East West Pop Brass Review
Tina Popielarczyk
When I first heard EastWest was releasing a Hollywood Pop Brass library I was really excited, as I am a big fan of the Hollywood Series. For pop brass, I have relied on a library comprised of soloists and it is good, but doesn't have a lot of bite and is time consuming to use as well. So I had high hopes this would eliminate the need for it. Well, does it? Maybe. If you buy the concept, I think you will buy the execution.
Aimed at capturing the sound of horn sections that you hear in recordings by Michael Jackson, Bruno Mars, Tower Of Power, Blood Sweat and Tears, Chicago, and Latin pop, Hollywood Pop Brass is a 25 GB, 24 bit, 44.1 kHz library with five Mic mixes. It's a four piece section comprised of 2 trumpets, I sax, 1 trombone, not solos, and although you can adjust the levels between the instruments and turn two of the three down and turn off the Room and Surround mics you can create one, it kills the sound and it clearly was not intended to be used this way.
Like all off the Hollywood series, the recording is stellar, just pristine and the EW studio is a great room for this. Clearly, these were great players as well. There is a full compliment of articulations: legatos, sustains, shorts, rips, growls, falls, trills, etc. (no shakes, though.) Also included are a bunch of great sounding phrases and licks. And it has more balls than most of the competition I have tried or heard
Since this is not a review of Play 6, I will assume you have some familiarity with it, in terms of using the Browser, Player, and Mixer and using the Installation Center. If not, the free downloadable manual is your friend.
Which brings us to the Sustain instruments. They also come with VS and X-fde versions but strangely the VS ones are not named with the VS added. There are plain sustains, those with added staccato and added accent, added crescendo, added diminuendo, and crescendos with different speeds. For playing chords or octaves, these will be what you want.
Moving to the Effects, we see a bunch of highly useful ones. Using these well is critical to making music in the style of Pop and R & B. You will want to spend a lot of time getting really familiar with them.
The HPB pre-recorded Phrases and Licks just sound great! 19 phrases, 17 Mod Licks that play longer or shorter Licks with the modwheel controlling the duration or as individual licks alone. Finally, there are a small number of really useful Keyswitch instruments that when you are in a hurry will serve you well. I especially like the Phrases KSs.
Hollywood Pop Brass sounds great, with lots of articulations that are excellent for this style it was created for. Will it always replace a library of soloists when I need to go deeper? Maybe not, but most of the time, yes, and when I want to get more complex I can add some soloists from another library and I will be able to do awesome stuff when called upon to do so, given enough time.
Jay is a Los Angeles-based composer, songwriter, arranger and orchestrator, conductor, keyboardist, as well as vocalist.As a composer, he is best known for scoring the New World Television series Zorro. Among the films and TV movies he has arranged, orchestrated and/or conducted are Paramount Pictures' Blame It On Rio Read More
Those familiar with EastWest instruments will feel immediately at home in the familiar folder structure. Beginning in the 'Sus' folder, we come upon a multitude of velocity-sensitive patches that can be played melodically as well as in different harmonic combinations. A 'CresLng' patch, for instance, presents a long crescendo whose dynamic range is dependent on initial velocity. Put through its paces, the preset sounded fantastic playing chords, slow melodic passages, parallel harmonies, and both diatonic and highly chromatic passages. In typical EastWest parlance, Patches marked 'Xfade' offer mod wheel dynamic control. The dynamic range and musicality of the swells here is truly impressive. While this is a brief criticism, the lowest dynamics are perhaps too strong or bright to be entirely convincing, while a much brighter and more appropriate dynamic layer begins around velocity #60. In larger groups and full mixes this is not noticeable (and may indeed help maintain presence in a mix), but in isolation it may bother some users. The clarion-like top of the dynamic range is bright in a way that is highly effective for the musical styles intended for this package. Let's be clear: this library's singled-minded aesthetic intent is to provide a powerful and even virile brass sound; there is little timbral subtlety to this instrument, and this is a good thing.
The staccato sustain patch gives a punchy attack and solid sustain. This simply glorious instrument yields complete realism in both staccato passages and enthusiastic chordal hits. The Sus folder is rounded out by various swells, crescendos and diminuendos for your crafting pleasure. It's only the first folder of this instrument, and already there is enough to get fully lost in.
The Short folder contains hard staccato, marcato, and 'stab' attacks, ranging from two to eight round robins. The round-robin patches pass the realistic repetition test with flying colours, while the repeating note instrument is a great choice to craft melodic and harmonic repeated double-tongued passages.
As great as HPB is, we are still not in the era of a perfectly playable instrument. Therefore part of the craft of effective virtual instrument orchestration remains the interspersing of pre-recorded phrases and gestures with normal legato playing. This is where the 'Phrases' folder comes in handy. This large collection of pre-recorded phrases is both session tempo-sync'ed and acoustically matched to the regular playable instruments, allowing for seamless and easy layering. As if this wasn't enough, the 'Licks' folder contains RRX2 small gestures whose pitch content can be varied using the mod wheel. Within this folder is a sub-folder titled '_singles' which contains single chord hits and short repeated patterns on minor or dominant seventh chords. So, for instance, you can play a close or wide orchestrated dominant seventh chord, a short scalar lick up into that chord, rapidly tongued repetitions of that chord, the dominant seventh with an added ninth with a jazzy falling figure, and others.
The keyswitch folder allows users to load a keyswitch patch for either effects, or licks, or phrases, or a curated group of standard articulations. The latter patch may prove particularly useful for those using Hollywood Pop Brass in notation software or with Cubase's Expression Maps. That being said, it is disappointing that a wonderful engine like Play still does not allow for custom keyswitch maps. Whether or not the rumour that this is possible in the developer version of the application is true, it'd be a very welcome power-user addition indeed.
Finally there is the robust and stable Play interface with its onboard reverb, mixer board, envelope control and other powerful features. Users may also find themselves reaching for non-standard uses of such a package. For instance, I had great success in mixing this instrument into my existing 'classical' brass libraries, either to add a bit of bite or sizzle in a score, or by contrast to help create legato connections in otherwise nice-sounding packages that were challenged in this regard. When I turned down the sax in the mixer and went for an ensemble sound, I was surprised how quickly I was able to achieve a 'Drums Corps'-type of ensemble as well: placed in a stadium reverb, I felt like the Blue Devils were about to make an appearance in my DAW.
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Launched in the summer of 2010 amidst much online ballyhoo, EastWest Quantum Leap Hollywood Strings was (and is) a titanic library in every sense, bar the unfortunate iceberg-collision one. The addition of Thomas 'King of the Mock-Ups' Bergersen and award-laden film-music recordist Shawn Murphy to its production staff helped this flagship strings collection win plaudits from users and reviewers alike. Shortly after its release, EastWest announced that the same team would record a companion volume, Hollywood Brass, to be followed in turn by similarly titled woodwind and orchestral percussion collections. And so it came to pass that after a three-week recording marathon yielding over 370,000 samples, a year of post-production and another healthy dollop of internet-fuelled anticipation, Hollywood Brass is upon us.
Like its predecessor, the Diamond Edition of Hollywood Brass (147GB) ships on hard drive, though if you opt for the budget Gold Edition you can look forward to installing from a set of DVDs. (See below for a detailed comparison of the two editions.) The hard drive is a Western Digital 500GB bare internal type, so you'll have to buy your own enclosure if you want to use it externally; EastWest say the drive is suitable for continued regular use, but recommend that you back up the data on a second drive (not necessarily a high-performance type) as a safety measure. Buyers also need an iLok Security Key, not provided with the library.
The release of HB coincides with the advent of Play version 3. This is not the Play Pro software promised many moons ago (and apparently still under construction); Play 3 is simply a free upgrade of EastWest's proprietary sample player, which improves load times, cheers up CPU performance and expands the maximum voice count without actually introducing any new musical facilities. However, Play v3.0.21 finally levels the Mac/PC playing field by implementing long-awaited Mac 64-bit compatibility, which requires an Intel Mac running OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or higher. Both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Play are included with the library, and while the 64-bit player can potentially access far greater quantities of RAM, it offers no increase in sound quality or GUI functionality over the 32-bit version.
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