Music Composers Unite!
Can anyone comment on this? I currently have Vienna Special Edition 1, plus GPO5, EWSO Gold and Cinematic Strings2. Using Cakewalk for my DAW (formerly Sonar). Would this be worth my while? Is the Epic Orchestra useful?
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I’ll be following this in case others more experienced reply.
I researched a bit before settling on VSL with standard Ensemble player and individual collections. Epic Orch demos put me off. They sounded like routine soundtrack orchestrations about which there was nothing subtle. Epic Orchestra seems to bulk instruments together with just a couple of solos which may be more suited to someone needing quick and simple scoring rather than more detailed stuff.
That may be what you want and fine. An associate of mine, a composer who’s done a stint in Hollywood, spoke of the pressures they work under so it’s inevitable - but for personal work where someone wants detailed control over instruments it probably won’t work.
I’ll be looking at Pro 7 soon I suspect. It offers a few things the Vanilla Ensemble doesn’t. Although I don’t anticipate multiple computers running DAW/Sampling VSTs just yet it’ll be there if I need it. But there are things the Pro Ensembles have like polyphonic legato/portamento in the strings, integrated FX etc.
I haven’t got Eastwest. It was on the list but Vienna won out. That doesn’t mean I thought it was second rate, just that VSL was closer to what I wanted. (For example, EW doesn’t have solo violas or basses, and various exotics that I happen to like!) For Cinematic-styled work, VSL’s Appassionata Strings are in tight competition with Hollywood Strings….with VSL losing out on price.
So apologies for chipping in without offering much help.
Cheers.
That's certainly a good idea. If you have the Special Edition 1 you're already familiar with VSL - boy, did it give me a few headaches at the outset?! So if you wanted to go with Pro 7 at least you get Epic Orchestra free! Could be useful for quick mock-ups.
Good luck finding an answer on that Micheal. There are lots of guys on the VI forum with multiple libraries who would probably comment on that. I'm not familiar enough with these to make an educated comment.
It is getting so that they are all pretty good and depending on the material it can be tough to tell the difference. What's not to like about Cakewalk? A free DAW that once costed 599.00 and has any capability most would ever want of need :)
Good luck finding an answer on that Micheal. There are lots of guys on the VI forum with multiple libraries who would probably comment on that. I'm not familiar enough with these to make an educated comment.
It is getting so that they are all pretty good and depending on the material it can be tough to tell the difference. What's not to like about Cakewalk? A free DAW that once costed 599.00 and has any capability most would ever want of need :)
Hi All
I purchased VE Pro 7 and got Epic orchestra for free (the free version is the same as the purchasable version - I think if you are going to spend €105 on EO you would be as well to pay the extra €40 for VE Pro). I downloaded it and had a go at using it on my current working composition for piano and orchestra. I'm just about finished it using Dorico & noteperformer and my plan is to take it into VSL SE to finish it of. I will them complete it in Cubase Pro.
I decided to take a detour and see if i could make use of EO. Here's what my experience is.
First up, EO uses 75gb of samples from the Synchron libraries - sounds like a lot and you do get some pretty stuff but in my opinion it's not much use. You do get a "lite" version of the appassioanta violins and chamber violins but not much more. The Wagner tubas sound ok as does the solo oboe d'armoure plus there are one or two other baubles, but no separate woods section and what you do get is limited to very few articulations.
I prefer to work from a notation program and I find EO (and the Synchron approach in general) very limiting and not much fun. I can get a much better sound from SE 1 and MIRx than I than from EO - plus I can do a whole lot more. The only downside with VSL SE in Dorico is that I'm having to create my own expression maps for each instrument - very time consuming.
The main problem i find with EO (and by extension other libraries like it, i.e €100 price point) is that there is no access to the individual string (and other) sections - the whole string family is mapped across the whole keyboard which I find pretty much unusable.
While I don't think it would be of any use to the "serious" composer you can quickly put together some impressive phrases (the demo sound files are impressive), but not much more than that.
I would say that it would be better to buy SE 1 than EO but of course it's more expensive, plus you would probably want VI Pro and a couple of the MIRx sound stages.
So, I found that I couldn't use it effectively in what I currently working on which uses all four string section plus woods and brass. I can get much better results with VSL SE 1, VI Pro, VE/VE Pro & MIRx.
But that's not to say that it would not work perfectly well for you!
Colin
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