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Spitfire Studio Brass

NoamL said:
Those notes are clearly slurred. Not every single one to the next, but there's a slur over every upbeat phrase until the downbeat.
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Listen to how different the articulation is from the first and second time of the horn theme. The second time it's more articulated. I haven't seen the score, but I presume the first time is MF and the second time F.

And, of course, comparing to a live recording isn't always fair as 2+ musicians with staggered breathing will always be different from one single horn patch.
 
So SF isn't even going through the motions to release and support via the commercial thread? There's blood in the water... going to be a feeding frenzy for great deals next year.
 
The point of a legato patch is that you don't hear repeated attacks between notes - they are essentially the equivalent of a "slur" patch, that is why you have things called "true legato" which literally sample a player changing from one note to another without re-tonguing, and catching all the "in-between" sounds. The problem with the Spitfire sample shared earlier is that it sounds like the notes are being restarted every time new one is triggered, rather than sounding like a continuous line. Horn players play these sorts of slurred/legato lines at forte (and above) all the time.
 
LamaRose said:
So SF isn't even going through the motions to release and support via the commercial thread? There's blood in the water... going to be a feeding frenzy for great deals next year.
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Maybe they're trying a different approach. (completely opposite of building up hype.)
I was surprised (in a good way).

I knew it would eventually be released since they mentioned SStB SStW when they released SStS, but I didn't have a clue when.

Next release, we might have something like, them suddenly announcing a new product and be like "available today". Same date as the announcement, just like Apple :P
 
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Consona said:
We are nearly in 2019 so honestly, can the legato handle this line or not?

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No. Why? Because Spitfire Audio has zero concern with trying to emulate that type of style with their current releases. Now, I would venture to say that Andy Blaney could figure it out as many of his demos over the years have shown how good these libraries sound but, if you listen closely, you will hear that he avoids legato lines like that in his Brass writing. I freakin love his demos and compositions in general but he is very good at writing to the strengths of the samples whilst sounding very idiomatic to the orchestra. That, alone, is an amazing skill to have.

With that said, the Studio Series, at least with Studio Strings, has not been marketed towards these types of compositions. That's fine. I think it's very important for potential buyers to understand the purposes of the libraries being released, especially by Spitfire. They usually have a very focused concept, designed to achieve good results if you write within that aesthetic. Again, nothing wrong with those types of libraries. I welcome them. We, the consumer, just need to be aware of that and not fall into those marketing traps of hyperbole.

Personally, after listening to the walkthrough, I feel like this library doesn't offer anything new to the market. It's certainly not a game changer and doesn't rival what's already been done. It's simply just a new set of sounds one can used to be inspired. That's cool. Knowing Spitfire's products very well, I will venture to say that it functions amazingly, as long as it doesn't have poorly edited samples and sample starts like Studio Strings currently has. There is still a lot to fix in that library and I hope they learned from those mistakes with this one.

Cheers,

Chris
 
I personally prefer this type of marketing as I do not keep tabs on "coming in the near future" or other "statements" full of marketing tricks. The 'walkthroughs' and the price is what makes me to purchase or not these days. Kudos to Spitfire for this release, it does sound good, and it is very affordable, indeed. I hope Winds and Perc would follow as most of the time I do find the Spitfire orchestral libraries a bit (and I have them all) too 'wet' for my taste, this new approach is a very welcomed one imo.
 
ka00 said:
My money is on CSB maybe pulling it off.

I’m wondering why on this entire planet there is basically one dude, Alex Wallbank (with Jasper Blunk being a close second, and Audio Imperia probably third) who has this very realistic legato thing down? Honest question, which I realize will be provocative.

Or is my question merely revealing my personal preference for a certain type of legato transition?
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Not provocative at all. I was wondering the same thing.
 
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This legato debate will go nowhere. It's pointless to argue about dynamics and what real players do and how technically the embouchure does this or that, blah blah blah. I used to be a trumpet player and honestly couldn't care less about this stuff, all I know is that when I listen to this library, I can immediately tell that it's samples and not the real deal. And that is the only thing that matters to me.

Also I want to mention that in general, the decade-old Hollywood Brass seems to do legato better than this library. And that's unfortunate.
 
Zhao Shen said:
This legato debate will go nowhere. It's pointless to argue about dynamics and what real players do and how technically the embouchure does this or that, blah blah blah. I used to be a trumpet player and honestly couldn't care less about this stuff, all I know is that when I listen to this library, I can immediately tell that it's samples and not the real deal. And that is the only thing that matters to me.

Also I want to mention that in general, the decade-old Hollywood Brass seems to do legato better than this library. And that's unfortunate.
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It’s such a paradox when people don’t care about what sounds real, still they complain if it doesn’t sound real. “I don’t care if real horn players don’t play legato in fortissimo, I want my samples to do so. But they should sound real.”
 
I watched the walkthrouhs too and while I think that all spitfire products have a stellar and nice sound when it comes to pure sampling I am especially since I started this year working more with modeled instruments (like Sm, IBrass) I feel that a lot of those normal sampling mechanics with predefined performance and articualtion systems in the style of putting lego together, the libraries all lack imo of being able to create cohesive musical lines. However just an example: While they sampled different RR´s for the shorts and probably also for the longs you can´t really perform convincing sounding repeating notes of the same or even different pitch, also faster repetition have the typical mechanic robotic feel which with real performances it has so much more nuances of shorts regarding note length, note attack, and the note envelope characteristics, detuning and pitch fluctuation of the sound. You need to have imo control over single instruments and treat each performance carefully (which I find crucial for a real performance) to come closer to an expressive real life performance. For one hit situations they might work quite well. However, this is where you have to make your own decision: Do you want more realism which comes closer to a performance aspect of a real playing thing, or do you want to shortcut time and have some sort of nice sound but absolutely no real musical interpretation whatsoever. I think that sampling can only improve the realism in that regards if they try to explore new waters and give the composer more input options to be able to have more control over those performance aspects. When you start mocking up a lot of real orchestra things this problem becomes very very obvious imo. And that is not a spitfire thing, it applies to almost all libraries which utilizes the normal articulations system. Question could be also: normal sampling has imo gotten to a point where I think they can´t improve with conventional techniques any more realism and while I am always interested in seeing new coming products I feel that this level of creating library sounds have been at a point where you can´t get more out of it. Its a bit like a game which you passed, you can repeat the game playing with slightly different aspects but you still reach the same end.
 
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NoamL said:
no they mean slurs. :)

Slurs and legato are two different things as well. e.g. you can write "broad legato tongue" over a part with no slurs.

Sample developers have their own language to describe virtual instruments and unfortunately it sometimes directly contradicts the language you need to use with real musicians.
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So true! I played trombone and hardly remember half the articulations I read through in the VI libraries I own. To be fair, it was just the high school band soo... Same for vocals though too. I've sung my whole life (solo and in choirs) but we never even used the term "legato" to describe our transitions between notes. That was term I had to learn to understand as a midi composer.
 
I found myself reading this thread with serious interest before realizing that there was no ridiculous time-wasting hype, and that had there been, I may have been far less interested. I love this way more. I'll give the examples a serious listen when I get a moment because there's a lot of good brass coming out lately and this is intriguing at a great price.
 
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