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SPITFIRE AUDIO string orchestra - libraries with greatest realism you can feel in your whole body + inspirational with playable full ensemble patches?

I have just about every major string library out there, and in terms of playability, Afflatus is an absolute breeze. It's much more user friendly than anything Spitfire has ever done, imo.

Afflatus also has ensemble patches that are true polyphonic legato, which allows you to play with both hands and achieve smooth legato transitions!

Tone is subjective, but in terms of realism? More often than not, that has more to do with the composer's programming skills.
In the right hands, a 20 year old string library can sound amazing!

With that being said, if you're set on Spitfire, then i highly recommend SCS. It's a great string library and can achieve just about anything you throw at it. It also has ensemble patches, and the flautando articulations are absolutely gorgeous.

Many people will recommend CSS, but i personally am not a fan of the playability, as I find it to be very cumbersome. Also, if you go that route, make sure you like the tone, because it has a dark, and sometimes even a "lo fi" sheen to it. The ensemble patch also sounds very synthy to me. Regardless, CSS is fully capable of producing some very beautiful results.

Good luck with your search!
Hello Mike,

I appreciate you sharing your opinions based on vast experience with string libraries. Tone is subjective indeed but from so many different demonstration and walk through videos that I have been watching, I have found that I keep coming back to Spitfire Chamber Strings. I just love the sound of it. It sounds warm and inviting and so rich and warm, like it just reaches out and hugs you, if you know what I mean?

The sounds from the Cinematic Studio Strings library do sound like they are specific to blockbuster cinema composition. I think they would work well for any movie with Dunce "The Rock" Johnson as the star, or any of the Marvel movies. Not so much my cup of tea but I can hear why many people love it.
 
Ensemble patches (sections spread across the keyboard) for both hand playing are nice improvisation tools but they have their borders. Especially strings sound emotional and realistic through the independent dynamic of the voices. And no long note string patch sounds good if you don't add continuous dynamic movement. I think orchestration and dynamic are 90% of good sample strings. Maybe you should think about a midi pedal or breath controller to add dynamic to your performance. Normally dynamic is driven by the modulation wheel (like the Spitfire Epic Strings) but you need a free hand for that.

A lot of the bigger string libraries have ensemble libraries as an additional goody beside the single instrument sections. You will pay a lot if you don't need those.
Cornucopia by Strezov Sampling is a good sounding pure ensemble library, only the basses are separate. It's one of the few string ensemble libraries I know which are not part of a bigger package.

This might be interesting too...
Hello Saxer,

Thank you for these important lessons. You certainly helped with further understanding the range of limitations to working with ensemble patches. I appreciate the link you shared as it was a very informative lesson for me in some new territory.
 
Hello Mike,

I appreciate you sharing your opinions based on vast experience with string libraries. Tone is subjective indeed but from so many different demonstration and walk through videos that I have been watching, I have found that I keep coming back to Spitfire Chamber Strings. I just love the sound of it. It sounds warm and inviting and so rich and warm, like it just reaches out and hugs you, if you know what I mean?

The sounds from the Cinematic Studio Strings library do sound like they are specific to blockbuster cinema composition. I think they would work well for any movie with Dunce "The Rock" Johnson as the star, or any of the Marvel movies. Not so much my cup of tea but I can hear why many people love it.
Yes! SCS is arguably Spitfire's greatest accomplishment in the sampling world. It's quite versitile, and definitely has that feeling of "warmth" that you mentioned. A good part of that is due to it being recorded at Lyndhurst, which is a very beautiful and warm sounding hall. You can't go wrong!
 
My main instrument is the guitar, and when I used to writing on guitar, the point was always to write to the nuance and expressiveness of the instrument. And I suspect this drives the way I obsess over both the expressiveness of textural libraries as well as these these detail of performability vs plonkability - trying to recover that ability to write in the dimensions of nuance and texture and performance and gesture that were lost to me, at least temporarily, when I shifted to samples.

And all those youtube videos that "review" a violin or a cello played by plonking notes onto a keyboard and expecting it to react like a keyboard ... well I console myself that this not the worst travesty of humanity that Youtube has brought us. Still pretty bad though.




I'm with you on this. It is one of my great adult pleasures to be able to write parallel 5th anything I want.

This is my favourite (if also the simplest) of the official SCS demos.



(Doesn't mean that I don't also like good voice leading though. I love a nice bit of good voice leading).



I sometime think it's Homay's personal mission to bankrupt me. :) And her LCO demo is among my favourite of hers.

I was actually talking about LCO strings though, should have been specific. Though I agree that this is all equally true LCO textures. It has an entirely other dimension of crazy textural possibilities.

If you're looking at the Olafur toolkit - be sure to check out her demo for Stratus also. And note that it does come with the non-stratus piano patches also.




To this I'd add - brace you self for other libraries taking more work to sound good. Few, if any, libraries sounds as amazing right out of the box as OACE. My cat could write something beautiful on OACE. (And I don't even have a cat).

But the flautandos in SStS are to die for also. (There's some shockingly anti-flautando people around vi-c. I am not one of them).




Make sure you're looking for this sound though. I don't have this, but I have Albion One which replaced this. And it's not that it's a bad library, but it's just too ... epic, I suppose ... for what I do.

Of course that's exactly what it says on the tin, so this isn't a complaint against it, exactly. But it just isn't right to match the quality I get with these other libraries. Not quite sure what that quality is, but I think "lyricism" is as good a word as any. And Albion One / Origionals tends to excel particularly for bombast and aggressiveness. And so, by design, possibly the single least lyrical library Spitfire has on offer. In particular, most of the strings are orchestrated in octaves, which makes me crazy.

This is awesome ISM

You sure are a master of connecting the dots!

It seems that the Spitfire Chamber Strings has naturally become the main attraction for me. I know you love the flautandos in Spitfire Studio Strings but how are the flautandos in Spitfire Chamber Strings? Just as good and intimate? Not as good?

Homay definitely makes an incredible sales clerk without making any form of sales pitch. She makes Spitfire look good and helps them to stay connected with a younger up and coming audience.

I have watched the demo videos of Stratus many times. I decided against it because it is so specific and his signature sound for his last record. It would be too easy to end up sounding like Oli with that however, I am sure there are ways of making it sound different. When you say that Stratus comes with the non-Stratus piano patches, do you mean that Stratus comes with pianos and content from the Olafur Arnalds Composer Toolkit library?

Funny story about the cat you do not have ISM :emoji_laughing:
 
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the flautandos in SStS are to die for also. (There's some shockingly anti-flautando people around vi-c. I am not one of them).
A corollary of the proposition that one can never have too many string libraries is that one can never have too many flautando/sul tasto patches.
 
They are the ur-flautandos. Like Christian Henson I use the ensemble flautandos for sketching. It’s nice and consistent and beautiful across the range and reacts very musically to movements of the modwheel. The SCS flautando ensemble patch was the first sample patch that I really fell in love with.
Thank you for sharing that.


People must think I am crazy about Spitfire. I am using my ears and listening and going with my intuition. The other thing is that Spitfire share the royalties on their libraries with the musicians and technicians that make the libraries and that is definitely something to consider because without the musicians, there would be no libraries and no technological advancements happening in how to make these things sound more realistic as time moves forward. There is an attitude that samples will replace real performers. It is a very strong opinion but one held by many musicians who eschew sample library music. I love that Spitfire work with musicians and treat them with the respect they deserve. It is easy to support a company that supports music and musicians and puts the money they earn back into the company by developing more innovative products.
 
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Spitfire Chamber Strings is amazing. Spitfire Symphonic Strings is also very good but much larger in player count. The Spitfire Symphonic Solo Strings Library is a great library to compliment both of these library to add more detail. All recorded in Air Lyndhurst which sounds fantastic.

Other very good String libraries I have, Orchestral Tools Berlin Strings, CSS, CSSS, HZ Strings. Actually I’ll stop there. It’s scary how much money gets spent on this stuff 😂
 
How is Spitfire Chamber Strings on the computer's CPU?

How many instances of it in Kontakt can you run on an i7 Quad Core machines with 12-16 GB of RAM?

In other words, am I going to need a new computer just to run it?

It does seem like a massive library company to anything else I have so far.
 
I have a very strong feeling you won't be stopping there....just like most of us...."My name is Rex and I am a .....o_O"

Oh I have more. I just didn’t want to list more. And besides, I don’t have the Berlin Strings expansions yet so they are definitely on the cards. Be irresponsible not to complete it.

But yeah, SCS is an amazing library.
 
@purple & @TigerTheFrog

I listened to lots of Cinematic Studio Strings demos. It sounds really great but I'm afraid that it does not have the kind of sound I am looking for. It sounds very cinematic and perfect for creating blockbuster film scores. I am looking for libraries for composing my own music. I am not a media composer. I really like the more raw and intimate sound of Spitfire Audio's products in general. Call me a fangirl if you like but it is just what resonates for me. For my music, I want something more personal that can reach a listener on a more personal level without being too over the top and intimidating. Cinematic Studio Strings sounds massive. It is very impressive and very cinematic. What I seem to be leaning towards is Spitfire Chamber Strings. It has a sound that feels more personal, warm and inviting to me.
You are the only one who knows what kind of music you want to make and the kind of sounds you want to hear, so you have to go with your judgment.

Have fun making music with whatever you choose! I look forward to hearing the results. :)
 
It seems that the Spitfire Chamber Strings has naturally become the main attraction for me. I know you love the flautandos in Spitfire Studio Strings but how are the flautandos in Spitfire Chamber Strings? Just as good and intimate? Not as good?

Yes, as jbuhler says, the SCS flautandos really are the ur-flautandos.

That said, Tundra has it's own amazing take on flautando. And Neo of course has some rather spectacular innovations in flautandos, and fluffy audio has it's own perfectly breathtaking take on flautandos. Not to mention the sul tastos in LCO strings. And the solo string flautandos and ... we could really be here all day. There's really no way I could ever get enough flautandos or sul tastos. I think SCS also has a legato patch for the flatlands ... so if you like flautandos, SCS is the place to go.


This is no disrespect to the SStS flautandos, which are entirely lovely. And I've also really come to appreciate them for their own qualities - the dryness of SStS can give a definition and bite, and this can be felt as warmth or dissonance, depending on your mix and reverb. (Although mostly I just drench them in reverb and pretend I'm using SCS).


People must think I am crazy about Spitfire. The thing is, I am using my ears and listening and going with my intuition.

Spitfire was founded out of an angst over the absence of something - some kind of quality of the sonority of the sample libraries that were available at the time.

And I remember bashing my head into the VSL SE, which was amazing at the time, with a stunning precision and depth to sampling. But I could just never get it to sound remotely like something I could ever imagine anyone actually want to listen to. Not that it wasn't technically "realistic", just that it was sterile. I always argue that it's not about "fooling" people intellectually into thinking the samples are real instruments, it's about "fooling" them emotionally into thinking they're listening to real music.

And then I discovered, first SSW, and then Tundra. And bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. VSL could do fantastic mock ups. East West could do a fabulous hollywood sound. But suddenly I could aspire to write music that was both what I wanted to write, and with a sonority that, concieveably, someone might actually want to listen to someday.

(non-anglophones might need to google wordsworth for the bliss/dawn reference).


Enjoy SCS!
 
Yes, as jbuhler says, the SCS flautandos really are the ur-flautandos.

That said, Tundra has it's own amazing take on flautando. And Neo of course has some rather spectacular innovations in flautandos, and fluffy audio has it's own perfectly breathtaking take on flautandos. Not to mention the sul tastos in LCO strings. And the solo string flautandos and ... we could really be here all day. There's really no way I could ever get enough flautandos or sul tastos. I think SCS also has a legato patch for the flatlands ... so if you like flautandos, SCS is the place to go.


This is no disrespect to the SStS flautandos, which are entirely lovely. And I've also really come to appreciate them for their own qualities - the dryness of SStS can give a definition and bite, and this can be felt as warmth or dissonance, depending on your mix and reverb. (Although mostly I just drench them in reverb and pretend I'm using SCS).




Spitfire was founded out of an angst over the absence of something - some kind of quality of the sonority of the sample libraries that were available at the time.

And I remember bashing my head into the VSL SE, which was amazing at the time, with a stunning precision and depth to sampling. But I could just never get it to sound remotely like something I could ever imagine anyone actually want to listen to. Not that it wasn't technically "realistic", just that it was sterile. I always argue that it's not about "fooling" people intellectually into thinking the samples are real instruments, it's about "fooling" them emotionally into thinking they're listening to real music.

And then I discovered, first SSW, and then Tundra. And bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. VSL could do fantastic mock ups. East West could do a fabulous hollywood sound. But suddenly I could aspire to write music that was both what I wanted to write, and with a sonority that, concieveably, someone might actually want to listen to someday.

(non-anglophones might need to google wordsworth for the bliss/dawn reference).


Enjoy SCS!
What does ur-flautando mean? If it is the prefix for saying something is original, I thought that SCS came out long after the Flautando first appeared in a Spitfire library?
 
What does ur-flautando mean? If it is the prefix for saying something is original, I thought that SCS came out long after the Flautando first appeared in a Spitfire library?

Possible that was a bit academic / wonky, especially for a non angolphone.

I think the "ur-" prefix literally translates as "original" (or maybe "primordial"? I think it's ancient ...I want to say Babylonian? Sumarian? ... or something?). And I think SCS might have been first library to sample flautando - I think it Christian talks about it somewhere - os in one sense it's quite a literal meaning, SCS was (I think) the origional flautando.

But the implication/joke here is a little more nuanced, slightly tongue-in-cheek - that SCS flautando is the flautando by which all other flautandos are to be measured.


ie. that SCS flautando is widely acknowledged as "One Flautando to Rule Them All" might be a slightly less obscure way to make the same point.


Sorry for the obscurity. But seriously, who can resist a good ancient Babylonian (Sumerian?) joke?

(If it's any consolation, I once lived with a really, really lovely (and I think maybe slightly autistic) New Zealander with PhD in history in history from Oxford who was writing a book of obscure jokes - many of which probably haven't been funny for hundreds of years outside a history department unless accompanied by lengthy lectures on, depending on the joke, anything from nuances of Mauri myth, to the conjugation of verbs in Old french, to rituals of the Australian outback, to the techniques of traditional dentistry in Botswana).
 
Possible that was a bit academic / wonky, especially for a non angolphone.

I think the "ur-" prefix literally translates as "original" (or maybe "primordial"? I think it's ancient ...I want to say Babylonian? Sumarian? ... or something?). And I think SCS might have been first library to sample flautando - I think it Christian talks about it somewhere - os in one sense it's quite a literal meaning, SCS was (I think) the origional flautando.

But the implication/joke here is a little more nuanced, slightly tongue-in-cheek - that SCS flautando is the flautando by which all other flautandos are to be measured.


ie. that SCS flautando is widely acknowledged as "One Flautando to Rule Them All" might be a slightly less obscure way to make the same point.


Sorry for the obscurity. But seriously, who can resist a good ancient Babylonian (Sumerian?) joke?

(If it's any consolation, I once lived with a really, really lovely (and I think maybe slightly autistic) New Zealander with PhD in history in history from Oxford who was writing a book of obscure jokes - many of which probably haven't been funny for hundreds of years outside a history department unless accompanied by lengthy lectures on, depending on the joke, anything from nuances of Mauri myth, to the conjugation of verbs in Old french, to rituals of the Australian outback, to the techniques of traditional dentistry in Botswana).
Some days I feel like I might be slightly autistic but my doctor says definitely not and and I trust her!

I will have to do some research into ancient Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations. I am familiar with the Mauri as I spent a month in New Zealand last year during my travels. In Iceland we mostly study our own ancients - Viking explorers and their slaves and the Huldufólk who began the first settlement.
They were indeed brutal but not quite as much as the Mauri who ate anyone who crossed their path.

Good to hear that SCS contains the benchmark Flautando samples!

I thought that SCS was a more recent creation from Spitfire but perhaps I am wrong? What year was it released? What was released first, Chamber Strings or Studio Strings?
 
Yes - "benchmark" would have been a much easier way to say that, now that you mention it. Always good to be educated in the English language by non anglophones.

And SCS was in some sense the very first spitfire library. There are some complexities around rebranding and how it evolved from the first bespoke library. But Spitfire was in a very real sense created at first only to record more or less what is now known as SCS.

None of which was really the point of the ur-flautando jokes. But fun fact:

 
In Iceland we mostly study our own ancients - Viking explorers and their slaves and the Huldufólk who began the first settlement.
They were indeed brutal but not quite as much as the Mauri who ate anyone who crossed their path.

I grew up in the west, where there wasn't a lot history to teach (unless of course your count the ancient histories of the first nations, but then of course that would have been awkward).

But I do remember a big middle school field trip - every middleschooler in the province made this trip, something pilgrimage really to the homestead of the greatest poet in the history of the province.

Who wrote exclusively in Icelandic. The nuance of which I'm sorry to say seemed, to my middle school self, to have been somewhat lost in the translation.
 
When you say that Stratus comes with the non-Stratus piano patches, do you mean that Stratus comes with pianos and content from the Olafur Arnalds Composer Toolkit library?
And no, here I meant that you have the stratus piano sampled without the repetitions. It’s limited compared to the OACT piano, but really nice to have in its own right.
 
Not Spitfire, but I like the sound of Ben Osterhouse's Sospiro strings. Its $39 and seems like it would be good for an emotional ensemble strings option. I don't have it, but am highly considering.

 
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