Musical instrument software reviews, production tips and walkthroughs. VST and other synth guides. Reviews and help for working composers especially in action or TV including some Epic music genres.
This is good to see. I've been wanting to expand beyond CSS as my main template library, but lack of sampled rebowing has kept me away from a lot of otherwise seemingly decent tools. MSS is looking like an appropriate addition to my collection. I love the tone of CSS, but MSS seems to have more polish to its build; plus I've been veering towards a much dryer sound in the past few years and MSS is essentially what I adjust the CSS mics to sound like ...
A lot of great info here, Nathan, thanks. If anything is clear from this, it is that each of us need to find our own 'sweet spot'. Such as ram vs storage. I have been leaning to reducing the amount of the samples loaded into ram in order to have a larger template, knowing that my fast drives serve up samples pretty well on demand. But then again, when I make my next computer jump next year, probably to the upcoming Mac Studio M4 Ultra from my i9 10900x, I'll also be reviewing my templates and how they are loaded, likely doing a hybrid of... in the case of Kontakt libraries particularly, loaded ready to play, and a bunch of the tracks in the template with unloaded instances for the less used instruments/articulations.
In my honest opinion the CSW sound is standardized and prepackaged so that it can be used immediately in an easy and fast way, but it is not customizable. Furthermore, it already contains a basic reverb that cannot be eliminated. Vienna Syncron on the other hand can be modified in every parameter of the timbre to obtain the desired color. And it is recorded both in dry completely without reverb, and with the natural reverb of a recording room with different customizable microphone configurations. In conclusion, it depends a lot on what you want: if you want a standard sound ready for use or if you want a sound that you have to customize and to reverb.
Thanks for this Nathan, I've been doing some faster percussion parts with this recently and was looking for a way to tame those chunky release times. Your section on the ADHSR was really helpful. Really wish they just had a simple release control like Damage 2 though :)
This is exactly the video I needed. Suffering from a lack of staccato (as opposed to all the other weird, never-use articulations in Spitfire Symphony Orchestra), but needed some of the engineering know-how to achieve the best workaround. Glad to know 0.5 short with lower expression is the trick.
I think there is a way to record the midi but it might vary from daw to daw. Or there might be a plugin from plugin monkey (developer) that intercepts the midi, to record it and humanize / randomize it. Another possibility would be to save each instrument group to a different audio track and insert the Human plugin from Mixed in Key. I did a video on that plugin and was pretty impressed with how it could subtly alter audio timing to feel more in the pocket and groovy. Might be worth a demo.
@@NathanDavidCarltonSoundbed I see in Orchestrator the REC button maps to midi tracks for the different articulations in Cubase > can Modulate the midi in the Inspector per track(velocity and position preset even!)
Hi Nathan, great video! I’m wondering, when you wrote the Cellos sounded “muffled”, does this just occur only in the runs patches or is it the case for other patches or across the board for Cellos? Thanks!
Could you help me understand how you have your entire string section in one Kontakt instance? I would love to mimic that setup, but I need help in understanding how to set it up. Thanks!
It’s called a multi. Load your violins, violas, cello and basses into the same Kontakt instance. The second part is the auto divisi legato in MSS. It’s on by default, so any chord you play will get split to all seats each section. And each line uses legato transitions when notes overlap.
I think that its time to make part two of this. This time about working with latency and latency issues epecially in CSS. Try and test some ways and methods check wich one are the best/. Im more than sure that it could be incredible helpfull for many people. ;)
Thank you for showing me I can compose like this. I appreciate the gift you've given me. I'll subscribe just in case you decide to recreate more famous soundtracks. ;)
I like the detail of the bow noise. That does indeed make them vivid. They sound a little romantic to me otherwise (small 'r'). Fairly good at plaintive, very good at incipient joy. Some of the passing discordant sounds were really nice, suggesting that maybe there is more pain in these strings than I'm hearing at first.
Did you try Tokio scoring strings? It's very dry, very alive sounding. I think it's in the ballpark of LS scoring strings, and maybe has a few advantages. Also wondering how MSS compares to LASS
First, MSS vs LASS. I would say LASS 2 sounds a bit more raw, emotional, and huskier than MSS. The sound did not change much for LASS 3 but I find a couple things did get slightly more smoothed out (only slightly). MSS is quite a bit more contemporary sounding, with a little less "raw" emotion - although it has a "raw" recording style which is to say if you turn off every EQ and reverb effect it can sound quite simple and plain as if it came straight out of the microphone with no coloring, in a neutral room. This allows you to sculpt quite a bit with MSS, but you'll never get a super wide vibrato out of the box contrasted with something like CSS which has a much more pronounced vibrato than MSS. Next, Tokyo Scoring Strings..TSS has a lot of features that a re similar to MSS. It might be slightly more agile and flexible but even the mic mix has a different timbre or character to the sound that I find hard to describe. While MSS is baseline "neutral" TSS is baseline "with a little bit of character baked in" but again I find it hard to name the characteristic itself. TSS has a great smooth variable vibrato control that works very well. Both TSS and MSS have extraordinary lookahead features. MSS can have small sizes and true divisi but TSS excels at the smaller size "sound". So many choices!
im putting my hope to the native instruments komplete kontrol user accessibility i hope it works so you can use the courser to go trough all sounds of the vsts there are
How did you get your Arturia patches to show up under the "All Instruments" section? I have been looking everywhere to find the solution to this but have not found it anywhere.
First I added all the patches to Kontakt’s Quick Load feature. Then, the click you see is a right click, on the main Kontakt instrument window (but not on any specific control which would try to assign a midi controller) to open all my quick load patches in folders.
@@NathanDavidCarltonSoundbed not yet, is it worth it? I have angry brass from them. Usually my goto is trailer brass because i love creating epic music
Nathan, looked at the videos and all their pros & cons, and dislikes, I don't have an all-string library and was thinking oh all those others, and LASS 3 popped up. Geez, all I hear and see is you guys are pros at orchestrating and composing and whatever you do all these libraries sound great to me. But for a newbie I'm confused. I saw you did differing on Opus, which I got at a discount as an all-in-one orchestra library and I wonder if I made a mistake. Can you please respond, appreciated?
Hi! I’m not clear on what your question is exactly. Most of my videos are to try to help people make use of tools they’ve bought, or try to get a sense of what different libraries feel like when you try to use them. It certainly is a difficult landscape to navigate. Let me know if you have a more specific question. Opus is a great product. If you already own it and you’re just starting out, I would suggest continuing to learn how to get the most out of it. It wasn’t a mistake, certainly not for strings. They hold up quite well. Cheers!🍻
I think they had a re-release after this video was made. Might want to see if you like the tone any better (I’m guessing it won’t change much for you, though).
@@NathanDavidCarltonSoundbed I just got LASS 3, and CSS is still my favourite, it has more useful content and its interface is less cluttered. Sure, LASS has more controls, but most of them is not so useful, like this AMG switch.
Thanks for this video. Just getting started. This may have changed since you made this, but I found my user preset in ~/Documents/East West/Presets/Hollywood Orchestrator/ {category name/preset name}. I'm wrestling with the same dilemma: in the DAW or in Orchestrator. In the past I've used Sibelius to make passages or patterns that I use in a DAW. Orchestrator makes shaping a performance easier with the mod wheel for sure, but programming it to all work will take some time.
