EWQL Composer Pack/ The $1,000 Question

[XPRTNovice]

I was looking at the composer's pack from EWQL. It seems like a ridiculous deal; you get like $4,000 worth of software and sound packs for $1,000 ish. I'm wondering if anyone here has shelled out the cash for something like that and what they thought of it.

That aside, I was considering taking $1,000 of my tax return this year and dedicating it to music stuff. Granted that I already have a tube preamp, a legit DAW (Cubase 7), Komplete 8, and a good soundcard (Focusrite Safire Pro 14), are there any suggestions? I could either go the software or the hardware route, though I don't know what kind of hardware I'd get other than maybe some nice mics.

[Wiesty]

Kontakt and look for some good samples. Often cheaper, amazing quality, and you can be more selective of what you want.

[XPRTNovice]

Kontakt and look for some good samples. Often cheaper, amazing quality, and you can be more selective of what you want.

By Kontakt you mean just browse the Native Instrument site?

[Wiesty]

Kontakt the sampler, and then search the web for kontakt samples, there are TONS

[XPRTNovice]

I already have Komplete 8, if that's what you're talkign about, which comes with Kontakt 5. Or are you saying just go crazy looking for awesome Kontakt samples?

If anyone could recommend some good ones or general repositories for Kontakt samples that would help me out, too. I'm pretty sure Orchestral Tools and 8dio works with Kontakt, but that will kill my $1,000 with one or two sample packs

[Argle]

Composer Pack is definitely the easiest way to get tons of sounds, other than Komplete. I prefer to use a bunch of different products in Kontakt, but I've been collecting them for years. Trying to get the perfect set of 3rd party crap all at once seems like an exercise in masochism.

[XPRTNovice]

I've been collecting them for years.

Given that you have some experience, do you have some suggestions for Kontakt, then?

[Argle]

Given that you have some experience, do you have some suggestions for Kontakt, then?

Well, the stuff that gets a lot of use from me these days is Kirk Hunter Concert Strings II, Concert Brass II, Damage (big drums, percussion, distorted elements), Impact Soundworks stuff, the old Kontakt EastWest libraries (not so much these days), some of the factory stuff (orchestral), and various and sundry other 3rd party stuff I dinnae remember.

Throw in Omnisphere (my fav), Engine2 libraries, and a few elements from Sampletank 2 and you basically have my setup.

Problem for you is, most of the stuff on the list I purchased on sale, so buying it all now would be prohibitively expensive. The best entry-level bulk sounds are either Komplete or Composer's Collection.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Argle

[XPRTNovice]

Thanks Argle! I'll do some browsing along those lines. I have Morphine and Harmon synths...do think Omnisphere is worth getting even though I have a bunch of other ones?

This year's Black Friday showed me some really good deals that I couldn't afford at the time, so I may wait it out until November to really upgrade the studio and put my tax refund money in a CD or something. I have some native instruments vouchers, too, so maybe that'll help.

If anyone has any other suggestions for Kontakt libraries or building up my sound library in general, you would be my hero.

[Argle]

Thanks Argle! I'll do some browsing along those lines. I have Morphine and Harmon synths...do think Omnisphere is worth getting even though I have a bunch of other ones?

This year's Black Friday showed me some really good deals that I couldn't afford at the time, so I may wait it out until November to really upgrade the studio and put my tax refund money in a CD or something. I have some native instruments vouchers, too, so maybe that'll help.

If anyone has any other suggestions for Kontakt libraries or building up my sound library in general, you would be my hero.

I love Omnisphere. It gets used on every track. Whether or not it would be useful to you I can't say.

I think it would help if you say what kinds of sounds you want.

[XPRTNovice]

I think it would help if you say what kinds of sounds you want.

I'm still a budding remixer (only been doing this since January 2012 and I mostly use my live instruments) so I'm definitely looking for:

a.) a good orchestral kit, more strings than winds since I have winds at my disposal

b.) some good epic drums

Other than that, I have questions as to what I SHOULD be looking for, you know? I'm still sort of defining my style.

[Argle]

The Composer's Collection will give you those things. Komplete Ultimate gives you strings in the factory content as well as Session Strings Pro, but it doesn't come with Damage for big drums. Which is awesome, btw, but wait till it's on sale.

I guess the salient differences between Composer's Collection and Komplete is, the EastWest stuff gives you a lot more in the way of choirs, ethic instruments. While Komplete gives you a lot more synths. Komplete also gives you Kontakt, which is a key piece of kit.

I would recommend one or the other (or both!) for simplicity. Then when you become familiar with the sounds and know which ones you like and which are duds, you can branch out more with 3rd party shite.

[XPRTNovice]

Thanks man, some good food for thought. I'm thinking Composer's Collection because I already have Komplete (though not ultimate)

[Argle]

I already have Komplete (though not ultimate)

Right you are, and I am an absolute retard for not seeing that. reading comprehension FTW.

Yeah man, there's plenty of good stuff for Kontakt, but wait for a sale (unless you're made of money). As for Composer's Collection, I don't think it ever goes on sale. That said, if you wanna hold out for one of the frequent EW sales you can get 2 for 1, maybe the orchestra and Stormdrum.

[Wiesty]

The only thing with the composers collection is that you might get a lot of samples you won't use. If you buy individual samples you can be more selective, and you have way more options.

[Chimpazilla]

Joe, I've asked my friend (Plasuma!!! who just signed up on OCR after a year of my bugging him to) to chime in here. He owns every plugin ever made by EWQL and tons of other orchestral stuff too, and uses Cubase. Hopefully he'll jump in here shortly.

I personally have Kontakt with Albion and Session Strings Pro and love both. For fun drums, I do have Damage which is super duper fun but Argle is right, wait for the sale. I also have the Evolve packs but haven't even delved into them yet.

I also have Omnisphere, and like Argle, I use it in every single track. There are so many great sounds in Omnisphere, they are amazing right out of the box. (many of them are reverb-drenched but you can always turn that off) Omnisphere has so many capabilities to explore, so many ways to process the sounds. My friend (Plasuma!!!) calls it "song in a box" and for good reason.

[Plasuma!!!]

Chimpazilla beat me up and made me do it, I'm here against my will.

But yes, the Complete Composer's Collection is a pretty good deal if you pick and choose the right stuff. I have some minor regrets in what I've purchased, so they're not all great, but I love and regularly use a majority of the products. My strategy for purchasing the CCC assumed that I would also purchase EWQLSO separately in its entirety during a sale to save money, and it worked, but I believe they may have fixed the "exploit" I used. More on this later.

Products to avoid and reasons for doing so:

Voices of Passion - this is a very limited-use library, and the legato patches are very synthetic. You should only want this if you plan to use the instruments as ethereal drones or have a use for the now-overtapped phrases. The phrases certainly are great, but everyone's heard them numerous times in other places already, so you have to like them to make this purchase justified.

Goliath - a general "everything" library that contains a handful of good, timeless and somewhat useful instruments, but too many dated or unusable sounds to be considered worth the price. In my experience, more can be done with the Kontakt factory library, so unless you've heard a patch in a demo somewhere that you absolutely cannot live without, skip it.

Ministry of Rock - the focal point of the library being rock makes this all the more confusing, but the guitars are barely usable. The only good things about this library are the drumkits, but they're not recorded dry, so they can be troublesome to fit into existing productions. The guitars themselves aren't horrible and can be useful in many circumstances where you wouldn't need a lead, but they take some tweaking to sound right and aren't nearly as dynamic as, say, Electri6ity, Orangetree guitars, or even Shreddage 2.

Ra - a somewhat disappointing sampler of everything one might consider "ethnic". I've rarely used this for anything but percussion, and even then, everything it contains is easily covered by other libraries I have and prefer for a cleaner sound. This was one of EastWest's earlier projects, and it shows in both recording quality and usability. Avoid it unless you really want some specific instruments it contains and can find nowhere else.

Products that are good, but not necessarily definitive:

Stormdrum 2 - all very wet percussion, but even so, the sound is unmistakably epic. You could easily fill out your percussion battery with this library alone, and the experimental sounds are pretty nice for flavor, but there are so many "epic percussion" libraries out there with a more controllable sound that you should have to think and listen before you decide you want this in your bundle. The pro expansion doesn't add much, but if you're dead-set on getting this library in the CCC, you may as well throw it in to get the whole package.

Symphonic Choirs - recorded in the same hall as EWQLSO, it's great if you need choirs to accompany that library. The star of the show, WordBuilder, while absolutely amazing in concept, is unwieldy and unstable. You can manage to make fairly realistic phrases, but not without practice and some investment of time for every word, and that's no guarantee that PLAY won't crash while you're in the middle of editing a line. There are other alternatives on the market, such as VOXOS and the SoundIron / 8DIO choirs, but they don't even remotely offer the functionality of the very robust, albeit shakey WordBuilder. The expansion adds "angel" and "demon" patches, which are women's and men's choirs respectively, but I have not found them to be very useful.

Symphonic Orchestra, PLAY Edition - this is a complete orchestra in a box, and was the crowning achievement of EWQL up until the Hollywood series was released. For orchestral applications, I'm lucky enough to have the entire bank of Hollywood series instruments at my disposal, and I supplement them with percussion from this library. They work quite well together in this respect. By itself, the sound is still great and the patches are usable enough to make somewhat believable recordings, but the big issue with this edition of the EWQLSO is the engine it uses.

PLAY is not very flexible when it comes to scripts and customization, and a "Pro" version of this platform, which was touted to provide the features desired, has been promised for many years and has not yet seen the light of day. The library itself hasn't seen a script or patch update in a very long time, and, as such, you are restricted to 2006-level technical understanding of sampling in practice. This is to say, without spending eight or more hours just tweaking MIDI CCs, you will not likely get the sound you desire for a piece. It sounds great, but without the flexibility of Kontakt, it's unwieldy and time-consuming to make sound real. This being contrary to other libraries that use PLAY, such as the Hollywood series, which have been continually updated and offer patches with a variety of scripts that make them sound great out of the box.

The Platinum edition is a must-have if you're serious about sound quality, as the additional microphone positions over the Gold edition can help make your mix cleaner. Do not bother with the Platinum "Plus" edition, however, as the "Plus" only adds optional lower quality samples that were made to accommodate the memory limitations long-obsolete machines.

Products that are stellar:

Gypsy - most people just get this library for the violin, which is pretty great, but I find myself using something else from this library in almost every production. The accordions, guitars, and trombone are very handy for small ensembles where some atmosphere with intimacy, jollity, or mystique is needed.

Silk - while at first sight this seems like a big Eastern instrument sampler, which is the general truth, it also contains some instruments such as the E Cello and 30-piece Persian string orchestra, which sound great just about anywhere. Unlike VOP, every instrument is incredibly dynamic, even with the lack of true legato. In a pinch, the pre-recorded phrases can be a life saver for whenever you need a hint of the far east.

Fab Four - it's the sound of The Beatles, sure, but there are so many timeless instruments from that era contained within that I think the name doesn't do it justice. Drums, guitars, oddball song-specific patches - all of it useful. This is an ideal replacement for the things MOR offers whether or not this era appeals to you.

Pianos - I could not live without this library's Bechstein. There are only 4 different pianos in this library, but the depth of detail surpasses every other piano library I've heard, even VSL's Imperial. I suggest the platinum version for multiple microphone positions to mix, but gold can do just as well. The biggest issue with this library is the amount of memory it requires to run, and so I often find myself using a smaller piano patch from another library in composition to later swap for one of the 4 from this library in the final mixdown.

Symphonic Orchestra, Kontakt Edition - if you should be lucky enough to get your hands on the Kontakt version of the Symphonic Orchestra (somehow, as it's not available in the CCC or officially anywhere), you'll be treated to all the flexibility that platform offers. Custom scripts, sample editing, all that wonderfulness makes the library competitive with modern ones without too much effort on your part.

The aforementioned 'exploit' concerning my purchase of EWQLSO took advantage of one of their sales, which included hefty discounts for new purchases and license upgrades. I already owned the CCC, which ships on a hard drive that contains all of their libraries included in the Terapack, even the libraries for which I did not have licenses (including EWQLSO).

In the store, there was an option at the time to purchase a new version of EWQLSO Gold as an "upgrade from Terapack" for around $100, so I made the purchase and received the activation code very shortly thereafter. To upgrade from Gold to Platinum cost only $150 during this sale, so I purchased that immediately after I had my code. The 'exploit' here was that the Platinum version was priced at $350 as an upgrade from the Terapack, and I saved $100 by jumping up the ladder. I also saved $40 over the price that it would have been in the CCC itself, so that was quite a find.

Keep this as a mental note: during the very common soundsonline.com sales, the best price might not always be the most direct.

I hope this information helps.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Plasuma!!!

[XPRTNovice]

Thanks for the advice, everyone!

Composers collection wins for me right now, because:

Separately: $4000

Collection: $900

Ebay Sniping Four Minutes Ago: $500, free shipping, no taxes.

Win!

[zircon]

See I have to disagree completely about Ra. I got it many years ago when it first came out and it is still one of my very favorite libraries. It's not THAT deep but you get such a wide breadth of instruments that it is well-worth it, IMO. I have used instruments like the santoor, shakuhachi, saz and oud too many times to count.

[Garpocalypse]

Ministry of Rock - the focal point of the library being rock makes this all the more confusing, but the guitars are barely usable. The only good things about this library are the drumkits, but they're not recorded dry, so they can be troublesome to fit into existing productions. The guitars themselves aren't horrible and can be useful in many circumstances where you wouldn't need a lead, but they take some tweaking to sound right and aren't nearly as dynamic as, say, Electri6ity, Orangetree guitars, or even Shreddage 2.

Avoid Ministry of Rock like the plague. A complete miss from Phoenix. A few games have used it though most notably Motoi Sakuraba's work on Tales of Xillia. (something that is bound to prevent my enjoyment of the game when it gets released) Duke Nukem Forever also used it and I think I heard some of the background guitar squeals from Ministry of Rock were used in Soul Calibur V on that one stage. The Blue and Red one. Chaos something i think. Maybe zircon can confirm that.

I've been using it since my first remix i had here on the forums and now that i have gone beyond it I don't know how i ever used it. You can't humanize the rhythm guitars without them souding awful. Only one of the rhythms in the whole pack let's you use your two hands to play it, everything else needs a keyboard split which means you have to run two instances for one instrument. You can't double track or quad track which is a metal necessity nor can you control the panning unless you mono each side by itself. The guitars sound so bad though you won't even get to that point.

The lead guitars would be usable if they weren't so thin. But only if you play everything on a keyboard. If you can't play a lick, programming it is going to sound like hell. The articulations are a big problem too as each guitar has seperate articulation triggers. If you liked the bends the les paul delux has but want to do it on the les paul standard, Tough! You can't do it.

The drums are ok but i've never used them in anything I finished. Steven Slate Drums are what I use most of the time anyway.

Need further proof? http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=40535&highlight=valhorteka

[Plasuma!!!]

It's not THAT deep but you get such a wide breadth of instruments that it is well-worth it, IMO. I have used instruments like the santoor, shakuhachi, saz and oud too many times to count.

I don't disagree with that, and it was probably a little harsh of me to be so short about the library on its own, but I've found replacements in Silk and some libraries from the likes of ToneHammer / SoundIron / 8Dio and some others which I think sound much better than the few instruments from Ra that I did use.

If your music tends to include a lot of the instruments on offer, by all means, Ra is great! I just don't personally use them much, and the ones I often wanted to use lacked flexibility to the point of regret / needing a better solution. It certainly doesn't help that it's all trapped in PLAY. I imagine the Kontakt version of Ra would be a godsend, if that's what you're using.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Plasuma!!!

[zircon]

Yeah true, I am using the Kontakt version.

[Chimpazilla]

Sorry Plas, that I dragged you kicking and screaming, against your will, into the warm, fuzzy pool of like-minded friends that is OCR. (no I'm NOT sorry, I'm NOT!) But, you could have at *least* made a useful and helpful post.

Thanks for that Plas, and welcome to OCR, finally!

[Plasuma!!!]

But, you could have at *least* made a useful and helpful post.

My apologies. I'm having kind of an off day today, what with the being bagged and dragged into a foreign place to... socialize...

[Calum]

I think it is all about what other stuff you have and what you use the most.

I bought CCC and my impressions are:

Symphonic Orchestra - amazing, I use this all the time, in everything. It is pretty wet buuut I can get over that.

Symphonic Choirs - I was shocked that these really weren't all that useful. Wordbuilder is nice but way too much effort to get anything good going. I sometimes use the solo voices but never really the whole choir as it doesn't really sound outstanding to me.... also, I don't really use choirs all that much.

Gypsy - Contrary to Plasuma, this is my least favourite. I was really excited about it at first but then I found it to be a bit disappointing. Everything that's there is easily replaceable live or by another sample library - I've used one of the guitars a little but there's a chord django guitar which is a bit annoying. Accordions/Trombone/Violin weren't as good as something you could find elsewhere. Guitars, I suppose I assumed this is probably the most commonly recorded instrument (after voice I suppose) but it depends what you're after really.

Ra - This is quite good. I'm not a huge fan of how the patches are described and laid out - hard to know what you're getting with some of it buuuut there's a lot of diverse stuff here for your world music needs - I use that dijeridoo quite a lot!

Silk - Again, it's good. I've had a lot of use for the japanese instruments. There's a quite nice string section in there as well which I've used a lot. There's a lot of stuff which goes unused here though I suppose.

Pianos - great sound but takes forever to load. It's good though!

I think a lot of this is just dependant on what you'll find you're likely to use most. For me gypsy was my least useful but that's clearly not the case for everyone. :~)