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Saturday, June 7, 2014

VIRTUAL ORCHESTRA! the best orchestral and strings Vsti, with free plugins inside!



Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about an interesting topic: how to add some orchestration to our song using midi plugins, obviously only if we don't have a real orchestra at hand.

Let's start by saying that virtual strings are not new, they've been around since the '70s, and the first synth strings have been featured on some of the most important albums of all times, for example on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon".
A synth is a machine that starting from a self generated sound and applying a serie of filters and modifications is capable of reproducing (among the others) sounds that are similar to a real instruments, for example a drumset or a violin: it can't reproduce obviously every nuance, but it can give to the sound a cold and modern vibe that sometimes it's just what we need.

In the last few years, together with synth instruments, the market has been flooded with sampled instruments, which are for example violins or a drumset that are recorded with a microphone and bundled in a plugin that lets you play them by using the Midi standard.
This method is capable to achieve very realistic results, much more realistic than starting from noise (as the synth do), and with time the sample libraries have become always bigger, more accurate, more complete and with a higher resolution, up to a point that today they can easily reach the 20-50 gb size.

Today we can choose among the many orchestral synths and samplers the one that fits our song best, keeping in mind that a sample library will often need a sample player, like Native Instruments Kontakt, in order to be used.

The best Virtual Orchestra libraries are obviously expensive, for example today some of the best on the market are EastWest Symphonic Orchestra, Ik Multimedia Miroslav Philarmonik, and obviously the Native Instruments Komplete serie, but if we are on a tight budget and we need to insert some orchestration in order to become the new Fleshgod Apocalypse, here's some free orchestral synth and sample library to rock your world:

- Simon Larkin Section Strigs: a small but effective string section sampler

- Safwan Matnitron: a lightweight violin sinth

- Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra: one of the best free orchestral sample libraries around

- Dsk Overture: an interesting synth orchestra

- Versilian Studios Versilian Chamber Orchestra: an orchestral sample library with particular attention on percussions

- Dsk Strings: a very rich synth strings plugin, with the single instruments and the full sections

- Orchestral Strings One: a strings ensemble sampler from the authors of Piano One, probably the best free piano library on the market


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2 comments:

  1. Thanks for giving my little rompler a mention.

    Simon Larkin

    ReplyDelete
  2. it's a pleasure! keep up with the good work!

    ReplyDelete