Review - COSMOS by Impact Soundworks

Check the video at the bottom for a walkthru of the sounds included!!

Cosmos is a fairly new Atmospheric library from Impact Soundworks. I feel that as a company, Impact Soundworks’ products offer an amazing bang for your buck. I own a number of their libraries, and always love the simplicity and focus, and the prices are some of the best you can get, while still providing a vast amount of fantastic content. Needless to say, I was excited when I heard the demos of Cosmos…beautiful atmospheres and deep rhythmic pulses… what’s not to love?! (Granted, I’m a sucker for these types of sounds in the first place…)

I made my purchase and downloaded the product in a 4 part .rar archive. Delivery of the product and installation was quick and easy.

The interface for Cosmos is fantastic. I love products that are focused and simple to use. Too often, I feel libraries go after the all-inclusive approach, and try to do everything. I dislike this for a couple reasons: One, they provide so much content it can be utterly overwhelming and too often an absolute pain to navigate and find the right sounds. Secondly, the price of these libraries can be utterly ridiculous, easily clearing the $500 dollar mark. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Cinemorphx from SampleLogic…guilty on both accounts)

Simple, easy to use, and a wonderful image of a nebula.

The library comes with two main instruments - Ambiences and Phrases. I loaded up the ambiences first. There is an option to scroll through the sound sources on the left side of the GUI. In the middle is a step sequencer, and underneath are filter controls, then in the bottom left corner are ADSR controls.

The ambiences are quite amazing. They are very evocative and inspiring, often evolving over time, with subtle pitch changes or harmonics coming into play. They seem to be either very warm and beautiful, or a bit more abrasive and tense, but always very spacey. There are two categories of sound sources provided: Tonal and Atonal. Naturally, the atonal sound sources are where things can get more ominous and capable of building some real tension. While they are all very evocative of outer space, they are also quite versatile. I did notice that most of these will sound best for underscoring or building an atmosphere, not so much for very melodic chords. I say this because many of them have some sort of subtle melody, harmonics, slight pitch modulation, etc, already built in as you hold one note. All in all, the ambiences in this library are incredible.

Navigating the phrases is a breeze thanks to the tagged categories and instant sound previews.

The second instrument provided is phrases. These come in Arps, Pulses, and Gates. Navigating through the content here is incredibly simple and intuitive, providing tags for each type of sound, etc, and also featuring an option that previews each sound before you even load it up. This is incredibly helpful and I wish more libraries would organize their files this way. The arps range from cinematic to EDM flavors, and the notes in each arpeggio is pre-determined. There are keyswitches you can load up multiple phrases at once and switch between them on the fly. I preferred the sounds of the Pulses and Gates, but that is just my own personal preference based on the style of music I compose. The pulses and gates can be soft and beautiful, or aggressive and dark, and all sound just phenomenal, and instantly useable in a wide variety of genres. I encourage playing with the resonance and cutoff for these, as they can really morph from something dark and subtle to a bright and edgy sound.

Products like this are often some of my favorite (including another from Impact Soundworks called Sonic Forest) and I end up using them MUCH more than the bigger, more expensive and wide ranging libraries. . They’re fairly small, extremely focused, and provide amazing sounds with just enough controls to be tweakable, yet not overwhelming. Not to mention, the incredibly low price you pay for such amazing content. I can highly recommend Cosmos not only for media composers like myself, but for electronic music producers and more.

The Verdict-

9.25/10

Pros+

+ Amazing sounds, evocative and inspiring.

+ Browsing through the phrases is quick and intuitive with tags and sound previews.

+ Amazing price for the amount of content.

+ Simple, focused library that can really shine and deliver the outer-space inspired sounds.

+ Perfect amount of content and controls, easy to get into and tweakable, yet never overwhelming and confusing.

Cons-

- Arps follow pre-determined notes, some were a bit harsh/EDM for my personal tastes.

- Ambiences generally don’t allow playing chords, more of a one note pad due to evolving nature of the sounds.

Cosmos is selling for $49.00. Check it out here!

Review - Hexeract by Auddict

Before I dive in and start on my official review of Hexeract, the synthesizer by Auddict, I am going to simply share some of my experience with it so far. If any of you have been following this space, you may know I posted a “first look” article about it, and a couple YouTube videos walking through all the presets and samples and offering some impressions. I’ll try to be as professional as I can here, but I’ll warn you up front, not much about my experience with this product has been positive.

Hexeract was released around Black Friday 2017, and it was absolutely rushed. It was very hyped up in forums, marketing, and on the official website. It promised a “new generation of synthesis” and told us wonderful claims such as:
“Hexeract is a limitlessly powerful software synth, which has vastly expanded the potential musical palette for all artists. Create sounds with Hexeract that you never before believed possible, with the resources and functions to create, indefinitely and infinitely.”

Now, I understand all companies must fuel the hype train and market themselves, but these are very bold claims, however I was genuinely excited about it, and come on, the interface and design just looks awesome. I purchased this product shortly after it released and, sadly, immediately ran into problems. This is purely my experience but I have read about many, many users reporting similar experiences.

My DAW of choice is FL Studio, and Hexeract simply didn’t work with FL Studio initially. Any time I changed the tempo of a project, it crashed. I ran into countless error messages and crashes, the magnitude of which I’ve quite honestly never experienced with any other product. I would get it to load up initially, and play around with the sounds, some of which were very cool, but ultimately it would crash, or upon loading the project again after saving and exiting, I would run into multiple error messages and the entire project wouldn’t load.

I contacted support, heard nothing for a while, contacted again and they replied after about a week. I got a reply not from the official support email, but my initial email had been apparently forwarded to the developer of the product. After explaining what happened, he told me he would take a look at it. A couple weeks went by and I sent some follow up emails which seem to go ignored, so I took to the KVR forums to kind of vent a bit on a thread about the product, and see if anyone had similar issues. I stated the product was simply unusable and wished I could just get a refund, honestly not thinking anyone from the company would read it. I got an email the next day, apologizing for the wait, and offering a refund if the problem didn’t get fixed. I felt better after that. He eventually sent me a hotfix that fixed the issue. Now I could finally test out the product!

THE REVIEW

This thing looks freaking amazing…

When you load up Hexeract, it really is quite beautiful to look at. I love the design, the color scheme, everything about it visually hits all the marks. Initially there were only two banks of presets, but the have recently released an update to version 1.1.0, so I figured now was as good a time as any to revisit this product and write my in depth review.

The core of this product consists of three oscillators, which allow you to load up samples as well as standard synth waveforms. I found this to be quite interesting and unique, and kind of exciting to explore the potential sounds you can create with that. Knowing that Auddict is a fairly established and well regarded developer of orchestral samples for Kontakt, I was expecting some great quality samples to be included with this product.

I began by scrolling through the presets, checking them out one by one. They come organized in to different categories, which vary depending on which preset bank you are currently using, For instance, in preset bank 1, you have Bass, Bass Sequences, Bursts and Blares (similar to the beloved Hollywood trailer “Inception” sound, The Braam.), Ensembles (orchestral in nature, with some added synthesis), Hits/Kicks/Etc, Leads, Pads, One Note Pads, Sequences, Shorts, and Tailored Instruments. My personal favorites were the Bass Sequences, One Note Pads, and some of the Sequences out of the second preset bank. The sounds were spacey, yet mostly organic in nature. For the most part, the presets where movement or rhythm was involved were where this product really shined. The kind of sounds that you can find on other synths, like leads, pads, etc, were simply underwhelming. There was nothing cutting edge or groundbreaking about any of these sounds, largely sounding worse than what I could achieve with any of the soft synths I own.

While some of the presets are quite good, the quality of the samples is fairly bad overall. It all sounds very midi. This is especially disappointing as Auddict has very good orchestral libraries, and it would be nice to have some included here. Now I know this product’s focus is synthesis, but it’s simply another marketing boast that failed to live up to expectations.

I’m not kidding, this happened as I was writing the review and browsing presets.

Most concerning were the performance issues and overall flakiness and instability of the engine. Even after the 1.1.0 patch and update, I continued to run into quite a few issues. Sometimes when loading a preset and testing it on various keys in different ranges, the sound just cut out, and then the plugin would output nothing but silence no matter which preset you loaded. It had to be deleted from the project and loaded again, which would sometimes simply result in a crash. When this happens a few times, it get’s insanely frustrating. Note, this happens even with the 1.1.0 update. I also get pops and clicks, and harsh glitchy noises sometimes, as if trying to load a corrupted sample. (To be sure, I have uninstalled and reinstalled this plugin and re downloaded all content a few times.) I noticed on my previous machine, that loading around 6 instances of Hexeract caused some truly insane lag and slowdown of my DAW. Now that I have a more powerful machine, and the update promises better CPU utilization, I of course wanted to test this out. I have a project with around 15 instances of Hexeract, and during a part where about 10 are playing at once, my system again experiences the worst slowdown and lag I have ever witnessed. Note: I have a Core i7 8700k at 3.7 ghz, and 64 GB of RAM. This kind of performance is laughable and simply inexcusable.

I really held off on writing this review for many months, as I am an understanding person and I really just wanted to believe in this product and have faith the company will come through and deliver on all the promises. I realize however, that by being a reviewer of products, I would be doing a disservice to everyone if I was not completely honest in my review. Auddict released an unfinished and broken product, there simply is no other way to put it. While I commend them for trying, quite frankly they failed, and I believe they are in over their heads, resulting in lack of support and long delays in getting back to customers, if they get back at all.

While some of the presets sound awesome, there’s nothing to really LOVE here. There’s nothing this product does I can’t do MUCH better with any soft synth or a vast number of better sounding (and consistently stable) Kontakt libraries. More importantly than how it sounds, is how awful the performance continues to be even after a big patch/update. Don’t expect to get any sort of usable performance with more than a few instances loaded, whereas in any other project I can load 30-60 instances of Kontakt with absolutely no hiccups.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was really excited about this product, and it was massively hyped as groundbreaking and something that could do cinematic synthesis like no other. I can honestly tell you, in all my years of producing and composing music, I honestly have never been more disappointed in a product. I think it comes down to this : Auddict over hyped, over promised, and rushed the release of this to coincide with Black Friday 2017. The released a buggy, unusable mess, and almost a year later, and many, many dissatisfied customers chiming in on forums all over the internet, they finally released an update and new presets and promised to fix the issues. Mind you, the dev emailed me a hotfix for users of FL Studio back in June. There was NEVER an official release of this hotfix. I have had at least three FL Studio users see my videos or reviews and ask me for the hotfix, because they said they contacted support and hear nothing. I gave them all the fix that was shared with me, but honestly consider this: these users got better support from a random guy on the internet than they got from the actual company who released the product.

I don’t even care if the new presets offer the most mind blowing sounds imaginable. One thing remains : it still seems to have serious bugs and performance issues and I simply can’t consider this a reliable product at this time. I hope it continues to improve, but as for the recent patch, it was simply too little too late.

If you enjoy stuff like this, you’ll love Hexeract.

The Verdict-

4.5/10

Pros+

+Visually stunning

+Some great rhythmic presets, pads. Presets with rhythmic tendencies or evolving sounds really shine.

Cons-

-It’s simply a broken product. Bugs, Crashes, Poor Performance, even after waiting almost a year for a patch.

-Sub-par sample quality.

-Very Limited Amount of presets compared to other synths.

-Does nothing new for me, despite all the claims and hype.

TL;DR: Buy Synthmaster or Serum Instead, or INVEST in some trusted kontakt libraries from output, Heavyocity, etc. You’ll thank me later.

Review: 8Dio Legion Series - 66 Tubas

You guys asked for it, so here it is! My review of 8Dio’s newest addition to it’s Legion Series , 66 Tubas. I’ve been on a bit of a hunt for some insane low brass ensembles, so this came at the perfect time for me. I purchased at the intro price so I believe I paid around $138 dollars. Currently it retails for $248 dollars here at the 8dio website.

So, this one is fairly self explanatory. It’s 66 freaking people each playing a tuba in one giant room. It sounds HUGE, deep, brassy, a bit farty, and they threw in a bunch of sound design presets as well.

Obviously, this is not the kind of library for the purists out there, as you’ll never be able to reproduce these sounds with a traditional orchestra. I feel it really embraces the Hans Zimmer approach to sampling, which is a mindset of pushing the boundaries, and usually “bigger is better”.

The GUI

The interface is fairly straightforward, easy on the eye, and provides the most needed controls all laid out right underneath the main articulations. The “Chaos” button randomly sets all the parameters and is appropriately named. Sometimes it can be fun to see what you get here. This library is pretty solid for sound design as well, especially for drones. The “Stack” button allows you to stack multiple articulations at once, and can definitely come in handy. It’s also nice to have an option to reverse each sample right there in the GUI. This library loads in the quick-load section or in the file browser, and has separate folders for main and spot mics, each including a DFD (Direct from Disk) folder, two time machine folders, and a separate section just for the sound-design presets.

The Sound

66 Tubas is humongous, that goes without saying. What I did notice immediately, is that the first patch that loads from the sustains section is very quiet (playing at a gentle PP), and you’ll notice that when playing through the patches, some of them are surprisingly mellow. This library sounds incredible in the range of C3 all the way up to a surprisingly high C5. I find that going lower than G2, the notes on their own don’t really hold up, as they are so deep sometimes it’s even hard to tell what note is playing. However, when you layer this low end with the higher notes, or with a standard trombone or horn library, the result is impressively massive. This library is generally also not a “smack-you-in-the-face” type of brass sound. It is a very wide, thick, and slow burning type of sound, in my opinion. It’s not as brassy as a trombone ensemble, and the sound isn’t quite up front at all, but more subtle and provides a nice growl at the higher dynamics. I believe most of this is due to the amount of players here, and I honestly think they did go a bit overboard with the amount of players and it cost them in terms of providing a focused sound. The sound can become very muddy, and there really is no close mic sound, and there also is not much of a difference between the various mix mixes, besides the trailer mix (which was my preferred mix). The trailer mix is more up front and provides a nice balance.

This library goes up to a surprisingly high register, and can be transposed even higher with the pitch selection in Kontakt. I found the higher notes to be nice when layering, but by themselves, I noticed a bit of phasing, and some overall quirks that made them unusable in an exposed setting. Like I mentioned previously, there is also a muddy quality to the recordings overall, simply from having so many players in the same room, I believe. This is a very niche library and truly provides a sound you absolutely cannot get anywhere else, and I give 8dio serious props for that. I can definitely see it being used for modern epic tracks and trailer work, but anything that requires a more focused sound would best stick to more traditional ensemble sizes. In terms of being used in my own work, I see it having definite potential as a layering tool, but not much else.

The Verdict-

7.25/10

Pros+

+MASSIVE, thick Sound

+Highly unique product that pushes the boundaries, you will not find a library like this anywhere else right now.

+Good for layering and providing a wide, thick low end.

Cons-

-Frequently too big for it’s own good. (Muddy sound, lack of focus)

-Notes in extreme low register are hard to make out

-Notes in higher register have strange phasing issues

-Inconsistencies in Legato sustain patches

Here’s a patch walkthru and pointing out some of the complaints I mentioned above.

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.

Review - New Spitfire Solo Strings

***UPDATE 10/11/2018 :
Spitfire has released an update for this library, which addresses one of my main disappointments with this library: the lack of an all-encompassing and expressive performance patch, ie Joshua Bell Violin by Embertone. This update has added exactly that! A Solo Violin (Virtuoso) Total Performance Patch. I must admit, I was not expecting them to add this, but it’s quite amazing and performs VERY well. I feel this now fills the gap that was missing between having a truly intuitive, deeply expressive, and instantly playable solo string instrument and having a library that does everything else well. They have also fixed the issue with the batch re-save that I mentioned earlier. Overall, I am very pleasantly surprised with this update, and I feel it’s only fair to update my final score for this library now that it has been significantly improved.

UPdated score (with Violin Virtuoso Total Performance patch)

9.25/10

Original review is as follows:

Hello all! Today we are taking a look at a new solo string library from the folks at Spitfire Audio.

The original Spitfire Solo Strings was their first sample library ever, and the release of an all new Solo String library from Spitfire has been long awaited. I owned the original Solo Strings and got a discount upon purchasing the NEW Solo Strings, and they cost me $189 instead of $399. 

This library loads up through Native Access so it has it's own panel in the Library Tab of Kontakt, which is a welcome addition.

This library features all new players and recordings from the original, as well as an updated GUI. I was expecting a MASSIVE step forward in terms of sound, and more importantly, instant playability. I must admit that, while delivering on the quality of the recordings and providing many useful and great sounds, in the end they did not live up to expectation in regards to playability.

The library has all inclusive patches for three separate Violins (Virtuoso, 1st Desk, and Progressive), Viola, Cello, and Bass. For more detailed info about the different types of violin patches than I could ever give in my quick review, see the official page here.

I feel in every Spitfire collection I own, the short notes always stand out as being spectacular, while the longs and legato leave quite a bit to be desired. I found this library to continue this tradition. The shorts are always crisp, tight, and highly detailed and realistic. I also thoroughly enjoy some of the new articulations, like the Long Flautando and Long and Short Harmonics. I feel this library nails the articulations that are unique and provide some very interesting textures and timbres to add to your existing orchestral palette. 

I found the standard long notes in the main NKI files to be quite lacking. It takes a lot of time and MIDI programming to get these to sound good in my opinion. With so many libraries simply sounding incredible from the first note "right out of the box", this was quite disappointing especially after so much hype and waiting so long since their original Solo String Library. The attack and release leave a lot to be desired and require a lot of tweaking to get these long articulations to sound realistic.

Legato GUI

Now, when it comes to instant realism and playability for Solo String libraries, in my opinion there is NOTHING more vital than a highly expressive legato patch. I was honestly quite concerned when there was less than a month until the release of these new Spitfire Solo Strings, and there was yet to be a single demo showcasing any type of legato patch. In fact, there was no such legato demo until the library had already launched. With so many incredible and expressive libraries already on the market (such as Strezov Samplings' Macabre Strings, and Embertone's Joshua Bell Violin), I was hoping they would really deliver on this aspect and take a new step in expressive realism for solo string instruments.

The legato is definitely a step up from the original Spitfire Solo Strings from a few years ago, but still, in my opinion this again takes a lot of time and effort to get to sound realistic. It does allow for faster playing between notes, which is a plus, but it still does not have enough expressiveness and instant gratification to stand against some others currently on the market. I often have to deliver tracks for clients in a matter of days or sometimes even hours, and I (and many others) simply need something that just WORKS as soon as you open it up. This is the magic of modern sampling in my opinion, those moments when I am utterly blown away at the sound coming out of my speakers, and I am thoroughly convinced I am listening to a real musician playing this instrument in front of my as opposed to samples. Sadly this does not quite deliver that "wow factor" that so many other sample libraries have managed to achieve.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This library is more of an all-compassing solo string library and probably has every articulation you could need for solo string writing in a standard or classical arrangement, but in terms of expressiveness and true emotion it cannot deliver the “wow factor” of some others on the market. For the price you do get a lot, however I don't believe I will ever use the sustained notes in any of my compositions simply because I do not enjoy the sound. The short notes are amazing, as is to be expected from Spitfire audio, but the standard sustained notes are like night and day compared to the realism of the shorts and actually sound a bit grating. I wish they would have focused more on making this instantly gratifying and easy to play straight out of the box. For the basic articulations, it definitely delivers, but for emotional and virtuoso playing, I'd simply look elsewhere. I often use the short notes and occasionally the Flautando and Harmonics to add unique textures. I prefer solo string libraries for those fluid and emotional legato lines, which this library does improve upon from the original Spitfire Solo Strings, but doesn’t stand up to what’s available on the market from other companies. There is also too many violin player patches that don’t differ enough for me to be really impressed by one over the other, I do however know these could be very useful to some composers, I just am not one of them at this time. I must admit I used to be excited about new Spitfire Audio releases, but lately I have not been a fan of their marketing and focus as a company, as they seem to release countless string libraries and fail to truly innovate, not living up to the reputation they once had as an exciting and top of the line sampling company, instead lately I find them a bit boring and pretentious in the way they market themselves, which is strictly a personal opinion and does not mean they do not produce quality products, I just fail to get truly excited when they fail to innovate like the did with the Albion series and some of their artist specific libraries and composer toolkit’s. There is also a bug preventing a Batch Resave within Kontakt with this particular library, which makes loading very long every time I open it.
 

Spitfire Audio New Solo Strings (2018)

Verdict - 8.0/10

Pros

+ Vast amount of content and playing techniques.

+ Realistic sound, providing the superior detail and quality expected from Spitfire.

+ Unique articulations you may not find elsewhere.

Cons

- Simply can’t match the emotion and expressiveness of other libraries on the market.

- Long notes have an overall sterile and bland feel.

- Three violin player patches that fail to deliver anything significantly new or exciting to make them stand out from one another.

Let's Listen - DOUBLE FEATURE! Fingerpick by Realitone and select Misfit instruments by 8Dio!

Hey all! Welcome to the Wild West themed 'Let's Listen'!

Anyone who knows me or has worked with me professionally knows I thrive on variety and having a wide and eclectic musical taste, which translates into covering a lot of ground as a composer and musician. Every month I try focusing on covering new musical ground... and once again it's time to expand! When you stop exploring and learning, life can quickly become quite.. boring. My listening focus lately has been on exploring the roots...ethnic music from all over the world (specifically China, Persia, and India, so stay tuned for more of that) and here in the USA, which brings me to today's feature!

I love the Western film/video game genre and American roots music as a whole, and have always wanted to explore more into this territory with my own music. I did a few things here and there experimenting, but my libraries were severely lacking. I know the blues well on guitar and a bit of country but wanted to have EVERYTHING... fiddle, banjo, harmonica, that epic whistle you hear in the old Clint Eastwood films (listen below to "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"... that intro whistle is unanimously associated with Westerns, and we ALL recognize it).

I really love exploring the niche instrument libraries available for Kontakt, so I set out to find something good for a decent price (I'm not going to use these on every project, so I want the BEST sound for the BEST price.) 

Do you feel lucky? Do ya, punk?! Wrong film, whatever.

8Dio Misfit Series

I settled on the Misfit series from sample giants 8Dio They are priced VERY modestly (I paid $15-$37 for each) and I was swayed by the demos and their unique sense of charm (from the official site: "8Dio's Misfit Series is a massive deep-sampled collection of over 15 different instruments – all recorded with a unique, quirky and semi-drunk feel to it."

I started with the harmonica and banjo to get a feel for the usability and quality and later returned for the fiddle and whistle (I was torn between Embertone's fantastic 'The Whistler Ensemble' and the 8Dio 'Misfit Whistle', and decided on the latter because it was exactly what I was looking for and seemed to be made simply for that purpose, opposed to a more cheery and whimsical whistle ensemble).

The interface, for the most part, is pretty darn ugly (especially the harmonica). We have an amateur and hand drawn aesthetic on display here, complete with childish scribbles on post it notes.  There is a help button that is definitely useful, if you can get through the clutter. I mean I didn't expect a futuristic and minimal interface on a series called Misfit, but it could have been done a whole lot better than this. However, taking into consideration the extremely low price points of each instrument, presentation doesn't matter nearly as much as the sound. Still, it's quite the eyesore.

Cluttered with help info... useful, but ugly and tedious.

The sound however is pretty darn good for what it's worth. I am impressed by the character they put into the samples and the different performance effects that are available. The harmonica can do straight notes and a variety of bends and trills, and I really love how it sounds. You can ever make these sound like crap and out of tune if you want (the accuracy knob displayed above purposefully makes our 'musician' blow wrong notes). This all lends well to the "quirky, drunken" nature of this Misfit instrument series. However, at this time, I don't have use for a drunken harmonica player blowing the heck out of wrong notes on an instrument that already can sound grating to the ears. 

The fiddle sounds really good, and truly nails that lazy western tone with amazing performance legato (which they call "true gelato") and they truly capture a raw, human quality to these instruments which is really fitting for the style I wanted to use it for. Do NOT expect virtuoso playing and a classical sound, as you get the exact opposite. These really nailed the gritty western sound I had been searching for. Highly recommended if you are in the market for some alternative and unique libraries for Kontakt or for anything in the Western genre. You are pretty much guaranteed to feel like Family Guy's Stewie Griffin in that episode where they move down south. I know I did!

FIngerpick by Realitone

The only thing really missing from my ensemble so far was a great acoustic guitar. I did some live performance with my acoustic guitar and Telecaster for this piece, but I am not quite as proficient in country/bluegrass as I am in other styles, and I wanted to capture the style of finger picking, which I also am not a master at! A few weeks ago, I had stumbled across something that might be able to fill this void, Fingerpick!

As you may know by now I love discount plugins and samples and frequently browse and purchase from VstBuzz and Audio Plugin Deals. The latter, besides having a weekly product with an insane discount, has a shop featuring a lot of great products. You get rewards money every time you purchase one of their deals or any product from the shop. Naturally, I have accumulated a nice amount of rewards money which can go to any purchase there, so I frequently browse through to see if anything new has caught my eye.

Fingerpick by Realitone is my new favorite acoustic guitar library. I was, as usual, impressed by the video walkthru and knew it was the missing spice I needed for my Western Ensemble. The programming here is phenomenal, most impressive is it's auto legato, which automatically performs hammer on's and slides depending on the length of the note on your DAW's midi sequencer. The sound is incredibly realistic and genuine, and absolutely nails the sound of a seasoned guitarist performing on your tracks. For $89.95, plus additional discounts with rewards money from the Audio Plugin Deals Shop, this library is an absolute steal. Of course it is not only suited for the Bluegrass/Western style I was looking for, and while I think it is best for Rock/Folk and Blues/County, it absolutely covers any genre of music that uses an acoustic guitar.

NOW! Let's hear these bad boys in action. Giddy-Up!

Let's Listen: Air Hybrid 3 Synth and Tantra (Rhythmic Processor)

Hey guys, I wanted to offer some opinions on some really great plugins for a VERY low price. I'm going to try to make this an ongoing series, offering short reviews/impressions on the plethora of sounds available at ridiculously low prices at the various audio discount websites. As I'm sure many of you can relate to, I LOVE to get new sounds and just have a field day experimenting and playing around with them, so I often take advantage of the discounted websites such as VstBuzz, Audio Plugin Deals, and Plugin Boutique (there are others, but these are the ones I have most experience with)

Earlier this week I offered my impressions on a great orchestral library, the Herring Clarinet. Today I want to cover something complete different, the ever popular electronic/hybrid sounds. I picked up the Hybrid 3 Synth by Air Music Technology (creators of integrated plugins for PRO TOOLS) for only ONE DOLLAR here at Plugin Boutique (the deal may be limited, however). I didn't buy it at first because, come on, how good can it be for one dollar? I did a little research and heard some audio demos and a few days later I bought it. For the price, this is hands down he best deal I've ever gotten on any plugin, ever.

Load it up and you have a basic interface, and if you have ever used soft synths at all, it will all be very familiar: Oscillators (up to 6), envelope options and knobs for LFO, Filter, Preset bank, effects, etc. I won't go into much depth here, because there are much more knowledgeable users on the internet with more helpful tutorials and overviews of the features. I was mostly interested in how it sounds.

I proceeded to play around for a few days and get the feel of the workflow and operation, and then this evening I timed myself to produce an audio demo in one hour that still sounds good and relevant in today's constantly changing music scene. I was constantly impressed with the quality and lushness of the presets, and even those that didn't sound so great to me became useable after doing some tweaks, which is very easy to do. It was all very simple to use, and more importantly, a whole lot of fun to play with. A real sense of joy and discovery when finding a solid preset and then manipulating it to sound soft and airy, or thick and gritty, and everything in between. For those sounds that may have sounded a bit static, another great plugin saved the day.

I'm talking about Tantra by Dmitry Sches. The combination of these two plugins cost me around 35 dollars. I have only owned Tantra for less than a day, but I can tell you now it's going to be an absolute staple in my compositions from now on. I used it on the synth, but it can complement any possible audio signal you can throw at it. Vocals, guitars, synths, basses. It takes stale and static sounds and gives them a new life, deeply sampled rhythms and effects that sound phenomenal. The interface is also beautiful and a bit overwhelming with all the buttons and knobs, but it goes to show the amazing options for manipulation and tweaking.

Where Air Hybrid 3 is a niche product, Tantra is an versatile workhorse and can make anything sound better., providing anything from soft and subtle delays and frequency modulation, complete glitch-style signal manipulation, deep pulses and sidechaining, and percussive sequences. I was looking into buying Movement by Output, and after doing some research on forums, decided I could get something that does the same things for less money (who can say no to that?) and I settled on Tantra after the deal popped up in my inbox. I am not knocking Output at all, they have amazing products, but, if you are looking for something that has similar capabilities and features and can't afford Movement, go with Tantra. I have not even begun to delve into the full capacity of the features and sounds available, but already I know it will be a staple for years to come. It provides seemingly endless possibilities and rhythmic variations, at an amazing discounted price for a limited time here at VstBuzz.

Here is the demo I made in only ONE HOUR, using 95% Hybrid sounds (FL studio stock drum samples and one instance of the FL 3xOsc for the white noise sweep) and Tantra on the mixer channel for a couple of the Hybrid 3 layers. Tantra provides that great rhythmic sequencing (with built in delay/filter modulation) audible in the start and throughout the whole track.