EastWest’s Hollywood Strings is, in my opinion, the best string library out there for someone serious about string writing. It is more cumbersome and resource heavy than the other best-string-lib-contenders out there (largely because it is so expansive and in-depth), but if you are willing to work around these realities, it does yield the best sound of anything out there right now.
The audio file above is a medley of some string sketches I wrote up with HS in a very short amount of time–about 15-45 minutes each.
A quick sketch I did with East West’s excellent library Hollywood Strings. All strings are playing Con Sordino (with mutes) in this clip. Photo: Audri Botkin.
CineSamples just released their long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated (by me, at least) CineBrass. I payed the very reasonable $399 price tag yesterday and downloaded the 8GB of content which installed easily and runs in Kontakt 4 (4.2.3 required) as smooth as butter. This musical sketch below is the first thing I played around with after loading up some patches, and though it’s still quite sloppy, you can get a sense of the playability and credibility of these brass instruments.
The interface is really simple and intuitive–there are many articulations but few patches to hassle with, and of course, it runs in Kontakt which just makes everything nicer. The first-play experience is incredible. The velocity-sensitive key-mapping in the “articulations patches” is brilliant. I’ve long wanted to carry a staccato trumpet or horn line and end the phrase with a marcato note, but having to load another patch and sync the two so it sounds like part of the same performance is always a headache and often a waste of time. In Cinebrass, you can control the length of your staccato articulations by the velocity of your hit, which is awesome.
This is by far the best brass library I have played or heard to date. We’ll see what East West’s Hollywood Brass has to offer when it is released next month, and though it will probably sound great, I somehow doubt that it will match the playability or deadline-friendly conveniency of CineBrass. Maybe I’ll be eating my words in a month, but kudos to the CineSamples team for producing an exceptional product that not only does better what other current libraries do decently, but one that expands the horizon of what is possible with sample technology.
I’m entering the final stages of the scoring process for Ace Wonder: Message From a Dead Man, and thought I’d include a teaser of some of the music I’m working on right now. This clip is from a segment of the film where mysterious turning point meets inquisitive youngster.
Here are a couple screen-shots of a cue in progress. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.
Workspace #1 - Master View
Most cues in this film use between 10 and 50 tracks, So it’s important for me to keep the main edit view as uncluttered as possible. Believe it or not, this is as “uncluttered as possible.”
Workspace #2 - Instruments View
A word on libraries: Though I have a decent number of instrument libraries I still have only one machine currently running and it’s equipped with a now-paltry 8GB of ram… but I still rarely max it out and I commonly have no more than 4GB of instruments loaded. The key to eliminating unnecessary memory usage is knowing ahead of time what you need to achieve with a cue and how to accomplish it. By the time I’m done with a cue, I rarely have more than one or two patches loaded that I didn’t use, and it’s because every track counts. This should be a composer’s attitude whether he has unlimited computer resources or not, and chances are, he doesn’t. Being limited by your system is the not greatest enemy of creativity… granted, it can be a headache, but it can also be the tutor that forces you to learn economy of notes and clean instrumentation.
In addition to that, if you know your libraries well, you will not only know the difference between a “lite” and “powerful system” patch, but you will know that the “lite” works just as well in most scenarios. By the way, having a good idea of how you’re going to go about the process beforehand speeds up the process significantly– you don’t end up improvising a million things (maybe only a thousand) that you end up sliding to the back of your project, plus there is less clutterage to get lost in.
Back in ‘09 when I was working on The Mysterious Islands I was caught with a cue assignment one morning while on the road a couple hours from home. I didn’t have to drive, so I took those few hours on the journey home to watch the clip over and over and think through my approach in my head–even jotting down a few ideas the old-school way… ON PAPER. I got home at about noon and by midnight I had a 5 minute cue finished and uploading. Obviously, God was merciful to me in that tight situation (and my sisters brought me food), but being restricted by my circumstances from reverting to lazy improvisational habits actually sped up the process a lot.
I will be posting more clips, teasers and announcements about this film, so stay tuned!
I bought East West/Quantum Leap’s RA some time ago, a sample library including a wide range of instruments from around the globe, from Australian Didgeridoo licks to Sitar to Highland Bagpipes. I have been so happy with it over the years that I jumped at the opportunity to buy another East West ethnic library, SILK.
While SILK offers a smaller spread of ethnic instruments than RA, featuring only Chinese, Indian, and Persian sounds, SILK focuses on making the instruments from those regions extra special… the sampling process was much more in-depth and the instruments are more playable in a greater number of articulations and styles–there are also more instruments per each region than in RA. For Navigating History: Egypt, I primarily pulled from SILK’s Persian palette, which offers a range of bowed, plucked, wind, and percussive instruments from the middle east–ideal for this project. Every SILK instrument also comes with great-sounding and mix-friendly phrases and articulations that were recorded by expert musicians at East West Studios and Capitol Studios.
The Indian instruments sounded good too, which I was expecting… but the Chinese winds and strings blew me away. I mean, they’re really great. Buying SILK has led me to half-hope that the next destination of the Navigating History team will be China, if for no other reason than having an excuse to splurge on arrangements saturated with these expressive and evocative sounds.
While we’re speaking about EW/QL, I should mention that there is a Valentine’s Day sale running currently offering 3 instruments for 60% off… there’s good stuff here and it ships on a 1TB HDD. This is a pretty good deal, but don’t cry if you miss it–soundsonline.com (the site that carries EW/QL instruments) has similar deals every couple months. Unless forced by a pressing project, never buy any of their instruments (newer libraries excluded) for less than 40-50% off. Waiting is usually worth it.
Back to the review… In sum, Silk is awesome. All the ethnic instruments you hear in the above demos that are bowed, plucked, or blown came from SILK. You can also hear some electronic sounds from KOMPLETE 7, a dash of ProjectSAM’sSymphobia, and a healthy helping of my favorite EW/QL library, Hollywood Strings.
And in keeping with the law of this site (EVERY POST MUST MENTION AUDRI BOTKIN AT LEAST ONCE), I’m including a little medley of cello music Audri recorded for me.
Flash 10 is required to view this file
Here’s how this sort of thing goes:
BEN: “Hey Audri, Can you play this for me?” (*plays little melody on keyboard)
AUDRI: (*plays little melody on cello) “Want me to add some grace notes?”
BEN: “YES… lemme get the recorder. Play around with that idea for a minute until I find it.”
Disclaimer: None of the films I mention on this blog are recommended for viewing in full or perhaps even for closer study. They are chosen for the purpose of instruction, to illustrate a specific principle, and do not have my full endorsement because of many erroneous theological and aesthetic elements.
Hollywood Strings Sketches by BenBotkin
