I don't like to disparage anything, but I am quite surprised at the enthusiastic response. Sonically, it reveals itself over and over as fake / sampled. I do think it's pretty good -- I don't regard a B-plus as failing; quite the opposite.
That said, I think Andy Blaney's demos for Spitfire blow the doors off this trailer, nice though the composing is.
There’s a sense that Sasha’s demos almost define the OT sound for me, insofar as I’ve got my head around exactly what the OT sound is. Ark is always a bit too epic for me, although Time Macro, which I thing we can reasonably understand as a conceptual descendent of Ark 3, is something I’m really coming to love, although after quite a lot of effort to figure out what it’s even about. This new Ark - no idea what it’s meant to be about. Even less than my during my initial near total puzzlement over Time Macro. But I’m very curious about what the vision behind it is. (Ie, accepting that super aggressive chamber ensembles is a thing now - what the hell kind of is it, actually? Should be fun to find out).
OT have had some dreadful, if stylish and usually kind of fun, marketing buzzwords lately, that I thing is, like any marketing really , entirely worth mocking at least a little. But none of this diminished the quality of their work.
A nice thing about spitfire demos is that after a while you can really get a sense of the the library from knowing their approaches. Andy is always hyper virtuosic. While Christian’s demos are virtuosic, not so much in the the complexities of their harmonies and such, but in the way he crafts the sonority (I don’t want to say sound design, because it’s more than that, and it’s a dimension hugely important to libraries like Time Macro and, well, most spitfire libraries). Demos by Oliver and Paul come in at varoius points on the Christian to Andy spectrum. And then there’s Homay’s demos ... and I particularly love her sense of texture, which isn’t quite the same as Christian’s deep sense of sonority, but it has singlehandedly sold on libirares like LCO (though it still took me a long time to get my head aroud exactly what it’s about).
I’d love to see what kind of demos Sasha and the OT team could come up with for things like the Olafur Evo. But if OT really wants to sell me on Ark2 - which is the one I’m most intrigued by, then, well I suppose it would be too much to hope that the spitfire team might all contibute demos? And an Andy demo for Ark4 would be amazing as well.
Looking forward to the actual OT demos of this particular OT product also, of course
