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Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra samples - too much room baked in?

river angler

Senior Member
I have of course listened extensively to the walkthroughs of this library and others from the Spitfire camp and agree it does sound wonderful right out of the box. However I'm wondering how often it's inherent baked in room ambience that is still very present even when using just the close mic positions poses problems for presenting mixes correctly to clients.

A friend of mine uses Spitfire exclusively for his work but then often only for mock ups which end up being played by real orchestras. However when this library needs to be blended with other contemporary instruments (synths/sound design etc) to potentially end up forming the mastered orchestral part of a score I'm wondering just how many composers prefer to work with dryer samples in the first place offered by the likes of EastWest for example?
 
a good question. I mean, it is so personal what sounds like dry or close miced? It is like bread with butter. I like medium butter on bread, but I know people who like only thin butter with breat while there are people who like butter with a bit bread, you know?
So by saying that: The close micings of SFA Orchestra are more direct but yet you can hear the relatively dominant room sphere over the samples and the tails. If ou are going for a lush and epic sound this orchestra serves well, but if you are after an intimate more oldschool scoring stage sound, probably you should watch out for other libraries. Sample Modeling, CSS and Berlin Winds come in mind with Hollywood percussion which I like to use.

I would say mixing wise it depends on what kind of orchestra source material you are working with. There is no generalisation..saying it is possible to mix it or not with certain live orchestras. It always depends on the source material how effective or not it is to move it together. Generally I am of the opinion that you can move a lot of different things with enough post processing together..
 
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HI Alexander! Thanks for chiming in!...

I can certainly hear the reverb tails in the close mic positions! In my experience with reverb generally it can be hit and miss wether different reverb tails from different instruments blend well together or not. Sonics here can occasionally clash harmonically or simply muddy-up the mix in a way that takes quite considerable time to sort out should one run out of play on a particular instruments reverb tail! I'm not referring only to blending different manufacturers orchestral instruments (a practice I now wish to avoid!) but generally when it comes down to mixing a complete score with all manner of sonics to marry up in the mix! Certainly for an authentic orchestral arrangement it makes sense to me to have all the orchestral sections running through the same reverb wether that be one inherently consistent in the samples themselves as in SF or a separately applied reverb. However when an orchestral arrangement needs to blend with other instrumentation things can get a little tricky if one has no way of curtailing that reverb to suit.

I am about to plum for SF as its design adheres to many other aspects of my work including using it live on stage which thanks to the fact that it harnesses Kontakt I can set up midi patches to select at will which one can't with a lot of the other dryer libraries especially EastWest who's Player inhibits this functionality altogether unfortunately!

Fact is that SF sound the best IMO out of the box and one huge advantage of that is the ease at which one can compose and pretty much get an instant idea of how an orchestral arrangement is shaping up sonically which is of course very satisfying! I also think the SF tools to manipulate the samples are extremely well thought out, again making the process of composition more pleasurable and immediate. Overall this leans toward a very musical experience while composing rather than having to constantly adjust sonics to "feel" the composition is heading in the right direction. More time spent composing with less interruption to solve technical issues!

I imagine the pros of SFs libraries for most composers far out weigh this slight caveat regarding the possible over baked in acoustics. It's just a pity SF don't offer some kind of trial version of their libraries especially for composers who are potentially looking to invest heavily in one manufacturers instruments.

Do you by any chance use their Chamber Orchestra? I was thinking of picking this up as well for more intimate arrangements.
 
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it never crossed my mind that either the chamber strings or the symphonic strings have to much room baked in. blending those two libraries with synthesizers and SFX sources is no problem at all.
 
it never crossed my mind that either the chamber strings or the symphonic strings have to much room baked in. blending those two libraries with synthesizers and SFX sources is no problem at all.
That's encouraging!.. After a years deliberation on this I'm pretty much convinced SF is the right move me!
 
I don't think the SSS are that wet when using the close mics.

Here's and example of the close mics from a mockup I'm working on at the moment (still WiP), all added reverbs stripped down. First a part with longs, then some staccatos to observe the dryness even better.

[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/str-mp3.16409/][/AUDIOPLUS]
 

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and there's the mic expansion options where you can get pre-made stereo mixes, and also some interesting mic combinations
 
I'm wondering how often it's inherent baked in room ambience that is still very present even when using just the close mic positions poses problems for presenting mixes correctly to clients.

AIR Lyndhurst is one of the main selling points. For me, it's a feature, not a liability. I've blended it with loads of stuff, including synths, and it's sounded fantastic. The close mics on SSS work well for me, even with the sound of the hall still present.

On the other end of the moisture spectrum, Spitfire makes Studio Strings and LCO, which are much more dry. And there's always LASS, a library renowned for its dryness.

I'm not sure there's any such thing as presenting a mix "correctly" to a client. Do what you need to do to make your client happy, whether it's recreating a lush hall (like SSS does) or a dry scoring stage. I can see the need for both kinds of libraries.
 
and there's the mic expansion options where you can get pre-made stereo mixes, and also some interesting mic combinations

I still haven't installed that expansion, but I absolutely refuse to use SCS without the Jake Jackson stereo mixes which I bought (and installed) when they came out. They turned that library for me from a "always a bit too screechy and small" into "holy hell, this is exactly what I want".
 
I do think it can be somewhat overbearing a lot of times. The depth of the sound is fantastic, but the massive wash of reverberance can dillute the sound sometimes and make it real flubby and undefined. I don't use the hall mics at all anymore - it doesn't add anything to the sound but blur. It absolutely kills the low brass, for example.

These days I like using the stereo mixes. There's one that has a particularly nice balance between a more direct sound and ambience.

I don't even really want to fuss around with mic positions any more, to be honest, and don't really think that separate mic positions are all that useful in practice. It's a lot of GB bloat and I think library developers should really move to just offering different stereo mixdowns.
 
I love how they sound but they are WAY too wet for my taste. But screw reverb, what I truly hate is that the articulations are not balanced and have differences in wetness
 
I love how they sound but they are WAY too wet for my taste. But screw reverb, what I truly hate is that the articulations are not balanced and have differences in wetness
Interesting, that's the first time I've heard about this particular trait.
 
I've thought a lot about this very topic. I have a ton of SF including the full orchestra. For me the strings (SSS & SCS) are great, and the wetness is doable. The strings are the closest to the main mic's so a mix of close + tree can work in most contexts. But the WW's and Brass are just to wet for me. Dialing up the mains and it screams "church" to my ears. I've taken both out of my template. To bad because I love just about everything about SF...
 
The brass is a tricky one. The close mics sound pretty much like a party balloon being emptied, so in case you want to do the space yourself, it's possible but helluva hard, and you have to fiddle a lot with ER's too. The WW are way easier.

Granted, you will hear the tail ringing in the close mics still- it's impossible to get them sound like EW Hollywood- stuff. But the room tail ring in close mics is so small in your own reverb and space context and blended with other instruments using that same reverb that it definitely cannot be heard anymore at that point.
 
I still haven't installed that expansion, but I absolutely refuse to use SCS without the Jake Jackson stereo mixes which I bought (and installed) when they came out. They turned that library for me from a "always a bit too screechy and small" into "holy hell, this is exactly what I want".
So true about the Jake Jackson mixes!!
 
Well people, fellow composers! I've been reading all your posts and the ongoing convos with great interest!

I thought I'd just inform you all that I have actually decided to plumb for the Chamber Strings version of Spitfires SSO bundle. Reason being they sound more intimate and seem to be more physically playable dynamically. At the same time Chamber Strings can be made to sound much more symphonic with various techniques if needed. One can't reduce Symphonic strings to more intimate string sections- you're stuck with 16 violins! Also Chamber has a lot of legato patches which the Symphonic version is rather lacking. And as far as the 'baked in" thing is concerned, as there are less instruments being played the ambience is slightly less pronounced than in the Symphonic Strings library. This is not to say Symphonic Strings is redundant: they are fantastic for that full on wide symphonic sound- I get that completely! It's just not what I'm personally after for my base orchestral pallet most of the time.

So after a lot of listening this week I've come to the conclusion that generally I don't think Spitfire has over-cooked the room ambience in their samples and in fact, as many agree, the Air Lyndhurst hall is arguably an intrinsic part of the vibe of the Spitfire sound. One either likes how they sound or not! Further more my worries about them not being able to blend with other sounds in the mix because of the baked in ambience have abated somewhat if only because of my choice to go for the Chamber version!

One has to remember in all of this that orchestral libraries are still only getting closer to replacing real live playing orchestras and that at the moment a lot of these libraries are still only used to mock up rather than seeing them ending up on the finished productions... at least on the bigger film scores.
 
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