One should never post in a grumpy mood, but as these are my honest feelings and thoughts at the moment, I will still give my impressions of my first 2 days with Neo.
I find the strings to be lovely. Somewhat more intimate, precise and clear than e.g. Chamber strings. As mentioned above, they perfectly fit both smaller and larger rooms, just with microphone settings it’s easy to blend them with Air studio, Lyndhurst, and basically any other library I tried, which is great!
Brass and Woodwinds – I will never use them and wonder in which scenario one could use them. But of course, this is a matter of taste. For mine, a very strange choice, even considering that it’s a special niche. What I do not find a matter of taste is that more “conventional” brass and woodwinds articulations and, as mentioned above, the possibility to access the diverse instrument sections individually, would have catapulted the usefulness into a new dimension. And man, the Bacon à I sincerely wonder how this could pass QC?
Some of the Brunel loops perfectly fit my style, and I will use them for downbeat ambient / triphop tracks. But in the end, it’s just a very limited number of stems, which basically require arranging a collage of sample loops like in the old days with Magix music maker or so. I feel like time traveling using those. But it’s still nice to have them, because they offer a nice blend of the world of pristine acoustic / orchestral and more modern, electronic / hybrid samples.
Stephensons Steam Band – I understand the intent, as they write in the description: “In keeping with the NEO soundscape, the aim was to extract and enhance the emotion from every sound, taking them to new, warped dimensions.” But for me, this does not work out, I must be missing something crucial here. Maybe this is appealing to guys coming from strictly an orchestral composing / classical music background which for the first time in their life have some synthesizer sounds available and think “oh wow how cool, so that’s the world of synthesizers, now I have arrived in modern times”. There are a gazillion soft and hardware synths and samplers available that are infinitely more capable, broader in scope and allow for much more creativity in mangling orchestral samples. For someone used to using synths, samplers etc. it’s like a bad joke.
The same goes for the Segla Textures. Some are indeed really, really beautiful. But some of the stuff? Ouch. Again: just throw some original orchestral samples into e.g. a granular or whatever synthesis engine, and you have a gazillion of much more unique, creative, musically useful etc. possibilities and results. It’s my first eDNA engine instrument, but it really seems to be extremely limited and / or I seem to really oversee something very obvious and do not get the point.
So, in summary I’ve learnt: Albions are not for me, but despite the negative points above, I do not regret buying Neo, because first there really are some gems in it, and second, one learns from experience, and I would always have been thinking that other producers / composers using the Albions have kind of a magic secret weapon in their sleeves
P.S. As this is my first (and last) Albion, it was of course my mistake that I did not research these things beforehand (I was just focused on the orchestral side), and I am just sharing my initial impressions. I should also have added “in my opinion / perception” to every sentence, of course.
. The real American Exceptionaism is the way we delude ourselves with all kinds of notions of fantasy ie. All men are created equal, for starters....
