Hollywood Brass Diamond. Hollywood-Sound Strings, DIAMOND Edition. East West. QL SILK. € 154,-. -basses and -guitars from East West, Hollywood. Hollywood Brass was recorded in EastWest's Studio 1 from almost identical mic. the full Diamond Edition and a reduced Gold version aimed at those with less.
Hollywood Strings. Reviewed by Dave Stewart in Sound On Sound. September 2. 01. 0. When it comes to keeping an audience interested, Los Angeles- based sound company East. West have the instincts of a showman.
Their latest release was originally announced over a year ago, raising expectations sky high and setting Internet forums ablaze with gossip. For months on end, visitors to the company’s web site were confronted with a set of red theatre drapes concealing the object of desire, so it was a dramatic moment when show time finally arrived and the curtains drew back to reveal the new star turn: Hollywood Strings, the world’s largest self- contained string library, 1. A recurring question has been “what kind of system do I need to run this library?” One strong recommendation from East.
West is that users seeking optimum performance should use Solid State Drives (SSDs) to house the samples. While these devices have much faster access speeds than regular hard drives, they are considerably more expensive. Happily for those hit by the current economic doom- fest, the library runs without problems on conventional fast drives, though some of its bigger patches do demand a pretty hefty system. See below for East. West’s specifications.). Contrary to rumour, installing gigantic orchestral libraries from 3.
DVDs is not the thing I enjoy most in life, so it was a relief to discover that HS ships pre- installed on a hard drive. However, I was surprised to find that the drive in question is a bare internal type, which means that you either have to put it in a spare drive slot inside your computer or buy a suitable external case for it. At the time of writing, East. West’s web site states that the drive is supplied for installation purposes only and is “not intended for daily use (such as for storing the samples for streaming)”, a caveat repeated on the product box. The company have now upgraded the drive to a 5. GB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7.
RPM SATA model which they say is suitable for sample streaming, and they advise that this warning message is now out of date. Team Play. The library was created by a quartet of Hollywood heavy hitters. East. West supremo Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix of Quantum Leap need no introduction — having enjoyed a professional partnership since 1. For this project, the pair enlisted talented Norwegian composer/orchestrator Thomas Bergersen. Like Phoenix, Bergersen is an experienced film- trailer music producer, and having created a number of orchestral sound libraries for his own use (no, they’re not commercially available), he shares EWQL’s sampling and programming pedigree. The fourth team member has a CV as long as your arm, and a display case full of Academy, BAFTA and Emmy awards: enter Shawn Murphy, the veteran sound engineer who has recorded and/or mixed the soundtracks of over 3. In the words of Doug Rogers, “Who better to obtain that quintessential Hollywood sound than someone with his credits?” An excited forum user put it more emphatically: “DUDES!!!
Shawn F- ing MURPHY recorded it!!! It IS gonna be sick.”. Since early 2. 00. East. West/Quantum Leap releases have been formatted exclusively for their proprietary Play sound engine. Play comes in 6. 4- bit and 3.
The chief advantage of the 6. RAM, but in order to run it, your operating system, computer motherboard and (if you intend to use Play as a plug- in) host sequencer also have to be 6. RAM usage apart, there’s no difference in quality or functionality between the 3. Play. (Full 6. 4- bit support for Mac is not currently available — see note in the ‘System Requirements’ box.) The Play sound engine was reviewed along with East. West’s Fab Four and Ministry of Rock libraries in SOS March 2. Read the article at www.
In the interests of musical expression, Hollywood Strings uses an unprecedented amount of sample crossfading, causing a hike in polyphony that required some improvements to Play’s software. Play version 2. 0 (not to be confused with the forthcoming Play Pro) is now available as a free download to registered users. The makers claim the update also improves loading times, and while I was unable to compare Play v. I can say that on a 3. GHz PC the player took 2.
MB instrument containing 7. So what’s not in HS? Since its selling point is a large- scale, big- budget cinematic sound, it doesn’t contain solo instruments or chamber sections.
No chords, phrases, ‘wild card’ effects or glissandi are included either, but you can simulate the latter by playing a rapid chromatic run using a ‘repetition runs script’ instrument. Though it’s probably not an issue for media composers, there are no real- life muted (con sordino) samples; the effect of the mute is simulated by a switch that activates an EQ curve modelled on sordino recordings. Sonic Boon. Enough of the prologue: it’s time for the main feature.
The Way Brass Should Sound! NOTE: This product requires an iLok (not included) for authorization. Please call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer if you have questions.
Hollywood Strings was recorded in East. West’s Studio 1 with 5. LA’s top string players, using full- blown symphony orchestra section sizes (1.
JANコード: Hollywood Brass Diamond Edition(5マイクポジション・24bitサンプル・HDD提供) JAN :4580101323773(Mac版) JAN :4580101323780. Hollywood Brass: Hollywood Strings. the Hollywood Strings Diamond Edition will be effortless as. installing East West's Hollywood Strings Diamond Edition. EastWest Hollywood Brass - Diamond Edition (Windows Hard Drive). Get your EastWest Hollywood Brass - Gold Edition (DVD) now and spread out the payments! Close.
In marked contrast to EWQL Symphonic Orchestra (recorded in a reverberant concert hall), HS has a large- room studio acoustic which, while by no means dry, lends itself to users adding their own reverb if desired. To that end, the library includes a large menu of convolution reverb impulse responses, including some derived from the hall in which EWQLSO was recorded. From the violins down to the basses, these string sections have a lovely sound, texture and feel, with a rich, full symphonic sound and an opulent quality that comes from combining great players with a great sound engineer. The looped sustains are manna from heaven for pad merchants like myself, incorporating three degrees of vibrato as well as alternating up- and down- bows. As one who likes to compose by playing, the provision of pre- programmed, full, six- octave strings sections is very helpful. You can use Play’s instrument key- range setting to build your own full strings setups, though you’ll find that the presets require fewer samples.
Meeting film composers’ insatiable need for driving eighth- note ostinatos, HS offers a generous selection of short note deliveries ranging in length from powerful short marcatos to brisk, urgent staccatissimos that will do nicely for high- octane action scenes. I liked the intensity and forceful attack of the ‘on- the- bow’ staccato articulations (whose notes terminate with the bow still resting on the string) and the zing and bounce of the spiccato samples — great, energetic performances. Some of these deliveries incorporate as many as 1. RR sample. Following orchestral sample library best practice, the producers recorded completely different first and second violin sections. This greatly increases the timbral variety — and arguably, value for money — as each violinist brings in his or her own unique, often priceless instrument! The 1. 4- piece second violin section replicate many of the articulations played by the 1. Another articulation worthy of note is the ‘measured tremolos’ played by all sections, which time- stretch to play their fast iterations at a user- defined rate.
The rhythmic effect is somewhat blurred, but a 1. The same idea is applied to the note repetitions played by the violas and basses. With these, the pulse is sharp and clear, though its real life speed is consistently a little slower than the tempo figure displayed by Play. Express Yourself. To facilitate expression, HS adopts a ‘double modulation’ technique on some instruments, in which MIDI expression (CC1.
CC1), an approach I first encountered in Garritan’s Stradivari. It creates very lifelike, user- controllable swells and fades and obviates the need for played crescendo and diminuendo samples: rather than fiddling around trying to make fixed- length crescendo samples fit the tempo of your arrangement, you can create perfectly- timed crescendi of your own.
Starting notes with no vibrato, then gradually introducing it with the wheel is also very expressive. It takes a while to develop the requisite foot/hand co- ordination, but with practice the combined modulation produces those dramatic, emotive surges in volume and vibrato intensity we associate with strings. The technique works by crossfading between different layers of samples, with a choice of six, nine or 1. Transitions between layers sound natural and ultra- smooth, but a disadvantage is that even though you’re only hearing two layers at any one time, the others are playing silently and consuming polyphony. For this reason, East. West put the 1. 3- layer instruments in ‘Powerful System’ folders, warning that they may be too taxing on hardware that falls below the recommended specs.
Due to the crossfading involved, some of the large patches in HS use over 1. GB of RAM. For the those with less powerful systems East.
West created ‘light’ programs, available in the free HS instrument update 1. I find this slightly perplexing — there’s probably some technical reason why silent voices use up polyphony in Play, but it was never an issue on my old Akai S1. I found the ‘mod speed’ instruments (which let you use the wheel to increase the speed of delivery from very short staccatissimo to a short marcato) a very useful programming aid. Keyswitches are used throughout to switch between semitone and tone trills, up and down runs, and so on. In addition, each section has a single main keyswitch instrument incorporating various types of sustained note articulations. At this time it’s not possible to create your own custom keyswitches in Play.
Smooth Running. A realistic legato sound — a smooth, unbroken, joined- up line of notes, the hallmark of orchestral strings — is not easy to achieve with samples. In HS, East. West bit the bullet and, following the example of Vienna Symphonic Library and others, painstakingly recorded legato intervals of one to 1. This generates enormous amounts of sample data and helps explain why libraries of this ilk are so big, and why they take so long to create!