EIC users, orchestral strings query

[pairajacks]

So I'm concluding from this thread that Ableton's EIC2 Orchestral Strings ($189) is not as realistic as GPO, and especially if you don't have Tension (another $129), 3rd party strings are the way to go.


This brings up a couple questions;

What grief do you have to go thru with 3rd party strings in order to get a comperable level of expression control (assuming Ableton Orchestral Strings are ready to go right out of box). Do you have to map GPO or Edirol to racks and figure out all the macro nuances?

I'm guessing that Abletons Orchestral Strings are in racks where the various violin variants staccato, leggatto, etc can be contolled with a modwheel thru a macro to gain expressivity. How well does this work?

[gjm]

See if you can strike up a conversation with this Ableton user. He would have some opinions I am sure.

Link Your Music Forum

[locojohn]

Let me know how you get on Russ.... while Garritan is tempting, it would be nice to be able to get a good orchestral sound out of Live... integration and all that. Perhaps its a matter of mapping the modwheel to macros and playing around?

Interestingly, I have never been able to alter the sound of EIC Legato Violin instrument, however I tried with the macro controls.... I ended up recording the real violinist and the result is, of course, much better.

I don't know, however, why all other parameters that I tried of the Legato Violin do not make any change in the sound....

Andrejs

[chris_sparks]

Does anyone know of a good source to learn how to use the OIC properly? I have had this product for some time now and I still cannot get it sound realistic.

[scientist]

for orchestration theory in general, there is rimsky-korsakov's principles of orchestration:
http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/for ... y.php?f=77
following traditional techniques for assembling orchestral parts will help with realism, as will understanding the nuances of the individual instruments, so you can mimic their subtleties as best as possible with the tools you have.

specific to using a sequencer and samples, orchestration via midi is a specialized skill and it will always take a lot of time to get things to sound more realistic. writing parts per instrument, volume automation, non-quantized notes...it's all the tiny adjustments that add up to better sounding orchestral parts. if realism is a top priority, spending the money on good libraries is worthwhile and will save tons of grief trying to get the cheaper stuff to sound good.

[chris_sparks]

Thanks for the link.

You have described what I have to do, all by hand! So you are saying the OIC is cheaper stuff? $1000 US isn't cheap, well maybe considering the Vienna collection or the SONIvox stuff.

What has been the most frustrating is that I can program with Software all of the nuances if only Ableton would give me their ALS file format. Channel automation is a bear tweaking this and that up and down. Takes too much time. So you have any other products out there better suited to doing what I am trying to achieve?

chris

[scientist]

yeah, OIC isn't cheap, and imho is too expensive relative to the competition. are you looking to work with full sized orchestras or smaller ensembles?

for smaller ensembles i like the sound of bigfish audio's london solo strings, and the garritan stradivarius and gofriller. imo, the best of the best for larger ensembles is LA scoring strings (audiobro.com)...the demos are incredible. but that runs $1200 and is ONLY strings and needs two computers to run. they're putting out a lite version soon, but i'd guess that even that'll be $500+.

in the $500 range i think EWQL gold and kirk hunter are probably the best choices. northernsounds.com is a great resource for a lot of this information, and a lot of developers post there (garritan, spectrasonics, kirk hunter, etc).