Yes I know, but still I can't get the point of "technology preference":
- we start discussing that wet recording of real expression is preferred because it's "the real thing" it has "pure samples" it provides "real spatialization" etc.
- Then we admit and get excited by warping the samples with any possible digital trick (time stretch, cross fading, volume manipulation etc.) that obviously totally deprivate the reverb and the samples of the original nature, and we mix the result with other different wet samples, and cover them into additional reverb to make them fuse...
That sounds as a contradiction to me, and the evidence that it's really a matter of personal opinions and preferences (hopefully not instinctive bias).
There's more going on here that just "personal preference" or "technology preference"
Starting from the idea that I'd describe the SF approach as "as much expressiveness as possible without damaging the sonority", the point about the array of techniques I describe above that let you add expressiveness in the vibrato - but precisely in a way that works without damaging the sonority.
The time stretching, for instance, is limited to intensifying the vibrato's speed a little bit, and used sparingly, it really does achieves this without any significant damage to the sonority. (Of course, it wouldn't work to modulate the intensity or other dimension of vibrato expressiveness).
Similarly, the (non-phase aligned) crossfades endemically cause a a bit of bumpiness, so again referencing this noodle:
.. if you listen to it with your cognitive hat, you can hear that it's obviously samples. The bumpiness in the crossfade easily gives it away. At least intellectually. And some people report that, aesthetically, this kills it for them.
And sure, you can get mock ups that are more realistic in the cognitive dimension of smoothness of expressinon through phase alignment or other modelling techniques.
But at the same time, the sheer sonority of this noodle demonstrates what I fell is a level of "emotion realism", that trumps the cognitive. I can listen to this "as music" all day.
At least, when I listen to it not as a sound engineer, but "as music", my brain, apparently, is perfectly happy to ignore this bumpiness entirely. And I can really just immerse myself aesthetically in this sonority in a way that (sadly) I just can't with, say VSL or Emotion Cello.
Part of this is the musicality of the composition. If this were a Mozart concerto Spitfire Solo Strings would be *terrible*. The musicality of this kind of composition resides just too fundamentally in the pristine smoothness of the expressiveness. But the musicality I'm actively looking for in the above instead reaches for a beautiful, "fragile materiality" (quoting
@jbuhler), and I can really *feel* like I'm really experiencing a really fabulous sounding musical performance, sharing the same, embodied, space of the performer.
With other libraries it might be much harder to *cognitively* determine if I'm listening to a real performance vs samples. But there's an emotional quality of the sheer sonority and nuance of the performance that I simply don't find reproducible with modelling techniques.
And ultimately, when I'm writing with samples, "Emotional realism" is all I care about.
So yes, partly this is about personal preference. But I also think that that we can go deeper than that in understanding what's going on here. For one thing, the musicality. If we're listening for one type of musicality and insensitive to another, this is obviously going to colour our understanding of the sweet spots of a library.
But beyond musicality, there's such a huge difference of polarizing opinions on solo strings, that I think it's also quite plausible that there's a genuinely perceptual dimension involved in our differing preferences.
Sampled instruments are always playing a delicate game to maintain some illusion of "reality" (with an understanding that "emotional" and "cognitive" reality need some texture in their distinction). When I listen to VSL solo strings, one minute it's pristine and delicate and gorgeous ... and then next it completely falls off a cliff into synthyness and the whole illusion comes crashing down forever.
But music is always about perceptual delicacy - witness the perceptual dimension to how multiple countrapuntal lines are separated by the perceptual capacities of our minds into multiple streams. But then if the counterpoint is a bit sloppy for a couple of bars, the distinct perceptual streams might similarly catastrophically collapse into a single stream of harmonic mush. But there's going to be a *lot* of contextual factors involved what pushes it over the edge into collapse for one person vs another.
And note that this is a very specifically human perceptual capacity - dolphins for instance, would apparently experience Bach very differently.
So whether by nature or nurture, there's no reasons all of our brains need to experience solo string libraries in the same ways.
(More on this thread:
https://vi-control.net/community/threads/best-solo-cello.82018/post-4386657 )
Anyway, at the end of the day, there's a great richness of musicalities and perceptual stances, that it really just does go to show that you can never have too many solo string libraries.