I like it very much. I was listening to the music, not the library. I think that says it all, and actually speaks for both. Thanks for sharing this.

That is beautiful - the melancholy theme is perfect for violas.

Beautiful demo and great mixing. I am currently having trouble with all high strings: harsh and with parasitic high harmonics in the 4K-7K area. Can't seem to be able to filter them out. They completely spoil my melodic lines. Your demo is perfectly clean. I'd like to download it to play on my system. Any possibility for that to happen? 

Thanks, John.

Thanks, John.

Yeah, I went the route of deessing, but used only free ones, not too good. Can you recommend some or the one you've used?

Oh, my, I finally found the Inbox button near the Login slot. Stupid me. Let's communicate via 'pm' then.

Thank you for your gracious offer, John.

Nektarios, what is beautiful, the demo or the fact that I finally found the Inbox button, or both? J.

Thanks a lot for your comments guys! 

Hey John, about your high strings problems, in the Perform you have Exp-Filter, play with that, I find filtering here and there with the right dosage makes a nice difference. Harshness also comes from when notes are too well tuned, especially with accents, but you probably already know that, and an important rule of thumb, never make 2 notes start at the same time. Be carefull that your string dynamics don't all peak exactly at the same point, you'll get undesired frequencies, when dealing with high strings. etc. 

Very simple, because as crazy as it may sound, imperfections are a huge part of the beauty in music.

I couldn't work with maxed out humanizations scalers. It really sounds out of whack that way. The tuning is way off, like a student band, and a maxed out delay scaler just makes the timing of the attacks very unpredictable and sloppy-sounding. That's not the kind of humanisation one should be after, IMO.

I like to offset the starting points of notes and the dynamic curves purposefully - for example when I'm trying to give a passage of short notes a "behind" or "ahead" of the beat type of feel.  Sometimes, I want single notes of different instruments to be completely locked-in and "dead on" - on other notes or accents, I might want a little more rubbing. You can't rely on randomized attack delay to achieve that, and I certainly can't let humanization get in the way of how I intend things to sound.

In fact, one of the reasons I tend to use VSL stuff as the backbone of everything I do is the fact that the programming and editing has been done in such a way that the samples do what I want, how I want it, most of the time. Cranking the delay humanisation would kind of defeat the purpose. Not all sampled instruments are that reliable. A lot of them sound gorgeous, but  some of them are all over the place, timing- and dynamics-wise. I hate that, and I find it annoying having to work around erratic attack and buildup times of the samples, especially with short notes.

I love the humanization features of VI Pro, but I tend to dial them in moderately, just for some variation of performance.

It is a ridiculously time-consuming process. My life would be so much easier if I didn't have to spend countless hours on editing the living hell out of every single piece I write. :) Proficient keyboard players definitely have a huge advantage. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them, as I come from the guitar. I do try and play some parts on the keyboard, but my very limited playing ability obviously forces me to klick in notes in the piano editor most of the time.

I work in Cubase and the MIDI editor in there does have some really nice randomization and "swing" options, but again, it's a random thing, and while it can be useful in some situations, it's not the right solution for passages where one has a specific kind of "imperfection" in mind.

Sometimes, I stop and think about this whole "music with samples" thing we're doing and it's really shocking - such an absurdly nerdy, crazily obsessive way to spend our time. :)