The alternative sound of Alternative strings is awesome, but could patches like the normal spiccatos and performance legatos be used more traditionally to play fast clean passages like from a classical quartet playing Vivaldi or something? In the walkthrough video at 5:30 Paul Thompson plays a quick legato phrase that sort of sounds traditional. Is this possible with the library? Or are the round robins of even the spiccato patches too unique and different to be used for long consistent phrases?
The caveat is that I don’t think any sampled solo string can really do Vivaldi or Beethoven quartets remotely convincingly - Sacconi is probably your best bet for that style. If innovation in solo sting sampling continues as spectacularly as we’be seen in the last few year, then maybe in 10-20 years a convincing Vivaldi mock up will be possible.
That said, AltSS is a beautiful library, but note that the legato is very limited. Check the Andy Blakey demos, which I think show its strengths very nicely, but I think also push the legato as far as it can be pushed. In practice, I tend to think of this as more of a texture library. The legato (Vl And Vc only) is nice to have, but I’ve never found it useful except in context of doubling or something. If classical expressive range in the legatos is what you’re most looking for I’d seriously look to something like Sacconi.
And yes, all the vibrato is baked in progressive vibrato.
Spitfire’s main solo strings, in comparison, have much more sophisticated legatos in comparison - though still not really geared towards full on classical string quartets. But it’s probably 2 generations of legato technology ahead of the AltSS, with a fantastic expressive range in what you can do with the legatos. But with the exception of the Vl, still not in the league of Sacconi for Vivaldi-esque expressiveness - though far ahead of Sacconi (and everything else I know of) within the range of the kind of expressiveness it does do well.
That said, for what it does - crazily beautiful solo string textures, AltSS is completely unbeatable.