 part contrapuntal, and so forth. Using those incredible resources to create sounds that suit a specific compositional style was an exercise in self indulgence, not in marketing. The owner of a library can record and release what they like - and I would like to think their new CEO would have pointed out to them at some point that they would make much more money recording the library Daniel wanted to buy than the one they recorded instead - and I assume Christian and Paul have decided to put their own creative beliefs before profit in this case. As for HZ, I equally assume his participation was motivated by something other than money - as I can't imagine his royalties for HZS will cause much of a blip in his earnings graph.
On my listening to the library demos, walkthrough and your first look - I did find the quiet stuff the most interesting, and actually my favourite sound was the Long Col Legno Tratto! I would tend to agree that the louder stuff didn't really grab me the same way the 8ve legato low strings did in the original Albion the first time I heard them (The first thing I thought was HZ/JNH Batman!). I didn't feel they offered anything significantly different to what I already had in SSS - and in 'epic' terms, not as useful as Metropolis Ark, or Albions 1 & 3. Music is however a business, and my next question was 'when would I use the quiet stuff?'. Dunkirk was an experimental movie in the way it presented well known material in a radically different way - and although I thought in places that worked and for me in places it didn't - it suited an experimental sound world. When would I have needed HZS in the last 5 years - and I couldn't think, at least for me, of a single brief it might have helped with. With the best will in the world, I might think Long Col Legno Tratto is cool, but most clients or audiences wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and Symphobia CS - especially under dialogue. So I decided to pass; if I get offered a tense noir Scandi drama some day I can always go back and buy it later
As to the sectional inconsistencies - that is a bugbear of mine for most of the high end string libraries. They are called 'sections' for a reason, and 90% of the time all the strings will be playing the same articulation - so they all need to have the same articulations available. If you're short of budget, record less articulations - I don't think I've ever used Bartok Pizz in my life! I would also have thought their existing Kontakt GUI could have been retained but perhaps made a bit bigger (i.e. easier to read) in the new player - they have spent a long time tweaking it based on customer feedback and we've spent a long time learning to use it. The fewer clicks the better is always a good choice and seeing all your mic faders at once seems obvious. In terms off the new player, you'll only really know how it plays with the other kiddies when you use it in anger - but I too would find it a wrench to move away from a multi-timbral plug-in' and unless it has a purge / learn type function like Kontakt, having a full library loaded along with everything else would seriously test RAM availability judging by the sizes of the patches you were loading.
Hopefully you won't receive too many death threats. Another thing I learned as a marketer was that people can get very passionate about defending a brand in which they have invested heavily - and the world of sample libraries has always struck me as particularly 'religious' in that respect - they can get quite prickly when it comes to blasphemy!
Thanks again though - everyone needs a virtual reality mate they can have a studio based laugh with. Now however I must create a new Jack Sparrow / Daniel James meme - I'd post it back here but I suspect it falls foul of the forum rules regarding pornographic images :-(
..). Today here in Germany I could coincidentally watch "Gladiator" in TV and I tried to give all possible attention to the typical "Hans Zimmer Sound" and I could notice very much of the lush Sound which you can find in the Demos of HZ Strings: Big but not loud, overwhelming strings with an enormous dynamic range, well defined Soundscapes. Let me call it "Big silence". The Lib (without Bugs for sure) would definitely fit this kind of epic music style (think about the parts with Choir and Female Voice at the end) in my opinion.
