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My first orchestra

Ledwick

Member
Hi,

I'm an experienced musician/producer new to the orchestral world of virtual composition and I'm looking for my first orchestral sample library. Is 200 enough of a budget?

At this price range, these libraries sound good to me (some have currently available discounts)...

Amadeus - 150
Cinesymphony LITE - 200
Orchestral Essentials - 230

These sound good, but are slightly out of my price range...

Berlin Inspire - 400 (was on sale 50% in Dec)
Albion One - 450 (much too much)

What are your suggestions? Is there a thread for these kinds of questions? Apologies if so. Thank you. Have a good day.
 
I listened to a few Amadeus demos at the NAMM. It's basically a general purpose entry level type of library. Great for sketching and quick writing type of thing. Eventually you would want to grow your collection and get more specialized libraries that focus on a particular instrument or at least a family of instrument, but this won't be a bad investment.

There's also Mirslov 2? by IK Multimedia I think.
 
EWSO, the East West Symphony Orchestra is quite a bargain at around $200 to $250 when it's on sale, which is often. It's an older lib, but the technical quality is excellent and the value per money spent is very high. There are interesting oddball instruments like a Wagner Tuben, and a very complete percussion section. It has the advantage of offering good sounding solo instruments as well as ensembles. Amadeus also has solo instruments, but not at the same quality level. The "Play" player used by EWSO is in some ways not as versatile as the more common Kontakt player, but it does the job. When used as well as possible the sound is outstanding, check out the demo pieces on soundsonline.com.
 
There is another orchestral library on the market, it is called "The Orchestra". It contains all orchestral instruments with the most common articulations and contains big ensemble sounds, choir with syllables and lots of animated orchestral patterns, which sound fantastic!

For my purposes, it was the best choice, as I like to sketch my tracks in short time and get a good and big sound quickly. So maybe this could be an option for you if you have the time to wait for a sale;).
 
I bought the Garritan, they have a huge amount of instruments at a very fair price. Ok, i suck, but i couldn't get anything good out of it. To me the sounds feel very "cheap". I tried and liked The Orchestra as well. Trying to build a "custom" orchestra jumping from deals to deals could be good. 8dio makes bargains every week. and so on.
 
Hollywood Orchestra. Nothing touches it for the price when it's on sale, which is quite often.

EWSO orchestra is also another excellent option as Bill the Lesser pointed out.
 
Cool, thanks guys. Sounds like the best option is to try composer cloud for a month while looking for sales.
 
Cool, thanks guys. Sounds like the best option is to try composer cloud for a month while looking for sales.

The best thing about composer cloud outside of the value is that it also gives you access to different types of libraries, which will help you when making future purchases after you flesh our your writing style. Both Hollywood strings and the Symphonic strings sound awesome from the audio demos, yet cover two different territories, both are included in the EW cloud (Im pretty sure). Having experiences with two different types of string libraries makes looking at future options a lot easier.
 
If you already own Kontakt, the VSL Legacy sounds (plus the SIPS scripts) are an excellent starter's collection.

Paolo
i used very poorly its violin one imagined i played real violin i know khow good ear this human has. i say its solo strings,woodwinds andp ercusion isvery good.andbras maybe non massive (forte fortissimmo type things) parts.
 
I have the free Kontakt Player. My computer is a desktop, 4 core, 3.2 GHz, 12 GB RAM. I signed up to composer cloud and I'm currently trying the Symphonic Orchestra. There's so many articulations! Are certain articulations recommended for specific types of phrases -Long, Short, Slow, Fast, Legato, Vibrato etc? There's alot to explore.
 
Maybe Versilion studios VSCO 2 chamber orchestra pro edition or Impact Soundworks Rhapsody Orchestral colours + a percussion library of your choice when they are on sale?

I liked the videos that I saw on the Amadeus library.
 
I created my first song with composer cloud. Is there somewhere I could share it?
 
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