CRACK Project SAM - Orchestral Essentials
Tabatha Pasqua
I'm not enrolling back into college just to save a couple hundred bucks on an orchestral set that's still more expensive than OE1 and 2 combined. Nice of them not to have that restriction all the same though...
However, I will say that if you want OE1 not for writing orchestral music but for the "one key full orchestra", then yes, it's a better option. Albion doesn't include any patches for cross-family writing.
I was both exaggerating and forgetting there was something in there that costs roughly the same as OE. I think it was the shock of seeing orchestral suites and bundles costing upwards of $10,000 that overwrote anything else I saw in there.
OE1 & OE2 are both absolutely solid and would be the better value if you want to check the "symphonic/orchestral" box so you can use those types of elements in your work, but not necessarily focus exclusively on symphonic/scoring in general.
I think it would be a long-ass time before I get into any serious orchestral work, if I ever did at all, but I do have orchestral needs not requiring hardcore orchestral skills to be addressed, so I need something to supplement my EWQLSO and OE1 seems to be the ticket. Looked fairly easily in my opinion.
That would be "the everything bundle", which includes their entire line of... well, everything. All 4 Albions, the whole BML line, all of Sable, all of Mural, eDNA 1-4, all their one-offs and specialties, etc. It's like the "elite british orchestral komplete". Spitfire recently has actually toned down to be in the realm of "super expensive but not ridiculously expensive" ever since they stopped being so incredibly secretive and "VIP club" towards specific composers. I think Albion used to be around $1000 (and actually, back in the day, so was Komplete regular).
The Mixed Orchestra section in Orchestral Essentials 2 offers you beautiful, live recordings of different orchestral sections playing together, such as full orchestra recorded with choir and strings recorded with brass.
All instruments have been re-designed to fit the Orchestral Essentials concept, providing out-of-the-box playability and a cinematic sound that is impossible to beat at this price point. Orchestral Essentials 2 is a must-have addition for owners of the first volume, but is a powerful stand-alone volume too, especially for composers who already have their orchestral basics covered.
Project SAM products require you to register with the manufacturer at www.projectsam.com to activate your license. To use Kontakt Player Libraries you also need to register with www.native-instruments.com.
I have Orchestral Essentials 2, and it's great, although I have since bought the Symphobias (1,2 and 3), and so I don't really use it much anymore. But it's a great library with really lovely samples. It is ensemble patches, for the most part, and I think it's geared towards efficient composing using a basic and traditional kind of orchestral sound.
As for Kontakt's factory library: it's adequate for very basic work, although I find the orchestral samples in both Factory Library 1 and 2 to be either quite dated (1), or nice sounding but very limited (2). To my ears, working with these patches would take a lot of careful tweaking or the results would be pretty midi-ish.
I've always taken a "right tool for the job" mentality with this stuff. Project SAM's design approach is kind of love-it-or-hate-it, and I would probably never use them for any of my big orchestral projects, since I like to have a lot more control over the mood and texture of my arrangements. But I think the basic sound of Project SAM's samples are a good as anyone's, and if you need to do fast arrangements they are hard to beat.
I actually would have preferred this to Albion, which I bought because I bought into to he Spitfire hype years ago that I no longer buy into. I paid $600 for Albion Legacy and then $200 for the cross grade/upgrade to Albion One. I was able to test out Orchestra Essentials on a site that used to allow remote access for previewing project sam libraries and I immediately preferred Orchestra Essentials and regretted my Albion purchase. Since then spitfire has come out with a lot of great products but between Albion One and Orchestra Essentials, I prefer the latter. Don't get me wrong, Albion is still a great library but just overpriced IMHO. If you collect the entire Albion series,then you would have a more versatile collection but you would also spend a lot more. I'd say that the current sale for this is really good but it's only as good as you find a use for it. Don't spend money just because you can. Watch the walk through videos and decide if you can find a use for it. Guy's videos are the best for getting a feel for these project sam libraries.
Amadeus has been my go-to since its release. It doesn't have all the articulations of the biggest orchestral libraries, but it's got the essentials. Here are the ones for all the string instruments (violin, viola, cello, bass). There are both ensemble and solo instruments for all the strings, brass and woodwinds. It's pretty complete for the casual composer, and even includes the lazy composer's favorite shortcut, symphony.nki.
This orchestral compilation from Project SAM brings together samples from their Symphobia 1 & 2, True Strike 1 & 2, Orchestral Brass Classic, Woodwind Ensemble Orchestrator/Effects, Flute & Piccolo Effects, Organ Mystique, and Concert Harp libraries in one convenient 13GB package, which compresses down to 6.5GB on your hard drive.
The collection focuses on full-range, multi-instrument ensembles, enabling you to play complete orchestral sections without having to laboriously program their individual components. Its full-orchestra patches achieve instant lift-off with some blasting, ultra-tight strings-and-brass staccatos, ready made for action scenes. On a more subtle note, the 'Suspense' patch's layered woodwinds and sordino strings are a terrific inspiration for moody chordal writing. An 'Enhance' button adds a thunderous low-end piano and/or orchestral percussion layer to these powerful tutti ensembles.
Though offering built-in effects and some cool technical features, OE has no alternative mic positions and concentrates mainly on straightforward, single-note-based playing styles. The gaps in its instrumentation and articulations make it unsuitable for realising the detail of a traditional score. Nevertheless, it's a versatile, easy-to-use library optimised for the quick creation of powerful orchestral mock-ups and soundscapes, on which basis it merits four and a half stars.
Secrets of the Forest is an epic, cinematic orchestral piece with a curious spirit and an appetite for adventure! There are no 3rd-party plugins used, and the project is available for both Cubase Artist (or higher) and Logic Pro X.
I have tried to do a little bit of web research into these libraries. there seem to be a lot. Loads of packages from east west quantum leap. Native instruments, Symphobia, Vienna Symphonic Library. Project-sam orchestral essentials and lots more. It all seems a bit of a jungle. I would hope to get a package with most of the orchestral essentials, strings, horns, choir, percussion and hopefully a good acoustic piano. It may though be best in the end to buy individual instrument libraries (one for strings, another for horns etc) again advice would be welcome.
ProjectSAM has carefully selected the essentials from each of their products, including the highly praised Symphobia series, True Strike series, and Orchestral Brass Classic, and bundled them into one effective, incredibly versatile package.
Apart from these orchestral elements, you will also find a concert harp, church organ, ProjectSAM's renowned Dystopia sound design, and, exclusive to Orchestral Essentials, an enchanting grand piano, and harpsichord.
Shades of the Studio: Electronic Influences on Ligeti's Apparitions Benjamin K Levy Brief comments that Gyorgy Ligeti made in interviews, lectures, and articles such as his "Metamorphoses ofMusical Form"1 suggest that his early experiences in the Cologne electronic music studio in the 1950s, immediately following his flightfromHungary and his introduc tion to the techniques of the avant-garde, helped shape his later style of composition, and that both general principles and specific techniques for sound manipulation that he discovered through these experiences led to the creation of his firstmature orchestral pieces, Apparitions (1958-59) and Atmospheres (1961). Indeed, one product of that period, Piece elec tronique no. 3 (1957-58) was originally conceived under the title Atmospheres, but was leftunfinished, and was renamed when the orches tralwork took over that title, suggesting (despite Ligeti's denial of any explicit relationship2) a shared aesthetic concern and more than a mere chronological connection. Yet Ligeti's comments often lack concrete examples of how his work in the studio informed his later compositions. And while the orchestral compositions have attracted considerable fame 60 PerspectivesofNew Music and scholarly attention,3 there are very few significant studies on Piece electronique no. 3 or on his other two electronic compositions, Glissandi (1957), and Artikulation (1958), that clarify the connection. Perhaps on account of the unfamiliarity of the electronic medium, secondary sources tend to skirtover the details of the construction of these works in favor of general descriptions of their character?for example the "humor" of Glissandi or the interest in a synthetic language demon strated inArtikulation.* To understand these details, a close study of Ligeti's compositional sketches is essential. By comparing sketches and passages from the electronic pieces with both the score and the sonic impression of Apparitions, this study focuses on the specific composi tional techniques and the resulting gestures and textures which Ligeti discovered while working in electronic music and then carried over into the orchestral medium, thereby illuminating a previously neglected side of this important stylistic transformation. This investigation will proceed from rhythmic practice, where Ligeti firstbegan to experiment with and expand upon the serial methods of his contemporaries, to the more original compositional devices he developed involving the coordination of rhythm,pitch, and other parameters. The change inLigeti's approach to rhythmic organization was perhaps the most profound shift in his stylisticmetamorphosis during the late 1950s, as it encompassed both large-scale formal design and more surface level patterning. Moreover, itwas in the domain of rhythm where Ligeti began to reconcile serial practices with what he had taken from Bartok, through theHungarian theorist Erno Lendvai, and where ultimately, Ligeti found his own voice, developing the characteristically "static" and "textural" style forwhich he became famous. When Ligeti escaped Hungary during the revolution of 1956, he described himself as largely ignorant of the practices of theWestern European avant-garde: Invited by Dr. Herbert Eimert, I came to Cologne in 1957 as a "virgo intacta," so to speak, having no idea, then, not only about electronic music, but also even more generally about what had hap pened compositionally in the post-war years in Western Europe.5 He went on to say that he was inspired to compose a type of "static" music while still inHungary, but was without the technical means to realize this vision because until he arrived inCologne, he "had not got beyond the concept of notation based on metre." Even two of his more adventurous Hungarian-period compositions, Metamorphosis nocturnes and Musica ricercata, were "conceived within the framework of Shades of the Studio 61 conventional time measurement and periodic structure."6 Many of Ligeti's new colleagues at theWest Deutsche Rundfunk (WDR) Studio in Cologne considered the pairing of serial and electronic music to be the union of the most advanced compositional techniques of the day with the most advanced technology.7 It is not surprising, then, that Ligeti looked to serial electronic music when searching for themeans to overcome this compositional problem, and that he confronted this difficulty in the electronic medium before applying his solution to orchestral writing. Some traces ofmetrical thinking are still evident in the sketches forhis first tape piece, Glissandi. They show that...
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