EWQL Silk or Ra?

[Garpocalypse]

Looks like it's that time of year again and more of EW's sample libraries are almost half price!

This time I can't seem to decide which I would prefer to get between silk or ra. I initially thought that silk would have everything I wanted as far as eastern instruments go. ( i'm looking for erhu, pipa, shamisen, shakuhachi and koto among others) but as I was inspecting Silk with my mouse hovering over the BUY button I noticed no Japanese instruments were listed. Instead they were listed on Ra's page along with many of the same instruments that are in Silk.

So now I can't decide what I should get. For me, the Japanese instruments I'm looking for are the big sell and as long as it has all of the articulations I want I'll probably go with Ra. Can anyone who has one or both make a recommendation?

-gar

[Nabeel Ansari]

RA is an eastern smorgasbord. You get more instruments for your money, but I don't believe it has as many silkroad instruments as the SILK pack itself. The SILK might also have more articulations. I don't know this for sure, but generally with a more specialized library the less instruments it has the more detailed it probably is with the instruments it has. Not to say RA is not sampled well, my brother has it and it's incredible.

I personally would just wait and save for the entire damn Composer's Collection and get Symphonic Orchestra, Pianos Gold, Choir Bundle, Storm Drum 2 Bundle, Silk, Ra, and Gypsy for like freaking 70% off or whatever. That's $865 I think while they're all normally over $2000 if you bought em together. Plus it comes with a hard drive. (a nice western digital 1TB. It's not caviar black, it's blue, so it's decent but not eco-slow like the green)

[Garpocalypse]

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I personally would just wait and save for the entire damn Composer's Collection and get Symphonic Orchestra, Pianos Gold, Choir Bundle, Storm Drum 2 Bundle, Silk, Ra, and Gypsy for like freaking 70% off or whatever

I already have Symphonic Orchestra Gold and Ministry of Rock (the blacksheep of the bunch apparently). As much as I'd love to get all of those at one time, If i had that much money i'd almost certainly go for Omnisphere instead.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I already have Symphonic Orchestra Gold and Ministry of Rock (the blacksheep of the bunch apparently). As much as I'd love to get all of those at one time, If i had that much money i'd almost certainly go for Omnisphere instead.

Then you could replace those options with another two (like Silk and Gypsy). It's a customizable pack.

But if you don't feel like waiting to save up $850 or so, then you'd get more instruments with RA and it has the instruments you want (and Silk doesn't) so there's no practical reason to get Silk over RA.

[dannthr]

RA is a survey library, Silk is focused.

RA has many different sounds and instruments, but the sampling philosophy was fairly shallow. Superficially designed with quantity over substance.

Many instruments use pitch stretching or whole-tone sampling, and the articulations are fairly limited if non-existent.

Silk is focused on three specific regions and only contains a few instruments each. The instruments are more deeply sampled with real legato and many expressive articulations.

There are no drums in Silk.

So it's all about what you want--if you want focused, deeply expressive samples, then Silk is your library--if you want many different and varied instruments, then RA is your library.