Review: TIME Macro by Orchestral Tools

Hello all! I’m back, and as promised, today we’re going to take a look at Orchestral Tools’ TIME Macro. This is a fairly recent collection, and falls under the category of additional colors, or textures, to enhance and add nuance and realism to your tracks. This is a fairly non-traditional and unique offering, as opposed to a “bread and butter” set of standard articulations. Instead, this collection focuses on movement and swells, unique textures and timbres, and subtle sound ‘palettes’ that may not be possible to achieve using your standard orchestral libraries. These kinds of products are right up my alley, as I do enjoy having this kind of motion or movement embedded into the performance itself, so I can just open the patch and instantly play, without having to fuss around with CC01 modulation. The library retails for €349 , or approximately $399.

TIME is a recent collection of textures released by Orchestral Tools.

This library is categorized into Multis and Single Instruments, and then into Combined and Individual Sections. By nature, the sound is very atmospheric, textured, and overall amazing. I can’t help but get a major Spitfire Audio vibe here, as not only are some of these patches extremely similar to what’s offered in Spitfire’s Orchestral Swarm, but a lot of them seem to really revel in the softer dynamics, and instantly remind me of some of the sounds from Albion V: Tundra (example: sul ponticello and col legno articulations). The library offers standard sustains, but where it really shines is the unique offerings, such as the playing styles mentioned previously. The Sul Ponticello strings have a more harsh and grating sound, while the Col Legno are very soft and airy. A personal favorite of the String articulations was the “Sustain 5th Drops” and the “Trem Bursts”. These capture details and colors in the actual performance by the players, so it’s very natural, and something you would not be able to properly recreate with standard articulations. Sounds like these can instantly add realism, nuance, and atmosphere to any track you could think of.

This library does focus primarily on long notes as opposed to short or dotted notes, although there are some of the latter. I found the Woodwinds Combined and Individual sections to be my favorites. I just love the magical sound of woodwind instruments playing at soft dynamics, and this library absolutely nails it. Every articulation here sounds very ethereal and magical, and would work wonders at building atmosphere or enhancing the colors in a fantasy styled composition. The Individual Woodwind Sections (High and Low) offer an “Airy Sustain” patch which sounds especially beautiful and haunting.

Managing articulations is a breeze

The three main patches in the combined sections are Strings, Woodwinds, and Choir. Having the addition of a choir here is very nice, and while it’s not comprehensive as far as features, it absolutely gets the job done and offers some wonderful sounds.

In the Individual Sections we have the Strings, Woods, and Choir, split into High and Low (or Male and Female for the choir), and this is where we also find the Brass articulations (which features Sustains and long marcato as well as the familiar textures), as well as “Harps and Vibes”, “Double Reeds”. The “Harps and Vibes” patch is very beautiful and delicate and a personal favorite.

The “Altered Time” sounds are breathtaking.

There is a section called “Altered Time”, which plays around with reversing the samples and other time based experimentation, and it contains some of the most amazing sounds of the entire library. It’s exciting opening up each new patch and having a small idea of what it will contain based on the name, but it always is surprising and utterly beautiful when you strike the keys. The “Pendulum Winds” patch sounds almost like an organ in places, as the instruments play and swell in reverse and create a purely magical pad-type sound. Think of these as some sort of orchestral synth, as the sounds are very pad-like but incredibly organic, full, and rich. For owners of the library, make sure you experiment with each and every sound included in “Altered Time”, as they truly are magnificent.

The Verdict

9.5/10

This library is truly a unique and beautiful offering from Orchestral Tools. It isn’t cheap, at $399, and be advised it does not contain legatos, although it does contain all the sustains and motion/performance based textures you might possibly need. Alternatively, there is Orchestral Swarm from Spitfire Audio, which has some VERY similar sounds, although Orchestral Swarm seems to offer more in terms of dotted note articulations, and does not include a choir or any sound design style presets (like the Altered Time section), but it does retail for quite a bit less. If you are in the market for unique and atmospheric orchestral colors, or simply want a product that captures more of the player’s performance in the samples, than you really can not go wrong with TIME Macro. I use it very frequently to spice up soft/intimate tracks, just make sure you have the standard articulations covered before you purchase, as this library is more for additional and unique textures.

PROS+

+Amazing and unique sounds

+Beautiful and haunting textures

+Altered Time patches are breathtaking

CONS-

-A tad bit pricey

-No standard legatos, which would be nice, as you could do an entire track with this one library alone.

Review : 8Dio Century Brass Ensemble

Today we’re going dig into 8Dio’s Century Brass ensemble library and offer some honest opinions and thoughts about it. This full version Kontakt library was released at the end of last year, continuing their Century Series of orchestral instruments, which at that point only contained Century Harps (as of posting it now has Solo Brass, Strings, Sordino Strings, and Ostinato Strings as well).

I was very attracted to a hearty discount of 40%, which they offered last year during a store-wide sale, and I had been searching for Kontakt libraries to gradually replace East West’s Hollywood Orchestra series, as Kontakt consistently provided me with better performance and ease of use than the Play sampling engine which is used by East West. I was really impressed by the demos of their Century Series. It seemed to offer an incredibly detailed sound, with an astonishing level of realism, versatility, and playability. They provided free “Try-Packs” of some of the patches available as well, and I was very impressed with the realism of the legato scripting in the Try-Pack for the 6 Horn ensemble.

The GUI/Interface

The Century Series interface is simple and clean.

Century Brass is a library that does not register in Native Access, therefor you have to go to the file browser in Kontakt and load it up manually. I’m generally not a fan of this approach, and it honestly confuses me, as 8dio is a major player in this business and can easily afford the fee to Native Instruments to enable their libraries to be loaded up in the library panel.

Upon loading, however, I was fairly pleased with the simplicity of the interface (some might find it a bit bland), providing easy access to all the controls and mic positions. What really impressed me most is the way articulations and keyswitches are handled, allowing you to load up to TEN articulations in any order, and assign them to the keyswitch of your choosing. This seemed like a really nice way to sort of customize and tailor the library to the playing style of each user.

As for the articulations, there are an impressive amount here, including mutes, rips, crescendos, loure, flutter tongue, and one of the main selling points, according to their marketing, the Arcs.

Century Brass Ensemble offer’s a very large selection of articulations.

The Sound

When researching this library I was confused about this term “Arcs” being thrown around all the time, but it’s just an articulation featuring the players performing a dynamic swell, starting at the lowest dynamics possible and naturally rising up to full velocity, and then slowly tapering back down. To me, I just call them “swells” when I am describing them to someone else. They really are quite spectacular to play around with, and immediately I found myself using this articulation in every single track. It adds another level of realism, instead of just controlling dynamics with the mod wheel or CC automation, having these dynamic changes already taken care of in the actual performance really is something special to have in any composers arsenal.

The overall sounds of the instruments here are spectacular, captured in pristine detail and capable of performing in a truly impressive dynamic range. Everything is recorded centered, so you’ll have to manually pan to simulate a natural orchestral seating position. From the name of the library and the imagery of the marketing, it does feel they are catering this towards a more traditional composer, maybe even to classical and classic film styles, and the library really performs beautifully in the soft and mellow ranges. However I was also thoroughly impressed with the ability to really crank it all the way up to ff, and get an incredible amount of growl, heat, and a bold, majestic sound. This could easily be used as the only brass library to compose a modern epic or trailer track as well, I have no doubt about that.

The default mic position is a mixed mic, and it offers a lot of closeness and detail while maintaining the width and space of a further mic. I found the default mix to sometimes be a bit too close, however, especially for the horns. For the 6 Horns patch, which is spectacular, I found it really sounded best with only the Decca mic enabled. There was just something different about the default mix, which is not a bad thing, just not what my ears were used to.

The trombones give an amazing amount of growl in the higher dynamics, yet still warm in the softer dynamic ranges. I found the short trombone notes to be really fun to play with and wonderfully brassy, while the trumpets were bright and natural especially in the higher register.

A Few Quirks…

I did find there to be a lot of articulations that may not be necessary and some unusual choices as well, such as a “speed” knob to control the quickness of the legato transitions and how fast the arcs played. I found this really odd for the crescendos and arcs to be controlled by a knob with no numerical value, instead of syncing to the tempo of the DAW, and found it quite cumbersome to have to tweak the speed knob over and over until it matched the tempo of the track I was working on (not to mention re-adjusting for tempo changes, etc)..

While for the most part the legato patches sounded amazing when I first heard them, the more time I spent with the library, I did notice some annoyances (from minor to quite major) and bugs here and there. The legato transition volume sometimes seemed inconsistent, and adjusting the “Legato Volume” knob did absolutely nothing. It seems sometimes the legato transition volume is affected by the velocity at which you play the key, but sometimes I would be playing a very soft horn melody, yet each time I changed to a new note, the volume of the legato transitions was wildly inconsistent with the volume of the sustained notes I was playing. This honestly made some tracks unusable, as I would listen to them later through headphones and notice that the transitions sounded completely off and unnatural. There’s also an issue with the legato patch triggering the last note that was played instead of only playing the note I want it to play (it will play the wrong note for a split second before jumping back to the correct note), which again rendered this library unusable for a certain project I was working on. I also noticed some inconsistencies in timbre/volume across the full range of a single instrument (it was rare, but you can tell some notes have a different timbre, as if playing that note triggered a different mic mix as opposed to the one I had selected.)

I did email 8Dio support about these issues, and they responded saying they were aware of the issues and they would be fixed in an upcoming update, so I have no complaints about support as they got back to me immediately and said they are working on a solution. I also noticed Colin O’Malley of 8Dio has posted on a VI-Control forum back in March 2018 promising they are working on a free update for this library to offer new mixing options including pre-panned mixes, etc. I was a bit worried after I read users feeling that 8dio sometimes abandoned their libraries instead of releasing updates and fixes, but it seems if that was ever true, they are doing much more as a company to listen and stay engaged and offer updates to their customers.

The Verdict-

8.5/10

PROS+

+Amazing detail and realism in soft AND loud dynamics.

+Vast Amount of Articulations, including unique and highly playable arcs.

+Intuitive GUI with ability to customize key switches and load up to 10 articulations, all in one NKI file.

CONS-

-Some strange choices such as the speed knob, only one length of marcatos.

-A few bugs and inconsistencies really bring down the usability sometimes, especially with the otherwise incredible legato patches.

TL;DR: Century Brass is a very good library, but it’s note quite achieved greatness yet. The wealth of articulations and versatility, as well as the realism and detail captured in the recordings, are some of the highlights of Century Brass. These standout features are slightly marred by inconsistencies and bugs, but I have high hopes they will address these issues in the upcoming 2.0 update!

*(In the future I will update this review and possibly adjust the final score to included the 2.0 updates)

Review - Spitfire Albion ONE. (A great starter/all-in-one orchestral library)

Hello everyone! I have so many reviews piling up that I need to get through, so expect to see a lot more in the coming weeks/months. Today let’s review one of the most used and recommended “all-in-one” orchestral libraries, Spitfire’s Albion ONE.

Albion ONE is the 10th anniversary re-release of their original Albion library.

If you ever search around sampling/virtual instrument forums, this library is guaranteed to come up all over the place, constantly being recommended to beginners for it’s all inclusive approach, and for a good reason. This library has everything you need to write an orchestral track, saving time and hassle by having large sections that are easy to pick up and play instantly. Albion One combines the separate string instruments into one full-section patch, and the brass is split into Low, Mid, and High sections, while the woodwinds are split into High and Low. Each patch will load the most used articulations, including shorts (spiccato, staccato, pizzicato, etc) and longs (sustains), with additional legato patches for strings, woods, and brass. Large sections like this are fantastic for beginners and for those on tight deadlines, and helps in keeping the resource consumption to a minimum while providing big sound palletes to instantly play with.

The GUI.

This product really succeeds at being instantly usable right out of the box, and everything is recorded quite wet in their acclaimed Air Studios. It is great for beginners or those who aren’t full time composers and don’t want to dive to deep into orchestral writing and just need say, small string or brass sections in the background of a symphonic metal song or some other genre. The sound is overall quite good, even if the hall/reverb is baked in (which is a plus for some!). Instruments are all recorded centered, lacking the ability to properly pan instruments as they are combined into larger sections. I’ve also noticed all Spitfire libraries are VERY quiet when you load them up. I always have to turn them up +6.0 db to get them to match the rest of my orchestral samples, which isn’t a problem, just an observation worth noting.

The things I absolutely love about this library: The staccato and spicatto articulations are phenomenal! The short strings are an all time favorite and for a large ensemble have yet to be beat in my opinion. They sound absolutely impeccable and truly thunderous in the lower ranges, yet still provide a great amount of detail. Load this patch up for instant inspiration and endless hours of fun just playing on the keys. The low brass is also a favorite of mine, and provides an amazing amount of brassy bite and grit for intense action sequences (especially the “nasty” articulation). The Brunel Loops are subtle and very unique, providing wonderful textures of found percussive sounds and warped and processed to create clockwork style percussive loops, and the Darwin Percussion ensembles provided are also top notch and fill out the loud intense end of the percussion spectrum. I have yet to find such hard hitting drums in the lower register. The legato strings patches are also surprisingly good, giving off a rich, soaring Hollywood vibe. Think John William’s ET finale.

Some small quibbles keep this from being a perfect collection. Albion One advertises itself as “Epic Composer Tools” and I honestly have to somewhat disagree with this. Some of the sounds are incredible and are used in every single one of my compositions, but this library tops out fairly early in terms of dynamics, and is quite lacking in the horn section of the brass, which in my opinion is absolutely one of the most important section for epic music. I do realize you won’t get JUST the horn section as it’s combined into mid brass or high brass, but the mid brass especially is radically lacking bite and intensity in the sustains. The long strings are also overly synthetic and are rarely used for me, but they get the job done. Overall the middle ranges in this library are a bit muddy and lacking clarity to my ears, and I mostly use this for the lower end of the spectrum. I find this library has a strange dynamic range, as it’s not quite loud and bold enough for over the top epic, but also provides inconsistencies across the dynamic ranges, not providing a smooth enough transition from soft to (semi)loud.

I can absolutely see why this is such highly recommended for beginners, as it offers a very large amount of content and you get a lot of bang for your buck. The amazing and unmatched quality of some of the patches are sadly contrasted by synthetic string sustains and an overly muddy middle range. I still frequently use this as a base for writing a lot of my action oriented pieces, and then layering more detailed sections on top. It is one I will probably always keep on my system for the short strings and low brass patches alone, even if it doesn’t cover all my needs and provide enough detail for what I write these days.

The Verdict : 9.0/10

Pros

+ Unbeatable Low Brass and Short Strings.

+Large amount of content for the price (Orchestra, Synths, Percussion, and Loops)

+Hard Hitting Percussion could be the only ones you need.

+Brunel Loops and Stephenson’s Steam Band synths are wonderful and unique.

+ Perfect way to build a foundation for a more detailed piece, or for sketching.

Cons

- Not for detailed writing with the included patches, no solo instruments or sections.

- Sometimes overly muddy sound, especially in middle range (especially long brass) is lacking clarity and bite.

- Doesn’t cover enough of a dynamic range to be truly epic or for subtle/delicate passages.

- Lacking a piano of any kind which would round out the package quite well.

Let's Listen - PATHS I AND II from Audiomodern

This week I wanted to showcase the sounds available from PATHS I and II from Audiomodern. These are available as a discount bundle for $19.99 for a limited time. 

These are relatively small libraries made up of a number of preset "kits", each kit is synced to a particular BPM so it will not sync with your DAW's tempo. The kits are made for providing quick and instant percussion and atmosphere loops. It's geared towards modern EDM and Cinematic styles. Each kit is made up of 6 layers which can each be played individually. It's very cool sounding, however it's fairly limited and will be easily recognizable to those familiar with it. It will be very useful for loading up instant percussive soundscapes for producers and composers on tight deadlines.

Here is a very quick and no-nonsense rundown of every single preset sound available in Audiomodern's PATHS I