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Best Harp Library

Orchestral Tools is quite good, they are to my knowledge the only ones who sampled all pedal options, which translates into double amount of samples.
But:
I had an orchestra session coming up recently and writing out the harp pedalling is always quite a task when doing the scoring.
I thought it to be a good idea to invest in a good harp library and skip some of the real harp parts in the session.
I already had the Kontakt/Vsl harp and Sonokinetics' which both sound decent.
Started with 8dio century harps, not good. Then Spitfire harp, quite good and last week i bought the Orchestral Tools harp which is the best of the three.
But then again i did record some of the orchestral harp parts with the real harp anyhow and it's surprising that, even when doing dead simple and slow 3 note arpeggios the real harp sounds miles better than all the libraries. You can instantly hear a real musician playing. Surprising since i would say this is a relatively easy instrument to sample. Not so. Lesson learned.
 
If you've written well and simply for the harp, the player will I'm sure cope. If the music is overly chromatic, then why not use notation software to indicate some pedalling?, which will save time in a session. If you've written unwisely for the harp, notation software will highlight it if I'm not mistaken.
It's surprising that you thought it surprising that a real player sounded better....:shocked:...of course they do....;)

Don't waste money on samples when you can have the real thing......
 
mikeh-375 said:
It's surprising that you thought it surprising that a real player sounded better....:shocked:...of course they do....;)
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Of course i was not surprised the real thing sounded better, that would be surprising indeed.
It's a bit puzzling though that the difference is much bigger than for instance with some woodwinds, and even brass. A harp should be much easier to expressively play from a keyboard than these instruments. But it is the other way around.

And the Sibelius Harp pedalling plugin is not really that smart. At least not in V6. When there's enough time i even think doing the harp pedalling is a stimulating exercise.. But in this case there wasn't.
 
Noiseguild said:
Of course i was not surprised the real thing sounded better, that would be surprising indeed.
It's a bit puzzling though that the difference is much bigger than for instance with some woodwinds, and even brass. A harp should be much easier to expressively play from a keyboard than these instruments. But it is the other way around.

And the Sibelius Harp pedalling plugin is not really that smart. At least not in V6. When there's enough time i even think doing the harp pedalling is a stimulating exercise.. But in this case there wasn't.
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Aahh, I thought there was a correction plug-in, fair enough. It is fun working out pedals and enharmonic phonemes right? I always try to keep track of changes as I go along, but sometimes I loose track and then have to create the most odd spellings for a chord, but harpists are used to that.

The harp is beautifully resonant and that is what's missing from samples - the notes are not aware of each other acoustically, sampled strings suffer very much from the same problem imv.
It's great you are being recorded live, hope it went well with clients etc.
 
basically this : simplicity + sound = cineharp. unlimited resources + realism and sound = berlin harps.

how exposed is your harp writing, and are you actually writing for harp or just using the harp as an orchestral embellishment? if you're just doing glissandos - im not sure it matters too much, but if you're actually writing idiomatically for harp - nothing feels quite as satisfying as berlin, due to the pedals being sampled completely. G# and Ab are two different samples - because one is a string flat and one is a string sharp.
 
Yes, berlin makes the difference because of the all the pedal position samples. I would say this also pays of hugely when doing glissandos since you get a lot of different versions of the same notes which is one of the defining elements from the harp gliss.

Edit: but they only have 4 rr's per note/vel, which maybe isn't quite enough...
 
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Wolfie2112 said:
I still use the good ol' harp from EW Symphonic Orchestra. It's actually really good.
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The sound is so damn good on that one, I've got a couple libraries of harps and it still consistently has a tone that mixes in better than others. If only it had some scripting to more easily play some of the more typical harp techniques it would be a powerhouse sample they could sell on its own. That and the wind chimes are two of the samples in that library I still use over most of my versions in other libraries.
 
Ryan Fultz said:
The sound is so damn good on that one, I've got a couple libraries of harps and it still consistently has a tone that mixes in better than others. If only it had some scripting to more easily play some of the more typical harp techniques it would be a powerhouse sample they could sell on its own. That and the wind chimes are two of the samples in that library I still use over most of my versions in other libraries.
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Agreed! Actually, I prefer it over Hollywood Harp as well.
 
With OT's Symphonic Harps being 30% off for the next couple of days, I am forced to seriously consider adding it to my library (as my current harp is Soundiron's Elysium, which lacks for mic positions as well as articulations in comparison). But one concern is how well it would mix with the rest of my main orchestral libraries, which are Spitfire libraries (Symphonic and Chamber series, not Studio). Is anyone able to speak on their experiences with melding these libraries?
 
WindcryMusic said:
With OT's Symphonic Harps being 30% off for the next couple of days, I am forced to seriously consider adding it to my library (as my current harp is Soundiron's Elysium, which lacks for mic positions as well as articulations in comparison). But one concern is how well it would mix with the rest of my main orchestral libraries, which are Spitfire libraries (Symphonic and Chamber series, not Studio). Is anyone able to speak on their experiences with melding these libraries?
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its extremely easy.

1. you have literally 6(SIX) microphones. 3 different "close" mics.

2. if I had to guess, I'd say use more ambient - and use something like waves NLS with a neve profile - using enough drive to make it sound saturated. Then if you have a more ambient spitfire mix, just sent it to a church reverb.

I'll literally spend the next few minutes matching the two as an example(I have spitfire harp)
 
sorry, literally crashed my session and just opened a blank one to whip this up.

which one is the SF and which one is the OT?

[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/harpsfot-mp3.20822/][/AUDIOPLUS]
 

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ProfoundSilence said:
sorry, literally crashed my session and just opened a blank one to whip this up.

which one is the SF and which one is the OT?

[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/harpsfot-mp3.20822/][/AUDIOPLUS]
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I can't even begin to guess which is which, so that certainly suggests that the OT harp can sit in an Air Lyndhurst context. Thanks very much for your efforts! (OT should thank you too, since it looks like they are in line to make a little money as a result.)
 
I can tell which one, because the OT one has depth. ;) also easier to tell at low dynamics, as the SF one seems to fade out a bit early, without as quiet a dynamic recorded.

and that was extremely low effort on my part, as you can see - I was extreeemely lazy about it.

picked the AB mic(one that's going to sound more thick and ambient) then added just enough close mic to give it a similar presence/body as the tree on the SF. Then I simply used auto gain and a tilt filter(the laziest EQing ive ever done) and blended the drive in on the neve a little until it sounded as saturated as SF.

I think SF just has a sound, just like OT has a sound. I just think OT is just recorded absolutely pristinely - and in the case of the berlin series, extremely top to bottom sampling.
 
I generally don't like the A/B mic in OT libraries. Iinm they are figure 8's so there's quite a bit of 'room'. The Tree mic's have less 'room', just right to my ears!
 
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