Reading up on the forum posts regarding the legato transitions in Synchron Strings, this is obviously an infected topic. From the first demos of Synchron Strings I heard, I’ve found the legatos unconvincing, which is why I decided to pass on the library. This is prior to reading any comments on the topic, so my mind was not biased in any negative way prior to listening to the demos.

Regarding the rendition of Tschaikowsky Serenade op.48, I’m sorry, but as good as it is, I can hear no reason to reconsider my decision not to purchase Synchron Strings. To my ears, the strings doesn’t sound very natural, the legato transition reminds me of the scripted legato from old orchestral libraries. In my humble opinion, they have a kind of synthish quality to them. Please don’t take this as any personal criticism, all demos of Syncrhon Strings I’ve heard has, to my ears, suffered from this.

On to the disclaimer. Writing music is just a hobby of mine and I’m not a professional. I could surely not put together a better mockup myself, so please feel free to disregard my impressions as unqualified. With that being said, I’ve always been holding VSL in very high regard, and I still do. Their software is hands down the best there is, and I have nothing but praise for all the VSL libraries I own. In my humble opinion, it seems to me they didn’t quite hit the mark with the legatos in Synchron Strings, but that is just my two cents, and everyone is of course entitled to their own opinion.

Hi,

Ouch, sounds quite horrible. I have loaded different combinations of legato and sustain bassoons and strings from Special Edition, none of which got a tuning problem. Are you by any chance using VI Pro? Perhaps it's the humanize settings that causing the strings to be out of tune? If not, could you be more specific as to what patches are loaded?

Kind regards

Niklas

Awesome! Good thing I've got two more weeks of vacation. :)

I'm not sure your system would be able to run Dimension Strings. RAM-wise, your system should be fine, depending on what other libraries you are using. Not sure your harddrives will be up to the task though. Remember that the benefit of using SSD drives are both faster reading speeds and access times superior to spin disks. This means faster loading times for samples as well as being able to lower the preload buffers, which in turn lets you load more samples into RAM.

For the other VSL-libraries, your system seems fine.

That depends on your needs and your system specs.

Appassionata Strings is very nice, but not as versatile as Orchestral Strings and Dimension Strings. If you plan on writing complex parts for the double basses, keep in mind that Appassionata strings has a limited set of articulations for the double basses.

The Orchestral Strings (perhaps together with the Solo strings, but I assume solo strings is not your priority atm) are the most detailed in the VSL family, in terms of number of articulations. They are actually the only VSL string library (apart from the muted strings) that I do not own, nonetheless, I think these might be the right choice for you.

If you want to write for divisi, or have the flexibility to adjust the size of the sections, Dimension strings might be the way to go. Although more limited than Orchestral strings with regards to the number of articulations, in terms of realism, Dimension strings are probably hard to beat. Keep in mind that Dimension strings are very resource hungry. An SSD and plenty of RAM would be advisable.

Special edition is indeed a good starting place. Vienna Instruments Pro is also a really good investment, it will help you get more out of Special edition. Personally, I wouldn't go with Vienna Suite to start with. It's a great product with many useful tools. However, provided that your current arsenal of audio processing plugins is somewhat up to the task, I would spend the money on a good strings library. Strings is probably the weakest part of SE.

If you're not in a hurry, you would be wise to wait for a good deal before making a purchase. Lately, it seems that VSL has had a new attractive deal every month. I remember string collections being of by 30% or so last year. Other special deals has been reduced prices on the other instrument collections, 4 libraries for the price of 3 etc.

I'm confident you will not regret your decision to invest in VSL products. VSL is second to none, both in terms of sample quality, attention to detail, software and customer support.

Good luck!

What about Note expression, available in VST3.5?

Kind regards

Niklas

I do not own SO, however, I am an owner of other products from EWQL, including Hollywood strings Gold and Hollywood brass Gold. I prefer VSL over EWQL for several reasons. For starters Vienna Instruments (VI) is superior to Play. It's intuitive, stable, resource friendly and flexible. Should you need even more flexibility and muscles, you can always upgrade to VI Pro, to benefit from humanization, auto voicing, time stretching, SSD-optimizations and more.

Regarding the sample content, VSL is recorded dry in contrast to EWQL. A matter of preference, of course, but I prefer my samples dry, and I'd imagine you won't find many forum members here with an opinion divergent from this. Furthermore, crossgrading from EWQL SO, you would benefit from true legato and portamento articulations.

What you would gain apart from this depends on which libraries from VSL you are considering.

Are other matrices loading fine? If not, make sure you've got the latest version of VI installed.

Thanks for the heads up! Now I know how I will spend the evening.

Hi DG,

Thanks a lot. The A/B switch was indeed the problem. I confess I didn't read the manual for App Strings to carefully after purchase, I just kind of assumed that the legato patches functioned the same way as in Solo Strings and Chamber Strings. There seems to be some inconsistencies between the manual for App Strings and the actual patches as well. For instance, I've got patches named perf-legato_por in the Performance Interval folder, but the manual does not mention these.

Hello,

I'm working on a project including Appassionata Strings, among other VSL libraries. I've constructed my own matrices according to a structure I've been using for several years. Now I've got a really strange problem that is bugging me out. One of the matrices consists of different flavours of legato, slurs and portamento. The x-axis controls the speed of the legato, with increasingly rapid legato transitions. The y-axis switch between legato types, with normal legato on the top, and portamento on the bottom. I use the modwheel (cc1) to switch between these articulations.

The problem is that for the app strings, no matter how the modwheel is set, a portamento articulation will be triggered. If I check the matrice in VI Pro, the active cell is normal legato. However, the portamento still sounds. If I reload the matrice, it will work as expected again - for a little while. I'm currently trying to find out excactly when this happens, but at the moment, I can't say for sure.

I haven't noticed this problem with any other matrices. I'm using VE Pro and got one instance for each instrument group.

Has anyone got any idea what is going in?

Thank you guys. I really appreciate you taking the time to give me advice. I've decided to take piano lessons, starting this autumn. Until then, I found some useful android apps to get me started. MusicTutor SightRead, CSharply and Perfect Ear. With the help of these apps, I will learn to identify the note names on the treble and bass clef, different intervals, chords and inversions and so forth. Actually, after spending a week with these apps, I'm feeling quite comfortable with note names, intervals and chords, at least in the treble clef.

I will also get the suggested literature. It seems to be just what I was looking for.

Thanks again everyone!

Greetings,

This is probably a quite unexpected question at this forum. Thing is, I don't read music very well, I learnt to play and compose music by ear, and when I started out many years ago, my writing focused mainly on the rock genre. As years went by, I was more and more drawn towards writing some kind of orchestrated music. However, after discovering VSL and really starting to appreciate the wonders of classical music, not reading music very well has become a hindrance. Hence, I decided to remedy the situation.

My ultimate goal, of course, is to better learn to write for orchestra. Learning to properly read music seems like the first natural step towards achieving this goal.

Any tips on good resources that will help me with the first step of this undertaking?

The updated demos indeed sounds way better also to my ears. Again, the compositions are fantastic as well. Kudos on the great work.

Chill down a bit and read through the thread again. In my most humble opinion, you are way too sensitive to any statement that could be considered criticism of VSL, just or not. I love the products from VSL, they are second to none, both in terms of sample quality and software. I took advantage of the early bird offer when the violins where released, so I've already downloaded and installed the cellos. I do think they sound great.

After playing around with Dimension Cellos for half an hour or so, I am really impressed. As always, when it comes to VSL. Hats off to everyone at VSL for this accomplishment. Your products are next to nothing. The completed Dimension Strings will be a great opportunity for me to learn to write more complex string arrangements. I'm really looking forward to the violas coming up next!

I'm downloading at 3.3 MB/s with an ETA of 37 minutes. Looking forward to trying these ones out!

Hi Niversen and welcome to the forum,

The performance trill legato patches are meant to be played. They are just like the other legato patches, apart from the legato transitions being really short to allow for realistic thrills, mordents and such.

The matrix 31P V1-All_RE_perf_trills matrix uses VI Pros internal sequencer to trigger pre programmed sequences of thrills and mordents at the touch of one key.

Hope this makes it more clear.

AGM and AGT from Amplesound are the best acoustic guitar library I've come across. They've got plenty of demos and turorials on their webpage, and the instruments are really versatile. It's quite easy to achieve realistic results, both for strumming, fingerpicking and soloing. All demos and tutorial files are available as downloads for studying in your DAW. I can highly recommend these two libraries.

I understand the the frustration. Not sure VSL is to blame though, still, I agree they could make this information more explicit on the "System requirements" page.

Anyways, where your problems resolved? Are you up and running with VI now? I'm confident you'll come to appreciate VI once you have worked out your problems. As others have stated, it is by far the most stable and customizable sample playback engine out there. I can honestly say that the only problem I've ever experienced with VI is that it makes Kontakt, PLAY and Engine so frustrating to work with in comparison. I wish all my sample libraries could be loaded into VI...

I did some googling and searching through scientific databases (I work at a university), however, I couldn't access the full text for any studies examining if there's any audible difference between 44.1 kHz and 96kHz. However, the impression I got from forums, audioblogs and the occasional abstract of scientific papers, is that the better the study, the less evidence for any audible difference. It seems that double blind studies of high quality reveal no audible difference, and the sloppier the study, the better the chance of confirming the difference is.

The following article has some interesting things to say:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Wouldn't timestretching of samples benefit from 96kHz samples? Not that I would go 96kHz for that reason, not with DS already swallowing 14GB of RAM, with the violins only...

I've also had VI Pro crash on me while loading DS a couple of times. Loading from an SSD-drive, 24 GB RAM. i7 960.

So I just couldn't control myself and had to purchase Dimension Strings despite the fact that my wallet didn't fancy it all that much. But now it's on download at a speed of 3.5 MB/s! Think I will need a new SSD-drive though...