Below's an excerpt of what I wrote a few years ago on the subject of NI Symphonic Brass. Keep in mind that this was written before any updates that might have appeared in the meantime. (Something I don't know about because, since writing the review, I have never ever looked at this library again.)
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(...) Had this library appeared in the late-nineties of the previous century — around the time that Advanced Orchestra was creating a bit of a stir — people might have said: “Hey, this is not all that bad, is it?” and we all would have nodded approvingly, but today, there is simply no excuse in my opinion for the average sound, the generic sounding articulations and the idiotic programming which characterizes this effort.
It’s clear that a lot more time was spent on the Ensemble brass than on the Solo instruments, and if the bundle has one area where something vaguely reminiscent of ‘useful quality’ can be found, it is among the Ensemble patches. Still nothing that I would ever want to go to mock-up war with, but … not entirely revoltingly useless either.
The Solo brass however feels, behaves and sounds like an afterthought that both NI and Soundiron should be ashamed of. Several of the articulations have only one or two velocity layers. (The sustains have three.) If they have two, it's a ‘p’ and and ‘f’ sample, leaving a huge timbral hole in the middle that isn’t and can’t be filled. Moreover, these velocity layers reside under different keyswitches, meaning that if you want to go from the ‘p’ sample to the ‘f’ sample, you have to use a keyswitch.
As with the strings, the Dynamics-knob in the middle of the interface is basically a volume knob (as is cc#11), the ‘Tightness’ parameter does, to my ears, little more than changing the sample start value (usually to ugly effect), and for articulations where the GUI indicates 8 round robins, there are cleary only four, if that. The legato’s aren’t particularly good, the expressive articulations sound artificial, and the tuba sounds like one that Peter Siedlaczek never considered good enough for inclusion in Advanced Orchestra.
The Ensembles fare better: at least here, there are patches where the Dynamics-knob effectively moves between the two or three available velocity layers. (Rarely to good effect though, because you can’t simulate a mezzo timbre by bluntly crossfading between a ‘p’ and a ‘f’ sample, especially if the timbral difference between these two is a big as it is with all brass instruments. And there's nothing less convincing than a ‘p’ sample with a whiff of an ‘f’ sample added to it, posing as a mezzo sample. Ugly.
(I could do examples, but a compassionate and kind-hearted person would know better than to ask.)
I could go on. And maybe find a few good things too, I suppose. A couple of registers of some of the instruments and/or ensembles don’t sound all that bad by themselves, I guess. And if dropped somewhere in the back of a mix, maybe some of these brass might even manage to do some good in an arrangement. But I just can’t be bothered anymore. And it certainly won’t be my arrangements: I’ve already dug this library’s grave, on my Libraries Graveyard HD (which is getting worryingly full) and that’s where I’m now going to put it. (...)
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